Rent-Sharing, Hold-up, and Wages: Evidence from Matched Panel Data It is widely believed that rent-sharing reduces the incentives for investment when long term contracts are infeasible because some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. We propose a simple test for the degree of hold-up based on the fraction of capital costs that are deducted from the quasi-rent that determines...

We use data from the Survey of Consumer Finance and Survey of Income Program Participation to show that young households with children are under-insured against the risk that an adult member of the household dies. We develop a macroeconomic model with human capital risk, limited pledgability of human capital (limited contract enforcement), and age-dependent returns to human capital investment. ...

I study the implications of various bankruptcy regimes for student loans on college investment, human capital accumulation, and earnings in a heterogeneous life-cycle economy with risky human capital investment. The option to discharge one’s debt under a liquidation regime helps alleviate some of the risk of investing in human capital. However, dischargeability triggers exclusion from borrowing...

Like other macroeconomic variables, residential investment has become much less volatile since the mid-1980s (recent experience notwithstanding.) This paper explores the role of structural change in this decline. Since the the early 1980s there have been many changes in the underlying structure of the economy, including those in the mortgage market which have made it easier to acquire a home. W...

This study investigates the stock characteristic preferences of institutional Australian equity managers. In aggregate we find that active managers exhibit preferences for stocks exhibiting high price variance, large market capitalisation, low transaction costs, value-oriented stocks, greater levels of analyst coverage, and some evidence of a preference for stocks with less variability in analy...

This paper analyzes gender issues with respect to public pensions in China. Because provision of public pensions in China is highly fragmented, with different programs applying to different groups of people, we focus on the largest mandatory public pension program in urban China, the Urban Employees’ Pension Program. The paper uses data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (C...