We study a labor market equilibrium model in which firms sign optimal long-term contracts with workers. Firms that are financially constrained offer an increasing wage profile: They pay lower wages today in exchange of higher wages once they become unconstrained and operate at a larger scale. In equilibrium, constrained firms are on average smaller and pay lower wages. In this way the model generates a positive relation between firm size and wages. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) we show that the key dynamic properties of the model are supported by the data.

We claim that the stock market encourages business creation, innovation, and growth by allowing the recycling of “informed capital”. Due to incentive and information problems, start-ups face larger costs of going public than mature firms. Sustaining a tight relationship with a monitor (bank, venture capitalist) allows them to finance their operations without going public until profitability prospects are clearer or incentive problems are less severe. However, the earlier young firms go public, the quicker monitors' informed capital is redirected towards new start-ups. Hence, when informed capital is in limited supply, factors that lower the costs for start-ups to go public encourage business creation. Technological spill-overs associated with business creation and thick market externalities in the young firms segment of the stock market provide prima facie cases for encouraging young firms to go public.

We document that the fraction of entrepreneurs working in the region where they were born is significantly higher than the corresponding fraction for dependent workers. This is more pronounced in more developed regions and positively related to the degree of local financial development. Firms created by locals are bigger, operate with more capital-intensive technologies, and obtain greater financing per unit of capital invested, than firms created by nonlocals. This suggests that there are so many local entrepreneurs because locals can better exploit the financial opportunities available in the region where they were born. This helps to explain how local financial development causes persistent disparities in entrepreneurial activity, technology, and income.

Starting in the 1970's, wage inequality and the number of hours worked by employed U.S. prime-age male workers have both increased. We argue that these two facts are related. We use a labour market model with on-the-job search where by working longer hours individuals acquire greater skills. Since job candidates are ranked by productivity, greater skills not only increase worker's productivity in the current job but also help the worker to obtain better jobs. When job offers become more dispersed, wage inequality increases and workers work longer hours to obtain better jobs. As a result, average hours per worker in the economy increase. This mechanism accounts for around two-thirds of the increase in hours observed in data. Part of the increase is inefficient since workers obtain better jobs at the expense of other workers competing for the same jobs.

We consider a version of the Solow growth model where technological progress can be investment specific or investment neutral. The labour market is subject to search frictions, and the existing productive units may fail to adopt the most recent technological advances. Technological progress can lead to the destruction of technologically obsolete jobs and cause unemployment. We calibrate the model to replicate the high persistence that characterizes the dynamics of firms' neutral technology and the frequency of firms' capital adjustment. We find that neutral technological advances increase job destruction and job reallocation and reduce aggregate employment. Investment-specific technological advances reduce job destruction, have mild effects on job creation, and are expansionary. Hence, neutral technological progress prompts Schumpeterian creative destruction, while investment-specific technological progress operates essentially as in the standard neoclassical growth model. Using structural VAR models, we provide support to the key dynamic implications of the model.

We consider a directed search model in which workers differ in productivity. Productivity becomes observable to firms after assessing their workers on the job, but it is not verifiable. Firms with vacancies choose between posting a noncontingent wage and leaving wages subject to bargaining with the worker. Under wage bargaining, firms cannot optimize the trade‐off between paying higher wages and having a larger probability of filling vacancies. But wage bargaining makes wages increasing in worker productivity and so may allow firms to attract better workers into the vacancy. When workers’ heterogeneity is large and bargaining powers come close to satisfying Hosios’s rule, firms opt for bargaining. Yet, equilibria with bargaining fail to maximize aggregate net income and sometimes are not constrained Pareto optimal.

We study the effects of monetary announcements when agents face Knightian uncertainty about the commitment capacity of the monetary authority. Households are ambiguity averse and differentially exposed to inflation due to differences in wealth. In response to the announcement of a future monetary loosening, only wealthy households (creditors) act as if the announcement will be fully implemented, due to the potential wealth losses from future inflation. As a result the economy responds as if aggregate net wealth falls, which attenuates the effects of the announcement. Redistributing from super-wealthy to middle-wealthy households makes the announcement more expansionary, in the extreme as expansionary as under a fully credible announcement.

We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were increased for younger and decreased for older workers. This is because the young tend to lack the means to smooth consumption during unemployment and want jobs to accumulate high-return human capital. So unemployment insurance is most valuable to them, while moral hazard is mild. By calibrating a life cycle model with unemployment risk and endogenous search effort, we find that allowing unemployment replacement rates to decline with age yields sizeable welfare gains to US workers. (JEL D91, E24, J13, J64, J65)

We study business creation subsidies in a general equilibrium model where firms are financially constrained upon entry and borrow competitively by issuing long-term debt. If paid out before business formation (ex ante), the subsidy reduces start-ups? debt and bankruptcy rates; if paid out as a refund of expenditures (ex post), it reduces equity rather than debt, raising bankruptcies among both new and existing firms. In a model calibrated to Southern Italy, the optimal subsidy is paid entirely ex ante, raising welfare by 2% of consumption. If paid ex post, the same subsidy would result in welfare losses.

About half of the change in U.S. non-durable consumption expenditure is due to changes in the products entering households’ consumption basket (the extensive margin). Changes in the basket are driven by fluctuations in the rate at which households add products; removals fluctuate little. These patterns reflect that, in response to income increases, households adopt consumer products already available in the market. Household adoption amplifies the effects of fiscal transfers on consumption by more than 30%. Cyclical household adoption of products also implies that inflation measures based on a representative household consuming all varieties available in the market underestimate true household-level inflation by as much as 1% per year over the Great Recession in the consumption categories covered by our data.