Cooper and Willis (2003) is the latest in a sequence of criticisms of our methodology for estimating aggregate nonlinearities when microeconomic adjustment is lumpy. Their case is based on "reproducing" our main findings using artificial data generated by a model where microeconomic agents face...

Microeconomic flexibility is at the core of economic growth in modern market economies because it facilitates the process of creative-destruction, The main reason why this process is not infinitely fast, is the presence of adjustment costs, some of them technological, others institutional. Chief...

It is widely claimed that housing wealth, as well as stock prices, have an impact on consumption and hence on aggregate economic activity. This paper presents a broad overview of the issues that arise in evaluating this claim in the context of recent research in behavioral economics. Particular...

This paper considers tests of the parameter on endogenous variables in an instrumental variables regression model. The focus is on determining tests that have some optimal power properties. We start by considering a model with normally distributed errors and known error covariance matrix. We...

We show that very little is needed to create liquidity under-supply in equilibrium. Credit constraints on demand by themselves can cause an under-supply of liquidity, without the uncertainty, intermediation, asymmetric information or complicated international financial framework used in other...

People reason about real-estate prices both in terms of general rules and in terms of analogies to similar cases. We propose to empirically test which mode of reasoning fits the data better. To this end, we develop the statistical techniques required for the estimation of the case-based model....

The present study examines the importance of Schumpeterian profits in the United States economy. Schumpeterian profits are defined as those profits that arise when firms are able to appropriate the returns from innovative activity. We first show the underlying equations for Schumpeterian...

The present study reviews the "productivity slowdown" of the 1970s and 1980s. The study also develops a new data set -- industrial data available back to 1948 -- as well as a new set of tools for decomposing changes in productivity growth. The major result of this study is that the productivity...

We advance a novel choice-theoretic model of "identity" based on the notions of categories and narratives. Identity is conceived as a matter of "reflexive perception" -- how people understand themselves. Choosing an identity is equivalent to making a generalization about one's past that...

This paper considers an empirical likelihood method to estimate the parameters of the quantile regression (QR) models and to construct confidence regions that are accurate in finite samples. To achieve the higher-order refinements, we smooth the estimating equations for the empirical likelihood....