When backdating executive stock options (ESOs), the exercise price is set in favor of the recipient executive. Relative to a non-backdated benchmark, we find an (ex ante) upper bound for the cost of backdating to shrink from 10% to about 3.7%, as a consequence of the regime change represented by...

The positive correlation between per capita income and cross-country price levels is called the "Penn-Balassa-Samuelson effect." The most influential explanation of this effect centers around sectoral output productivities as the determinant of the relative price of nontraded goods. The...

This paper studies the cost of business cycles within a real business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market. We endogenously link both the cyclical fluctuations and the mean level of unemployment to the aggregate business cycle risk. The key result of the paper is...

Improvements in environmental quality will boost output production and hence economic growth. However, although environmental abatement equally benefits all economies in the world, it is shown that, if the private productive resources are not yet accumulated sufficiently in low income economies,...

In this paper we consider the optimal quadratic control problem of Markov-switching linear rational expectation models. These models are general and flexible tools for modelling not only regime but also model or parameter uncertainty. We show, first, how to find the solution of a...

Despite its theoretical dominance, the empirical case in favor of the permanent income hypothesis is weak. Contrary to one of its basic implications, a growing body of evidence suggests that rich households save a higher proportion of their permanent income than poor households. We propose an...

We consider the optimal capital accumulation policy of a competitive firm operating in the presence of decreasing returns to scale, price uncertainty, and costly reversibility of investment. We characterize the optimal accumulation policy and derive the value of the firm by focusing on the...

This paper constructs an endogenous growth model driven by self-fulfilling expectation shocks to explain the stylized fact that the average growth rate of GDP is related negatively to volatility and positively to capacity utilization. The implied welfare gain from further stabilizing the U.S....

We develop an equilibrium endowment economy with Epstein-Zin recursive utility and a Lévy time-change subordinator, which represents a clock that connects business and calendar time. Our setup provides a tractable equilibrium framework for pricing non-Gaussian jump-like risks induced by the...

This paper reveals that the class of Affine Term Structure Models (ATSMs) introduced by Duffie and Kan (1996) is larger than previously considered in the literature. In the framework of risk factors following a Wishart autoregressive process, we define the Wishart Term Structure Model (WTSM) as...