"A Symmetric Model of Firms and Workers" Abstract In this paper we develop a model in which unemployed searchers may either encountera firm and be considered as a new employee or may generate a business idea in which case they begin their own firm. This is the first paper in which an equilibrium distribution of…

"Adverse selection in the UK annuity market and the 1956 Finance Act" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday) abstract This paper proposes a new price test for evidence of active adverse selection in the insurance market for longevity risks: the annuity market.  The test is applied to the exogenous change in taxation of annuity payments following…

"Strategic Sovereign Defaults under International Sanctions" abstract Economic sanctions are often used to destabilize hostile political regimes. We present a model where targeted regimes react to sanctions by initiating a public debt crisis to foster internal political support. The strategy is based on two considerations. Fist, sanctions increase the share of external debt on GDP…

"On the complex interactions between mathematics and soft sciences. Toward a mathematical theory of behavioural systems" (Note: the seminar is on Tuesday)

"Economic and Class Voting in a Model of Redistribution with Social Concerns" abstract We investigate how concerns about social status may affect individuals' preferences for redistribution. In our model, agents are heterogeneous across two dimensions, productivity and social class, and an individual's social status is defined as his relative standing in terms of a weighted…

"Revealed preference and identification" abstract I develop a theory of revealed preference based on the assumption that we observe some optimal choices rather than all of them, as is traditionally assumed. I establish sufficient conditions to uniquely recover preferences from behavioral data for three standard cases: ordinal continuous preferences, von Neumann-Morgenstern preferences and qualitative probabilities.…

"It takes (more than) a moment: Revisiting the link between firm productivity and aggregate exports" Abstract This paper exploits a unique data set covering a panel of 16 European countries and 21 manufacturing industries to examine within sectors which features of a country's firm productivity distribution are relatedto its aggregate export performance. It provides robust…

"Cash-Constrained Households and Product Size"

"Immigrant Networks and Remittances" abstract This paper studies the influence of immigrants' social networks on remittances, both the probability of remitting and the quantity remitted.  We use the Spanish Migrant Survey, a unique database with detailed information both on immigrant's residence location and remittances. Our methodology accounts for problems of reverse causality, common unobserved factors,…

"Why taxes on unhealthy food might not lead to healthy behavior?"

"Equality-Minded Treatment Choice" ABSTRACT Empirical studies in program evaluation often concern policies that aim to reduce economic inequality in the population. A utilitarian policy maximizing the sum of individual outcomes in the population may not be the best choice if it magnifies economic inequality and post-treatment redistribution of income among the subjects is infeasible. This…

"Analyzing the Influence of Occupational Licensing Duration on Labor Market Outcomes" ABSTRACT We analyze the labor market influence of the duration of occupational licensing statutes for eleven major universally licensed occupations in the U.S. Time from the start of state occupational licensing (i.e. licensing duration) may matter in influencing labor market outcomes. States usually enact…

"On the impossibility of protecting risk-takers" Abstract Risk-neutral sellers can extract high profits from risk-loving buyers by selling them lotteries. To limit risk-taking, gambling is heavily regulated in most countries. I show that protecting risk-loving buyers is essentially impossible. Even if buyers are risk-loving only asymptotically, the seller can construct a nonrandom winner-pays auction that ensures unbounded profits. Buyers are asymptotically…

"Dismissal Disputes And Endogenous Sorting"

"Parental Inputs, Formal Care, and Child Outcomes" Abstract Child outcomes are believed to be a result of cumulative inputs from both within and outside the family. Taking the theory of skill formation (Carneiro and Heckman, 2003) and the model of child outcome production function (Todd and Wolpin, 2003), earlier endowments especially those of high quality…