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With inefficient bureaucratic institutions, the effects of laws are hard to assess and incompetent politicians may pass laws to build a reputation as skillful reformers. Since too many laws curtail bureaucratic efficiency, this mechanism can generate a steady state with Kafkaesque bureaucracy. Temporary surges in political instability heighten the incentives to overproduce laws and can shift the economy towards the Kafkaesque state. Consistent with the theory, after a surge in political instability in the early 1990s, Italy experienced a significant increase in the amount of poor-quality legislation and a decrease in bureaucratic efficiency.

We study the effects of monetary announcements when agents face Knightian uncertainty about the commitment capacity of the monetary authority. Households are ambiguity averse and differentially exposed to inflation due to differences in wealth. In response to the announcement of a future monetary loosening, only wealthy households (creditors) act as if the announcement will be fully implemented, due to the potential wealth losses from future inflation. As a result the economy responds as if aggregate net wealth falls, which attenuates the effects of the announcement. Redistributing from super-wealthy to middle-wealthy households makes the announcement more expansionary, in the extreme as expansionary as under a fully credible announcement.

We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were increased for younger and decreased for older workers. This is because the young tend to lack the means to smooth consumption during unemployment and want jobs to accumulate high-return human capital. So unemployment insurance is most valuable to them, while moral hazard is mild. By calibrating a life cycle model with unemployment risk and endogenous search effort, we find that allowing unemployment replacement rates to decline with age yields sizeable welfare gains to US workers.

Social contacts help to find jobs, but not necessarily in the occupations where workers are most productive. Hence social contacts can generate mismatch between workers' occupational choices and their productive advantage. Accordingly, social networks can lead to low labour force quality, low returns to firms' investment and depressed aggregate productivity. We analyse surveys from both the US and Europe including information on job finding through contacts. Consistent with our predictions, contacts reduce unemployment duration by 1–3 months on average, but they are associated with wage discounts of at least 2.5%. We also find some evidence of negative externalities on aggregate productivity.

This paper proposes a model of endogenous growth where innovating requires both researchers, who produce inventions, and entrepreneurs who implement them. As research and entrepreneurship compete in the allocation of aggregate resources, the relation between growth and research effort is hump-shaped. When entrepreneurs appropriate too little rents from innovation, too few resources are allocated to entrepreneurship and returns to R&D are low because of this lack of entrepreneurial skills. When so, innovation should be promoted by encouraging entrepreneurship rather than research.

We document that the fraction of entrepreneurs working in the region where they were born is significantly higher than the corresponding fraction for dependent workers. This is more pronounced in more developed regions and positively related to the degree of local financial development. Firms created by locals are bigger, operate with more capital-intensive technologies, and obtain greater financing per unit of capital invested, than firms created by nonlocals. This suggests that there are so many local entrepreneurs because locals can better exploit the financial opportunities available in the region where they were born. This helps to explain how local financial development causes persistent disparities in entrepreneurial activity, technology, and income.

About half of the change in U.S. non-durable consumption expenditure is due to changes in the products entering households’ consumption basket (the extensive margin). Changes in the basket are driven by fluctuations in the rate at which households add products; removals fluctuate little. These patterns reflect that, in response to income increases, households adopt consumer products already available in the market. Household adoption amplifies the effects of fiscal transfers on consumption by more than 30%. Cyclical household adoption of products also implies that inflation measures based on a representative household consuming all varieties available in the market underestimate true household-level inflation by as much as 1% per year over the Great Recession in the consumption categories covered by our data.

We study a labour market equilibrium model in which firms sign optimal long-term contracts with workers. Firms that are financially constrained offer an increasing wage profile: they pay lower wages today in exchange for higher future wages once they become unconstrained. Because constrained firms grow faster, the model predicts a positive correlation between the growth of wages and the growth of the firm. Under some conditions, the model also generates a positive relation between firm size and wages. Using matched employer-employee data from Finland and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth for the U.S., we show that the key dynamic properties of the model are supported by the data.

We analyse how unemployment, job-finding and job-separation rates react to neutral and investment-specific technology shocks. Neutral shocks increase unemployment and explain a substantial portion of it volatility; investment-specific shocks expand employment and hours worked and contribute to hours worked volatility. Movements in the job-separation rates are responsible for the impact response of unemployment while job-finding rates for movements along its adjustment path. The evidence warns against using models with exogenous separation rates and challenges the conventional way of modelling technology shocks in search and sticky price models.

Starting in the 1970's, wage inequality and the number of hours worked by employed U.S. prime-age male workers have both increased. We argue that these two facts are related. We use a labour market model with on-the-job search where by working longer hours individuals acquire greater skills. Since job candidates are ranked by productivity, greater skills not only increase worker's productivity in the current job but also help the worker to obtain better jobs. When job offers become more dispersed, wage inequality increases and workers work longer hours to obtain better jobs. As a result, average hours per worker in the economy increase. This mechanism accounts for around two-thirds of the increase in hours observed in data. Part of the increase is inefficient since workers obtain better jobs at the expense of other workers competing for the same jobs.