We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model of capital accumulation where credit is intermediated by banks operating in a Cournot oligopoly. The number of banks affects capital accumulation through two channels. First, it affects the quantity of credit available to entrepreneurs. Second, it...

More than 35% of Thai households either give or receive remittances, and remittances account for about one-third of the income of the receiving households. Remittance relationships may be an important source of protection against adverse events for the individuals involved. This paper provides...

What are the economic effects of an interest rate cut when an economy is in the midst of a financial crisis? Under what conditions will a cut stimulate output and employment, and raise welfare? Under what conditions will a cut have the opposite effects? We answer these questions in a general...

We present a model embodying moderate amounts of nominal rigidities which accounts for the observed inertia in inflation and persistence in output. The key features of our model are those that prevent a sharp rise in marginal costs after an expansionary shock to monetary policy. Of these...

This paper shows how US monetary policy contributed to the drop in the volatility of US output fluctuations and to the decoupling of household investment from the business cycle. I estimate a model of household investment, an aggregate of non durable consumption and corporate sector investment,...

An aggregation exercise is proposed that aims at investigating whether the fast average adjustment of the disaggregate inflation series of the euro area CPI translates into the slow adjustment of euro area aggregate inflation. We first estimate a dynamic factor model for 404 inflation...

This paper extends the static analysis of oligopoly structure into an infinite-horizon setting with sunk costs and demand uncertainty. The observation that exit rates decline with firm age motivates the assumption of last-in first-out dynamics: An entrant expects to produce no longer than any...

This paper considers the effects of raising the cost of entry for potential competitors on infinite-horizon Markov-perfect industry dynamics with ongoing demand uncertainty. All entrants serving the model industry incur sunk costs, and exit avoids future fixed costs. We focus on the unique...

Although it is well known that there is a strong association between education and health much less is known about how these factors are connected, and whether the relationship is causal. Lleras-Muney (2005) provides perhaps the strongest evidence that education has a causal effect on health....

During the last decade, debit card transactions grew rapidly in most advanced countries. While check usage declined and has almost disappeared in some countries, the stock of currency in circulation has not declined as fast. We use panel estimation techniques to analyze the change in...