Events

Topic: "A Quantitative Theory of the Credit Score" (with S. Chatterjee, K. Dempsey, V. Rios-Rull) Abstract: What is the role of credit scores in credit markets? We argue that it is a stand-in for a market assessment of a person’s unobservable type (which here we take to be patience). We pose a model of persistent hidden types where observable actions shape the public assessment of a perso...

Topic: "Redistribution with Performance Pay" (joint paper with A. Ndiaye and N. Werquin) Abstract: "Half of the jobs in the U.S. feature pay-for-performance. We derive novel incidence and optimum formulas for the overall rate of tax progressivity and the top tax rates on total earnings and bonuses, when such labor contracts arise from moral hazard frictions within firms. Optimal taxes accou...

Topic: “Wealth, Wages, and Employment” (joint with Per Krusell and Jinfeng Luo) Abstract: We look at environements where workers differ on wealth and wages and where they choose which wage/job to look for. They sometimes quit, lose their jobs or switch to other jobs. We use this structure to investigate the degree of job rigidity by matching the cyclical volatility of job to job transiti...

Topic: "Global demand for financial assets, falling real interest rates and macroeconomic instability" (with Enrique Mendoza) Abstract: The sharp, secular decline in the world real interest rate of the past thirty years suggests that the observed surge in global demand for financial assets outpaced the growth in supply. We argue that this phenomenon was driven by (i) faster growth in emergin...