The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the stock wealth effect of consumption exhibits structural change(s) or behaves asymmetrically over business cycles. We first perform a general test of linearity for the behavior of aggregate consumption in response to changes in stock wealth based...

We study a model with a durable good subject to abrupt, periodic obsolescence, and characterize the optimal purchasing policy. Consumers optimally synchronize new purchases with the arrival of new durable models. Hence, some agents use a "flexible" optimal replacement rule that switches between...

Firms in poor countries often tend to rely on alternative sources of financing different than banks. We show that borrowing constraints lead to financial arrangements between firms that can amplify the effect of liquidity or productivity shocks in the economy. In particular, we focus on the...

This paper develops a simple two-country, two-good model, in which the real exchange rate, stock and bond prices are jointly determined. The model predicts that stock market prices are correlated internationally even though their dividend processes are independent, providing a theoretical...

Many macroeconomic models involve hybrid equations, in which some variables are a function of both their lags and their expected future value. The hybrid ``New Keynesian'' Phillips Curve is a prominent example. Estimates of such hybrid models have produced conflicting empirical results: Studies...

This paper considers measures of uncertainty used in economic estimation. Our first contribution is to address the theoretical relationship between cross-section and time series measures, highlighting the reasons why these might diverge. In a subsequent empirical section, we compare measures of...

This paper investigates (i) what has determined the land investment behavior of Japanese firms since the latter half of the 1980s; and (ii) how the current market prices of their land assets diverge from their shadow prices (marginal values of land investment). To do so, we estimate nonlinear...

This paper proposes a stochastic model of investment with embodied technological progress, in which firms invest not only to expand the capacity as in Pindyck (1988) but also to replace old machines. The scrapping decision or the age of the oldest machine is then endogenous and evolves...

Consumption is partly a social activity, yet most studies of consumer behavior treat households in isolation. We investigate familial relationships in consumption patterns using a sample of parents and their children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find a positive and statistically...

This paper investigates the microfoundation of consumer decisions in Argentina. Structural parameters are estimated following the Euler Equation-GMM approach. Attention is focussed on parameter instability, an empirical difficulty for applying this method often pointed out in the literature. The...