Research 'blurbs'

Publications

■  "Competing with Asking Prices"  (w. Ben Lester and Ronald Wolthoff)  --Theoretical Economics-- May 2017,   (earlier version May 2015 ) 

We construct an environment with a few simple, realistic ingredients and demonstrate that using an asking price is optimal:  it is the pricing mechanism that maximizes competing sellers’ revenues and it implements the efficient outcome in equilibrium.

■   "The Extent and Cyclicality of Career Changes: Evidence for the U.K." (w. Carlos Carrillo-Tudela, Bart Hobijn, and Powen She) --European Economic Review--  (May 2016, vol 84, pp 18-41, sciencedirect open access provided by the ESRC)

Using quarterly labour data for the U.K. from 1993 through 2012, we document that in an economic downturn a smaller fraction of British unemployed workers change their career when starting a new job. Moreover, the proportion of total hires that involves a career change for the worker also drops in recessions. We further investigate underlying patterns, such as which workers change careers, and which are the industries and occupations from which workers originate and to which they move. We also compare the distributions of wage gains of those who change career and those who do not, and how these distributions behave cyclically.

■  "Directed Search over the Life cycle"  (with Guido Menzio and Irina Telyukova)  --Review of Economic Dynamics-- (January 2016, vol. 19, Pages 38-62) (linked version February 2015)

                            Wages and employment transitions  over the life cycle when workers lead finite lives, move job-to-job, facing (directed) search frictions, and accumulate human capital on-the-job

■  "Unemployment Risk and Wage Differentials"  (with Roberto Pinheiro), --Journal of Economic Theory-- (May 2015,  vol. 157, pp 397-424) (linked version Sept. 2014)

When workers search on-the-job, firms with high risk of sending workers back into unemployment don't pay compensating wages in equilibrium. Identical workers who become unemployed will have higher risk of flowing back into unemployment with subsequent employers as a result.

■  "  Meeting Technologies and Optimal Trading Mechanisms in Competitive Search Markets   " (w. Ben Lester and Ronald Wolthoff) --Journal of Economic Theory--  (Jan. 2015, vol. 155, pp 1-15) ungated version

In a market in which sellers compete by posting mechanisms, we allow for a general meeting technology and show that its properties crucially affect the mechanism that sellers select in equilibrium. We derive a novel condition on meeting technologies, which we call invariance, and show that meeting fees are equal to zero if and only if this condition is satisfied.

■   "Precautionary Demand for Money in a Business Cycle Model" (w. Irina Telyukova)     --Journal of Monetary Economics--     (Nov. 2013, 60(8)) link to earlier version

We build a model with uninsurable idiosyncratic preference shocks for `liquid' consumption, i.e. consumption that can only be bought with liquid means. We measure the extent of this uncertainty, and show that it affects the behavior of aggregates over the business cycle. 

■  "Information Acquisition and the Exclusion of Evidence in Trials" (with Ben Lester and Nicola Persico)  --Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization-- (2012, vol. 28(1) pp 163-182).

Fact-finders (jurors) have a cognitive cost of processing evidence; judges exclude evidence in order to incentivize juries to focus on other, more probative evidence

■  "Labor Market Fluctuations in the Small and in the Large" (with Richard Rogerson and Randall Wright)   --International Journal of Economic Theory-- (2009, vol. 5(1), pp 125-137) NBER WP version

nonlinearities, e.g. because of declining returns to household production, cause the elasticity of unemployment with respect to productivity to be large for small fluctuations, and smaller for larger fluctuations

This research has been supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain ( Juan de la Cierva Fellowship and project Grant ECO2010-20614), the Bank of Spain's Programa de Investigacion de Excelencia, and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), award references ES/LOO9633/1 and ES/N00776X/1.

Non-refereed Publications

■  "Career Changes Decline During Recessions", FRBSF Economic Letter, 2014-09 (joint with Carlos Carrillo-Tudela and Bart Hobijn)   

■  "Majority of Hires Never Report Looking For a Job" FRBSF Economic Letter, 2015-10 (with Carlos Carrillo-Tudela, Bart Hobijn and Patryk Perkowski)