This paper studies the differences between private and government provision of infrastructure. Capital utilization decisions and their differential role in determining market prices for capital goods under the two regimes of infrastructure provision serve as a critical transmission mechanism for...

We analyze how commodity price uncertainty affects saving behavior and welfare in a dynamic model with multiple commodities, portfolio hedging, and a preference structure that disentangles ordinal preferences, attitudes towards risk, and attitudes towards intertemporal substitution. We show that...

We present evidence about the disappearance of the high-growth recoveries from recessions with intense job creation typically observed until the eighties. This result matches the belief that recessions now have an L-shape as opposed to the old-time recessions that always had a V-shape. We also...

In this study, we empirically examine the extent of price rigidity using a unique store-level time-series data set – consisting of (i) actual retail transaction prices, (ii) actual wholesale transaction prices which represent both the retailers’ costs and the prices received by...

This paper proposes a theory of long-run development based on public infrastructure as the engine of growth. The government, in addition to investing in infrastructure, spends on health services, which in turn raise labor productivity and lower the rate of time preference. Infrastructure affects...

This paper considers the relationship between tax competition and growth in an endogenous growth model where there are stochastic shocks to productivity, and capital taxes fund a public good which may be for final consumption or an infrastructure input. Absent stochastic shocks, decentralized...

Consider trade in continuous time between two players. The gains from trade are divided according to a contract, and at each point in time, either player may unilaterally induce a costly adjustment of the contract. Players' payoffs from trade under the contract, as well as from trade under an...

This paper describes a method to solve models with a continuum of agents, incomplete markets and aggregate uncertainty. I use backward induction on a finite grid of points in the aggregate state space. The aggregate state includes a small number of statistics (moments) of the cross-sectional...

This paper shows that the R2 and the standard error have fatal flaws and are inadequate accuracy tests. Using data from a Krusell-Smith economy, I show that approximations for the law of motion of aggregate capital, for which the true standard deviation of aggregate capital is up to 14% (119%)...