What are the micro and macro implications of a credit crunch? We study this question in a model where heterogeneous entrepreneurs can finance their investment by borrowing subject to collateral constraints and/or by using internal funds. We discipline our theory by requiring that the size...

In our model, short-sighted policy-makers choose to subsidize productive entrepreneurs to relax their limited commitments. In the short-run, this policy reallocates capital from unproductive towards productive entrepreneurs, and boosts per-capita income, TFP and capital accumulation. Over time,...

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impacts of economy-wide microfinance or other credit programs targeted toward small-scale entrepreneurs. In our analysis, we find that the redistributive impacts of microfinance are stronger in general-equilibrium,...

Asset price data imply a large degree international risk sharing, while aggregate consumption data do not. We evaluate how well a model with fixed costs of exchanging money for assets can account for this discrepancy. In our model, households receive idiosyncratic income shocks, and only a...

We show that the key identifying assumptions underlying the existing approaches to identifying technology shocks in the data are violated in models with heterogeneous capital and labor. We propose a new method to identifying technology shocks in the data in presence of factor heterogeneity and...

We analyze the effects of the observed increased share of delegated capital for trading strategies and equilibrium prices. We introduce delegation into a standard Lucas exchange economy, where in equilibrium some investors trade on their own account, but others decide to delegate trading to...

We propose a way to measure the contribution of search frictions to the level of wage dispersion observed in the data. Using the data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth we find that the variance of match qualities between workers and employers accounts for about 6%...

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the...

This paper develops a vintage-technology model, in which firms face idiosyncratic uncertainties in nonconvex technology adoption costs. We derive the generalized (S, s) adoption rule yielding the lumpy technology adoption behavior within an otherwise standard model and compute the stationary...

Capital equipment, such as computers and industrial machinery, embodies skill-biased technology and, hence, is complementary to skilled labor. Many countries, by importing a large share of their capital, import skill-biased technology and a rise in the skill premium. In this paper we develop a...