We estimate an equilibrium model of dynamic oligopoly with durable goods and endogenous innovation to examine the effect of competition on innovation in the personal computer microprocessor industry. Firms make dynamic pricing and investment decisions while consumers make dynamic upgrade decisions, anticipating product improvements and price declines. Consistent with Schumpeter, we find that the rate of innovation in product quality would be 4.2 percent higher without AMD present, though higher prices would reduce consumer surplus by $12 billion per year. Comparative statics illustrate the role of product durability and provide implications of the model for other industries.

I suggest a novel theory of GATT/WTO negotiations based on Krugman’s “new trade” model. It emphasizes international production relocations and is easy to calibrate to bilateral trade data. Focusing on the major players in recent GATT/WTO negotiations, I find that it implies reasonable noncooperative tariffs as well as moderate gains from GATT/WTO negotiations.

We propose an equilibrium model that can explain a wide range of international finance puzzles, including the high correlation of international stock markets, despite the lack of correlation of fundamentals. We conduct an empirical analysis of our model, which combines cross-country-correlated long-run risk with Epstein and Zin preferences, using U.S. and U.K. data, and show that it successfully reconciles international prices and quantities, thereby solving the international equity premium puzzle. These results provide evidence suggesting a link between common long-run growth perspectives and exchange rate movements.

The black-white gap in schooling among southern-born men narrowed sharply between the world wars. From 1914 to 1931, nearly 5,000 schools were constructed as part of the Rosenwald Rural Schools Initiative. Using census data and World War II records, we find that the Rosenwald program accounts for a sizable portion of the educational gains of rural southern blacks. We find significant effects on school attendance, literacy, years of schooling, cognitive test scores, and northern migration. The gains are highest in the most disadvantaged counties, suggesting that schooling treatments have the largest impact among those with limited access to education.

How well do people share risk? Standard risk-sharing regressions assume that any variation in households’ risk preferences is uncorrelated with variation in the cyclicality of income. I combine administrative and survey data to show that this assumption is questionable: Risk-tolerant workers hold jobs in which earnings carry more aggregate risk. The correlation makes risk-sharing regressions in the previous literature too pessimistic. I derive techniques that eliminate the bias, apply them to U.S. data, and find that the effect of idiosyncratic income shocks on consumption is practically small and statistically difficult to distinguish from zero.

The high and rising household savings rate in China is not easily reconciled with the traditional explanations that emphasize life cycle factors, the precautionary saving motive, financial development, or habit formation. This paper proposes a new competitive saving motive: as the sex ratio rises, Chinese parents with a son raise their savings in a competitive manner in order to improve their son's relative attractiveness for marriage. The pressure on savings spills over to other households. Both cross-regional and household-level evidence supports this hypothesis. This factor can potentially account for about half the actual increase in the household savings rate during 1990-2007

We introduce a measure of the severity of violations of the revealed preference axioms, the money pump index (MPI). The MPI is the amount of money one can extract from a consumer who violates the axioms. It is also a statistical test for the hypothesis that a consumer is rational when behavior is observed with error. We present an application using a panel data set of food expenditures. The data exhibit many violations of the axioms. Mostly, the MPI for these violations is small. The MPI indicates that the hypothesis of consumer rationality cannot be rejected.

The paper develops a model of directed search on the job in which transitions of workers between unemployment and employment and across employers are driven by heterogeneity in the quality of firm-worker matches. The equilibrium is such that the agents’ value and policy functions are independent of the endogenous distribution of workers across employment states. Hence, the model can be solved outside of the steady state and used to measure the effect of cyclical productivity shocks on the labor market. Productivity shocks are found to generate large fluctuations in workers’ transitions, unemployment, and vacancies when matches are experience goods, but not when matches are inspection goods

Using factor methods, we decompose industrial production (IP) into components arising from aggregate and sector-specific shocks. An approximate factor model finds that nearly all of IP variability is associated with common factors. We then use a multisector growth model to adjust for the effects of input-output linkages in the factor analysis. Thus, a structural factor analysis indicates that the Great Moderation was characterized by a fall in the importance of aggregate shocks while the volatility of sectoral shocks was essentially unchanged. Consequently, the role of idiosyncratic shocks increased considerably after the mid-1980s, explaining half of the quarterly variation in IP.