We study why capital accumulation in Argentina was slow in the 1990s and 2000s, despite high productivity growth and low international interest rates. We show that limited commitment constraints introduce two mechanisms. First, the response of investment to a total factor productivity increase...

Over the U.S. business cycle, fluctuations in residential investment systematically lead fluctuations in real GDP. Evidently, these dynamics are specific to the U.S. and Canada. In other developed economies residential investment tends to be coincident with the cycle. On the other hand, in all...

We document that at business cycle frequency, nominal variables, such as aggregate price levels and nominal interest rates, are more correlated across countries than real output. Since national central banks control the domestic money supply and their objective has been to keep the nominal...

We document that, at business cycle frequencies, fluctuations in nominal variables, such as aggregate price levels and nominal interest rates, are substantially more synchronized across countries than fluctuations in real output. To the extent that domestic nominal variables are determined by...

We provide a new interpretation of the statistical relation between the trade balance and the terms of trade. This relation includes the J-curve, the tendency for trade balances to be negatively correlated with contemporaneous movements in the terms of trade, positively correlated with lagged...

An innovation in this paper is to introduce a time-to-build technology for the production of market capital into a model with home production. The paper’s main finding is that the two anomalies that have plagued all household production models—the positive correlation between business and...

Finn Kydland, a Dallas Fed consultant since 1994, shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in economics with Edward C. Prescott for their groundbreaking work incorporating decisionmaking by individuals, households and firms into economic models.