Recent theories of firm dynamics emphasize the role of financial variables as determinants of firm growth. Empirically examining these relationships has been difficult, since there is a lack of financial data on the small, young, and private firms. Using a unique administrative data set, this...

We ask whether offering a menu of unemployment insurance contracts is welfare-improving in a heterogeneous population. We adopt a repeated moral hazard framework as in Shavell and Weiss (1979), supplemented by unobserved heterogeneity about agents' job opportunities. Our main theoretical...

We combine and extend two existing lines of research in game theoretic studies of fisheries, building up on Quirk and Smith (1977), Anderson (1975), Fisher and Mirman (1996), Sumaila (1997) and most recently Datta and Mirman (1999) who developed either static or discrete time models, not...

This paper presents a lattice algorithm for pricing both European- and American-style moving average barrier options (MABOs). We develop a finite-dimensional partial differential equation (PDE) model for discretely monitored MABOs and solve it numerically by using a forward shooting grid method....

We consider a model of inflation and unemployment proposed in Ferri et al. (JEBO, 2001), in which the dynamics are described by a discontinuous piecewise linear map, made up of two branches. We shall show that the bounded dynamics may be classified in two cases: we may have either regular...

The recent financial turmoil has underlined the importance of analyzing the link between banks' balance sheets and economic activity. We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model in which bank capital mitigates an agency problem between banks and their creditors. As a result, the...

In this paper, I present a model in which firm-level uncertainty raises aggregate productivity growth. The mechanism for this is learning-by-doing in the research sector: firms undertake research to reduce uncertainty, which results in social knowledge accumulation that improves the productivity...

We present an OLG model in which life expectancy and environmental quality dynamics are jointly determined. Agents may invest in environmental care, depending on how much they expect to live. In turn, environmental conditions affect life expectancy. As a result, our model produces a positive...

This paper revisits a widely adopted approach to robust decision making developed by (Hansen and Sargent, 2003) and (Hansen and Sargent, 2008)--henceforth HS--and applies it to monetary policy design in the face of model uncertainty. We pay particular attention to two issues: first, we...

In this paper, the model of endogenous fertility proposed by Becker and Barro (1988), and extended by Benhabib and Nishimura (1989) is considered. However, in their model, the uniqueness of the optimal path may fail to hold. Furthermore, the value function may not be concave, because of the...