Yifan Wang

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A project is a continuum of ordered tasks that all have to be done, so the margin is not how much of each task to buy but who covers which. Two costs sit at the boundary between tasks: what a worker pays for the training she lacks, and what a pair pays to hand work across. Cheap metered cognition compresses both, at different rates, and team size depends on the two only through their ratio. A within-task gain therefore moves output without moving organization, while a boundary gain moves both — the two channels are indistinguishable in aggregates and opposite in organization. Teams dissolve while a prerequisite is still twice as expensive as a handoff.

with Chang Gao  ·  [Hide]

LGFV issuance spreads rise with local government leverage — under OLS, under a predetermined maturity-rollover instrument, and under the 2015 central-government debt swap. Housing-price growth is hump-shaped in leverage and turns negative past 18–23% of GDP. We read these patterns through a general-equilibrium model in which a leverage-dependent financial friction creates a debt threshold beyond which infrastructure investment collapses, so the bust needs no exogenous shock.

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Some sectors pay a premium and ration entry instead of clearing on wages. This paper puts a probability-based entry rule and an O-ring ability aggregator into a dynamic equilibrium in which skill evolves through learning-by-doing. Wage premia survive even when qualified labor is in excess supply, and a spell in the wrong sector can be worth taking for the sector-specific human capital it builds.

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Firms in a multi-country, multi-sector production network hold inventories of intermediate and final goods. Endogenizing that choice gives global shocks a propagation channel separate from trade itself. Under restrictions the economy is isomorphic to standard multi-sector models with input-output linkages.