What accounts for the sharp increase in the number of hours worked by married women? Although the number of hours worked per person in the U.S. has changed very little over the past 60 years, the labor force has undergone some pronounced shifts over that same period. One prominent change is this...

The popular press would lead us to believe that during the stock market boom of the 1990s just about everyone was buying and selling bonds every day. In fact, evidence shows that most households make only infrequent changes to their investment portfolios. "In The Role of Market Segmented Markets...

Living standards, as measured by average income per person, vary widely across countries. Differences in income result in large disparities in spending on goods and services by people living in different economies. What makes some countries rich and others poor? Furthermore, what determines...

Changes in the stock of firms' inventories are an important component of the business cycle. In fact, discussion about the timing of a recovery following a recession often focuses on inventories. In "The Role of Inventories in the Business Cycle," Aubhik Khan surveys the facts about inventory...

In the final article this quarter, Aubhik Khan wonders: What determines whether a manufacturing plant survives? Is it access to credit markets? Or does learning about plants' profitability over time determine survival? Should government policy play a role in helping plants survive? In...

We solve equilibrium models of lumpy investment wherein establishments face persistent shocks to common and plant-specific productivity. Nonconvex adjustment costs lead plants to pursue generalized (S, s) rules with respect to capital; thus, their investments are lumpy. In partial equilibrium,...

Aubhik Khan explains some of the things economists have learned about how investment changes over the business cycle

Recent empirical analysis has found nonlinearities to be important in understanding aggregated investment. Using an equilibrium business cycle model, we search for aggregate nonlinearities arising from the introduction of nonconvex capital adjustment costs. We find that, while such costs lead to...

We evaluate two leading models of aggregate fluctuations with inventories in general equilibrium: the (S,s) model and the stockout avoidance model. Each is judged by its ability to explain the observed magnitude of inventories in the U.S. economy, alongside other empirical regularities such as...