This paper considers Marshall's argument that geographic concentration of industry facilitates specialization. I use Census data on manufacturing plants to examine the relationship between localization of industry and vertical disintegration. I find that establishments located near other establishments within the same industry tend to make more intensive use of purchased inputs than establishments without own-industry neighbors. This relationship only holds among industries that are geographically concentrated; having neighbors makes no difference in geographically dispersed industries. I argue that this pattern is consistent with a model in which increased opportunity for specialization is the reason some industries localize.

I develop an asset-pricing model in which financial assets are valued for their liquidity—the extent to which they are useful in facilitating exchange—as well as for being claims to streams of consumption goods. The implications for average asset returns, the equity-premium puzzle and the risk-free rate puzzle, are explored in a version of the model that nests the work of Mehra and Prescott (1985).

Typical models of bankruptcy and collateral rely on incomplete asset markets. In fact, bankruptcy and collateral add contingencies to asset markets. In some models, these contingencies can be used by consumers to achieve the same equilibrium allocations as in models with complete markets. In particular, the equilibrium allocation in the debt constrained model of Kehoe and Levine (2001) can be implemented in a model with bankruptcy and collateral. The equilibrium allocation is constrained efficient. Bankruptcy occurs when consumers receive low income shocks. The implementation of the debt constrained allocation in a model with bankruptcy and collateral is fragile in the sense of Leijonhufvud’s “corridor of stability,” however: If the environment changes, the equilibrium allocation is no longer constrained efficient.

We study the importance of international trade in structural change. Our framework has both productivity and trade cost shocks, and allows for non-unitary income and substitution elasticities. We calibrate our model to investigate South Korea’s structural change between 1971 and 2005. We find that the shock processes, propagated through the model’s two main transmission mechanisms, non-homothetic preferences and the open economy, explain virtually all of the evolution of agriculture and services labor shares, and the rising part of the hump-shape in manufacturing. Counterfactual exercises show that the role of the open economy is quantitatively important for explaining South Korea’s structural change.

We analyze the secular decline in interstate migration in the United States between 1991 and 2011. Gross flows of people across states are about 10 times larger than net flows, yet have declined by around 50 percent over the past 20 years. We argue that the fall in migration is due to a decline in the geographic specificity of returns to occupations, together with an increase in workers’ ability to learn about other locations before moving there, through information technology and inexpensive travel. These explanations find support in micro data on the distribution of earnings and occupations across space and on rates of repeat migration. Other explanations, including compositional changes, regional changes, and the rise in real incomes, do not fit the data. We develop a model to formalize the geographic-specificity and information mechanisms and show that a calibrated version is consistent with cross-sectional and time-series patterns of migration, occupations, and incomes. Our mechanisms can explain at least one-third and possibly all of the decline in gross migration since 1991.

In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage. Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage: either they get divorced (assuming it is available) and struggle as low-income single mothers, or they remain trapped in the marriage. In both cases, education can provide a route to emancipation for women. To investigate this idea, we build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men. Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance against divorce risk. However, as women further their education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, leading to more unstable marriages and, in turn, further increasing demand for education. The framework generates powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to a large rise in divorce rates and a decline in marriage rates (similar to those observed in the US data) from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. Further, in the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in all of these trends, explaining more than one-quarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women.