We develop a contingent claims model for a firm in financial distress with a formal account for renegotiations under the U.S. bankruptcy procedure (known as Chapter 11). Shareholders and two classes of creditors (senior and junior) alternatively propose a reorganization plan subject to a vote....

Regional income disparities have increased in many European countries recently, even as national and supra-national policy instruments were created to correct them. To explain these evolutions, we develop a two-region, two-sector model with migration and public investment in infrastructure and...

We study optimal investment in technologies characterized by the learning curve. There are two investment patterns depending on the shape of the learning curve. If the learning process is slow, firms invest relatively late and on a larger scale. If the curve is steep, firms invest earlier and on...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy in a framework that explicitly accounts for policymakers' uncertainty about the channels of transmission of oil prices into the economy. More specifically, using postwar US data, I examine the evolution of the policy recommendations originating from an...

We present an analytical solution to the lab-equipment R&D growth model with an exogenous rate of imitation and apply it to study the optimal level of intellectual property rights (IPR) protection. This has already been studied in Kwan and Lai (2003); however, a mistake in writing out the...

Are exogenous shocks to lending spreads in corporate credit markets a substantial source of macroeconomic fluctuations? An alternative explanation of the data is that borrowing costs respond endogenously to expectations of future default, driven by macroeconomic shocks. We investigate by...

This paper combines survey forecasts with a heterogeneous agent model to examine the dispersion of expectations of participants in the foreign exchange market. We find distinct variations in the level of dispersion and document that dispersion arises because of the combined effect of market...

This paper finds that a model with sticky information is less successful than a standard model featuring nominal rigidities, inflation indexation, and habits in generating the dynamics triggered by technology shocks, as estimated by a vector autoregression using U.S. macroeconomic data. The real...

This paper analyzes the behavior of a firm that chooses both the scale and timing of its investment. Sensitivity analysis shows that greater demand volatility is associated with the firm investing in larger increments, less frequently. This is in contrast to the conventional wisdom, which is...

What is the relative importance of hiring and separation in driving unemployment fluctuations? This paper presents a framework to decompose the moments of unemployment and study the respective contributions of vacancy posting, a measure of firms’ hiring efforts, and separation. Separation...