Understanding Labour Market Frictions: A Tobin’s Q Approach

Labour market friction is viewed as the Tobin’s Q of an employed worker as opposed to the position of the Beveridge curve. This Tobin’s Q is inversely proportional to the average quality of the match between employers and workers. Based on this measure, I find that the labour market friction has a procyclical trend in the US, which is indicative of the fact that firms compromise on the quality of the skill match during an expansion.Intangible Capital, Skill matching, Human capital

Understanding Labour Market Frictions: A Tobin’s Q Approach

Labour market friction is viewed as the Tobin’s Q of an employed worker as opposed to the position of the Beveridge curve. This Tobin’s Q is inversely proportional to the average quality of the match between employers and workers. Based on this measure, I find that the labour market friction behaves procyclically in the US, which is indicative of the fact that firms compromise on the quality of the skill match during an expansion.

Inequality and Industrialization

Why do some countries industrialize later than others? Recent literature suggests that the prime reason is low agricultural productivity. This paper argues that the initial inequality of human capital could also be a contributing factor to the delayed process of industrialization characterizing some countries. We develop a neo-classical growth model which predicts that countries with a greater initial knowledge gap between rich and poor agents industrialize slowly, and that human capital inequality, although declining, tends to be persistent. Our cross-country data lend support to these predictions.

Uninsured Risks, Loan Contracts and the Declining Equity Premium

Using a two period model with moral hazard and uninsured risk, we argue that the decline in equity premium from its historically high level is due to a gradual elimination of barriers to universal banking. The loan contracts set up by financial intermediaries became more complete in nature with the advent of universal banking in the 90s following the Gramm-Leach-Billy Act. Hence, it is the nature of the loan contracts, not just the borrowing constraint and uninsured risks that is more fundamental in explaining the size of the equity premium.

The Growth-Inequality Relationship in a Model with Discrete Occupational Choice and Redistributive Tax

No abstract.

Government bias in education, schooling attainment and growth

A surprising cross country stylized fact is that a higher public spending on education tends to lower the long run per capita growth rate and schooling returns. This is contrary to the conventional wisdom that education is a major driver of growth. In this paper, we revisit this issue and try to understand these puzzling facts in terms of an endogenous growth model. Our cross country calibration of the growth model predicts that countries with a greater government involvement in education experience lower schooling efforts and lower growth.endogenous growth, public spending on education

Investment Frictions and the Relative Price of Investment Goods in an Open Economy Model

Is the relative price of investment goods a good proxy for investment frictions? We analyze investment frictions in an open economy, flexible price, two-country model and show that when the relative price of investment goods is endogenously determined in such a model, the relative price of investment can actually rise in response to a reduction in investment frictions. Only when the model is driven by TFP shocks do we observe a data congruent negative correlation between investment and the relative price of investment goods.Investment frictions, investment specific technological progress, total factor productivity, relative price of investment goods terms of trade.