There are two basic tools to analyse fundamental issues in dynamical macroeconomics. One of them is a model of optimal growth describing savings behaviour. The second one is the Solow-Swan model with a constant aggregate propensity to save out of income. A steady state of the dynamical economic...

Over the last 20 years, the annual average U.S. and Canadian productivity growth rates have been 2.3% and 1.3%, respectively. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we empirically document the firm size distribution and the productivity for the two countries. Second, we quantitatively...

Homestead exemption is defined as the level of home equity that a household declaring bankruptcy can keep. This exemption level varies across states in the United States. As entreprenurial activities are risky, small business owners value the insurance the bankruptcy law provides. In their...

In this paper, we use an open economy DGE model (SIGMA) to assess the quantitative effects of fiscal shocks on the trade balance in the United States. We examine the effects of two alternative fiscal shocks: a rise in government consumption, and a reduction in the labor income tax rate. Our...

This paper examines theoretically, using a two-country real-business-cycle model, the effects of capital-market liberalization when there is limited participation in national financial markets. It is assumed that workers cannot smooth consumption as well as do stockholders, and therefore,...

We connect two major strands of the recent monetary policy literature, i) the search for well microfounded optimising models consistent with macroeconomic data, especially persistence in inflation, and ii) the wealth of newly available microeconomic data on price changing behaviour from the...

We provide analytical and empirical underpinnings for the notion that the financial fragility of the aggregate economy depends on the balance sheet conditions of the corporate sector. First, we obtain time-varying semiparametric estimates of the relationship between the debt-equity ratio and the...