What determines the technology that a country adopts? While many factors affect technological adoption, the efficiency of the country's financial system may also play a significant role. To address this question, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with...

The relationship between venture capital and growth is examined using an endogenous growth model incorporating dynamic contracts between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. At each stage of financing, venture capitalists evaluate the viability of startups. If viable, venture capitalists...

How does technological progress in financial intermediation affect the economy? To address this question a costly-state verification framework is embedded into a standard growth model. In particular, financial intermediaries can invest resources to monitor the returns earned by firms. The...

How important is financial development for economic development? A costly state verification model of financial intermediation is presented to address this question. The model is calibrated to match facts about the U.S. economy, such as intermediation spreads and the firm-size distribution for...

How does investors' information about a country's fundamentals, and the fact that this information may be asymmetrically held, affect a country's financing cost? Motivated by this question, and by the observation that sovereign bonds are usually auctioned in large lots to a large number of...

A traditional explanation for why sovereign governments repay debts is that they want to keep good reputations so they can easily borrow more. Bulow and Rogoff show that this argument is invalid under two conditions: (i) there is a single debt relationship, and (ii) regardless of their past...

This paper develops the first dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium analysis of the International Great Depression. We construct a new version of Lucas?s (1972) monetary misperceptions model, with a real shock (productivity) and a nominal shock (money supply). We use the model with a newly...

With some models of money and a representative-agent there is no reason for monetary trade because identical individuals can consume their own production. Lucas proposed a parable involving differentiated products in a cash-in-advance model to avoid this problem. This paper studies Lucas?s...

Marcet and Marimon (1994, revised 1998, revised 2011) developed a recursive saddle point method which can be used to solve dynamic contracting problems that include participation, enforcement and incentive constraints. Their method uses a recursive multiplier to capture implicit prior promises...

Our paper examines whether the well-documented failure of unsophisticated investors to rebalance their portfolios can help to explain the enormous counter-cyclical volatility of aggregate risk compensation in financial markets. To answer this question, we set up a model in which CRRA-utility...