Knowledge that Transforms

In most times and places, women on average marry older men. We propose a partial explanation for this difference and for why it is diminishing. In a society in which the economic roles of males are more varied than the roles of females, the relative desirability of females as marriage partners may become evident at an earlier age than is the case for males. We study an equilibrium model in which the males who regard their prospects as unusually good choose to wait until their economic success is revealed before choosing a bride. In equilibrium, the most desirable young females choose successful older males. Young males who believe that time will not treat them kindly will offer to marry at a young age. Although they are aware that young males available for marriage are no bargain, the less desirable young females will be offered no better option than the lottery presented by marrying a young male. We show the existence of equilibrium for models of this type and explore the properties of equilibrium.

This paper investigates the sensitivity of Solow residual based measures of technology shocks to labor-hoarding behavior. Using a structural model of labor hoarding and the identifying restriction that innovations to technology shocks are orthogonal to innovations in government consumption, the authors estimate the fraction of the variability of the Solow residual that is due to technology shocks. Their results support the view that a significant proportion of movements in the Solow residual are artifa cts of labor-hoarding behavior. Specifically, the authors estimate that the variance of innovations to technology is roughly 50 percent less than that implied by standard real business cycle models.

At the microeconomic level, durable purchases are often discontinuous and relatively large. This feature has the potential to explain why aggregate expenditure on durables responds only slowly (relative to the frictionless permanent income model) to wealth and other aggregate innovations. In this paper I develop new results on the problem of dynamic aggregation of stochastically heterogeneous units, which help to characterize the connection between microeconomic behavior and aggregate dynamics in the presence of nonconvex adjustment costs. Using these results and splitting postwar U.S. aggregate durable purchases into different subcategories and time periods, I provide further support for the view that lumpy microeconomic purchases play an important role in explaining the time-series behavior of aggregate expenditure on durable goods.

A single seller of an indivisible good operates in a market with many consumers who differ in their ability to process information. The consumers' constraints are modeled in two submodels: the first in terms of the limits on the number of sets in the partition of the price space, and the second in terms of the limits on the complexity of the operation he can use to process a price offer. For the construction of the second submodel, the tool of a "perceptron" is borrowed from the parallel computation literature. Assuming a negative correlation between the seller's cost of supply of the good and the consumer's ability to process information, I demonstrate that the heterogeneity of consumer's abilities can be used by the seller to profitably discriminate among them.

This paper suggests a new procedure for evaluating the fit of a dynamic structural economic model. The procedure begins by augmenting the variables in the model with just enough stochastic error so that the model can exactly match the second moments of the actual data. Measures of fit for the model can then be constructed on the basis of the size of this error. The procedure is applied to a standard real business cycle model. Over the business cycle frequencies, the model must be augmented with a substantial error to match data for the postwar U.S. economy. Lower bounds on the variance of the error range from 40 percent to 60 percent of the variance in the actual data.