Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration and offshoring on US native-born workers. We find that immigrant and native-born workers do not compete much due to the fact that they tend to perform tasks at opposite ends of the task complexity spectrum, with offshore workers performing the tasks in the middle. An effect of offshoring and a positive effect of immigration on native-born employment suggest that immigration and offshoring improve industry efficiency.

This paper studies the second-moment properties of offshoring, the arrangement whereby firms carry out particular stages of production abroad. It documents a new empirical regularity: maquiladora industries in Mexico that are associated with US offshoring experience fluctuations in employment that are twice as volatile as the corresponding industries in the United States. This finding is not attributable simply to higher volatility in the overall Mexican economy, nor to the smaller size of Mexico's industries compared to US counterparts.

In a dynamic model of moral hazard, competition can undermine prudent bank behavior. While capital-requirement regulation can induce prudent behavior, the policy yields Pareto-inefficient outcomes. Capital requirements reduce gambling incentives by putting bank equity at risk. However, they also have a perverse effect of harming banks' franchise values, thus encouraging gambling. Pareto-efficient outcomes can be achieved by adding deposit-rate controls as a regulatory instrument, since they facilitate prudent investment by increasing franchise values. Even if deposit-rate ceilings are not binding on the equilibrium path, they may be useful in deterring gambling off the equilibrium path.

We study a Lucas asset-pricing model that is standard in all respects, except that the representative agent's subjective beliefs about endowment growth are distorted. Using constant relative risk-aversion (CRRA) utility, with a CRRA coefficient below 10; fluctuating beliefs that exhibit, on average, excessive pessimism over expansions; and excessive optimism over contractions (both ending more quickly than the data suggest), our model is able to match the first and second moments of the equity premium and risk-free rate, as well as the persistence and predictability of excess returns found in the data.

Productivity Differences across Employers: The Roles of Employer Size, Age, and Human Capital by John C. Haltiwanger, Julia I. Lane and James Spletzer. Published in volume 89, issue 2, pages 94-98 of American Economic Review, May 1999

The Winner's Curse and Public Information in Common Value Auctions: Comment by James C. Cox, Samuel H. Dinkin and Vernon L. Smith. Published in volume 89, issue 1, pages 319-324 of American Economic Review, March 1999

Although algorithmic trading now dominates financial markets, some exchanges continue to use human floor traders. On March 23, 2020 the NYSE suspended floor trading because of COVID‐19. Using a difference‐in‐differences analysis around the closure of the floor, we find that floor traders are important contributors to market quality. The suspension of floor trading leads to higher spreads and larger pricing errors for treated stocks relative to control stocks. To explore the mechanism, we exploit two partial floor reopenings that have different characteristics. Our finding suggests that in‐person human interaction facilitates the transfer of valuable information that algorithms lack.

Many natural competitors are jointly held by a small set of large institutional investors. In the U.S. airline industry, taking common ownership into account implies increases in market concentration that are 10 times larger than what is “presumed likely to enhance market power” by antitrust authorities. Within‐route changes in common ownership concentration robustly correlate with route‐level changes in ticket prices, even when we only use variation in ownership due to the combination of two large asset managers. We conclude that a hidden social cost—reduced product market competition—accompanies the private benefits of diversification and good governance.

We study the asset pricing implications of learning in an environment in which the true model of the world is a multivariate one, but agents update only over the class of simple univariate models. Thus, if a particular simple model does a poor job of forecasting over a period of time, it is discarded in favor of an alternative simple model. The theory yields a number of distinctive predictions for stock returns, generating forecastable variation in the magnitude of the value‐glamour return differential, in volatility, and in the skewness of returns. We validate several of these predictions empirically.