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Working Paper
Unskilled workers in an economy with skill-biased technology
This paper contributes to the search theory of unemployment by endogenously generating matching functions for skilled and unskilled workers from a wage-posting game. The model is capable of producing a positive skill premium and a positive wage differential among homogenous unskilled workers. The skill premium arises from a skill-biased technology; the wage differential among unskilled workers sustains because a lower wage is compensated by a higher change of getting the job. The model provides useful explanations for the observed dynamics patterns of within-skill and between-skill wage ...
Working Paper
Friedman meets Hosios: efficiency in search models of money
In this paper the authors study the inefficiencies of the monetary equilibrium and optimal monetary policies in a search economy. They show that the same frictions that give fiat money a positive value generate an inefficient quantity of goods in each trade and an inefficient number of trades (or search decisions). The Friedman rule eliminates the first inefficiency, and the Hosios rule the second. A monetary equilibrium attains the social optimum if and only if both rules are satisfied. When the two rules cannot be satisfied simultaneously, which occurs in a large set of economies, optimal ...
Working Paper
Vehicle currency
While in principle, international payments could be carried out using any currency or set of currencies, in practice, the U.S. dollar is predominant in international trade and financial flows. The dollar acts as a "vehicle currency" in the sense that agents in nondollar economies will generally engage in currency trade indirectly using the U.S. dollar rather than using direct bilateral trade among their own currencies. Indirect trade is desirable when there are transactions costs of exchange.> ; This paper constructs a dynamic general equilibrium model of a vehicle currency. We explore the ...
Working Paper
Pricing with frictions
The authors analyze markets where each of n buyers wants to buy one unit and each of m sellers wants to sell one or more units of an indivisible good. Sellers first set prices, then buyers choose which sellers to visit. There are equilibria where each buyer visits sellers at random and faces a positive probability of rationing when too many other buyers show up at the same location. The authors solve for equilibrium prices and other variables as functions of n and m, compare the outcome to the predictions of other models, and derive some limiting results as the economy gets large. The authors ...