Standard theory of small open economies predicts a smooth path for consumption and investment over time, and procyclical current account balances and employment. This contrasts with the data for emerging countries, where consumption, investment and employment are highly procyclical and volatile,...

The paper focuses on short run macroeconomic dynamics triggered by demand side shocks. In particular, the paper analyzes, in a general equilibrium framework, the impact of transitory demand side shocks on the behavior of macroeconomic variables and examines the relevance of policy instruments...

Building upon a long tradition in sociology, economists have recently turned their attention to the analysis of social networks. The present paper adds to this emerging literature by proposing a different approach to social-network formation. As in the model of Jackson and Wolinsky (1996),...

A possible view of the role of an adjudicator is that it is to obtain the information that is needed to apply a well-articulated legal rule. That is, the task of an adjudicator in a case is to gather and verify the information that is called for to employ a legal rule, but that once the required...

The large wealth and consumption inequality in the U.S. is usually attributed to two market frictions: debt constraints and incomplete markets. Recent literature has argued that debt constraints are the critical friction while market incompleteness plays only a secondary role. We evaluate the...

Structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) have become a standard tool used to determine the roles of monetary policy shocks in generating cyclical fluctuations in the United States. Using both long- and short-run identifying restrictions, various authors have explored the empirical response of...

This paper proposes the view that financial development and economic growth are linked through the characteristics of technology. The most obvious connection between technology and financial innovation emerges through risk-sharing. Technology is modeled as a distribution over outcomes....

We revisit the concept of unpredictability to explore its implications for forecasting strategies in a non-stationary world subject to structural breaks, where model and mechanism differ. Six aspects of the role of unpredictability are distinguished, compounding the four additional mistakes most...

The so-called purchasing-power parity (PPP) puzzle takes one of two forms. In its first form, early tests of the PPP-hypothesis failed to reject unit roots in real exchange rates, thus rejecting the hypothesis of PPP holding in the long term. In the more recent literature, the literature on the...

A large number of microeconomic decision variables such as investments, prices, inventories or employment are characterized by intermittent large adjustments. The behavior of those variables has been often modeled as following state-dependent rules. The optimality of such state-dependent rules...