Because of the recent surge in U.S. personal defaults, Congress is currently debating bankruptcy reform legislation requiring a means test for Chapter 7 filers. This paper explores the effects of such a reform in a model where, in contrast to previous work, bankruptcy options and production are...

Criticisms of endogenous growth models with flat rate taxes have highlighted two features that are not substantiated by the data. These models generally imply: (1) that economic growth must fall with the share of government expenditures in output across countries, and (2) that one-time shifts in...

In this paper, we explore how informational frictions in credit markets directly affect U.S. manufacturing fluctuations. Within the context of a dynamic industry model, we propose a strategy for identifying intermediation costs related to informational asymmetries between lenders and borrowers....

This paper studies the interaction of capital constraints with business formation, growth and destruction, and the policy implications of this interaction. A dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed and shown to be consistent with recent empirical finding on this subject. In the model,...

In this paper, we analyze the dynamic behavior of employment and hours worked per worker in a stochastic general equilibrium model with a matching mechanism between vacancies and unemployed workers. The model is estimated for the U.S. using the Generalized Methods of Moments (GMM) estimation...

The East Asian financial crisis exposed the problems of excessive government intervention in credit allocation and poor supervision of the banking system. We argue that the crisis is an opportunity to reformulate the strategies of growth by way of eliminating politicized intervention on...

We examine a model of the size distribution and growth of firms whereby firms learn about idiosyncratic productivity parameters. Aggregate shocks, by adding noise to learning at the firm level, can produce differentiated response across firms with their reactions depending on the position of the...

We study the number, size, and location of a firm's plants. The firm's decision balances the benefit of delivering goods and services to customers using multiple plants with the cost of setting up and managing these plants and the potential for cannibalization that arises as their number...

We study the urban structure of the city of Detroit. Following several decades of decline, the city's current urban structure is clearly not optimal for its size, with a business district immediately surrounded by a ring of largely vacant neighborhoods. We propose a model with residential...

This paper develops a two-region model of firm migration where moving is costly and firms have market power. In this setting, the decentralized equilibrium generates excessive inertia in firm movement relative to the 'first best' solution. Because the decentralized solution is inefficient, the...