Investment booms and asset "bubbles" are often the consequence of heavily leveraged borrowing and speculations of persistent growth in asset demand. We show theoretically that dynamic interactions between elastic credit supply (due to leveraged borrowing) and persistent credit demand (due to...

This paper presents a DGE model in which aggregate price level inertia is generated endogenously by the optimizing behaviour of price-setting firms. All the usual sources of inertia are absent here ie., all firms are simultaneously free to change their price once every period and face no...

Motivated by the success of internal habit formation preferences in explaining asset pricing puzzles, we introduce these preferences in a life-cycle model of consumption and portfolio choice with liquidity constraints, undiversifiable labor income risk and stock-market participation costs. In...

Many asset pricing puzzles can be explained when habit formation is added to standard preferences. We show that utility functions with a habit then gives rise to a puzzle of consumption volatility in place of the asset pricing puzzles when agents can choose consumption and labor optimally in...

In a recent paper, Chang, Gomes, and Schorfheide (American Economic Review 2002, p. 1498-1520) extend the standard real business cycle (RBC) model to allow for a learning-by-doing (LBD) mechanism whereby current labor supply affects future productivity. They show that this feature magnifies the...

We study a dynamic model where growth requires both long-term investment and the selection of talented managers. When ability is not ex-ante observable and contracts are incomplete, managerial selection imposes a cost, as managers facing the risk of being replaced choose a sub-optimally low...

An important determinant of informality in a country is its tax enforcement capacity, which some authors argue further distorts the decisions of firms and creates inefficiency. In this paper, I assess the quantitative effect of incomplete tax enforcement on aggregate output and productivity...

Recent empirical work finds that R&D expenditures are quite procyclical, even for firms that are not credit-constrained during downturns. This has been taken as strong evidence against Schumpeterian-style theories of business cycles that emphasize the idea that downturns in production may be...

A political-economic theory of fiscal policy is presented in which tax policy preferences are derived from a conflict of interest between individuals of different ages. Policy formation is fully rational in that an individual's beliefs regarding future policies are consistent with...

This paper studies the relationship between disembodied technological progress and unemployment in a standard search-matching model. We find that the sign of the correlation crucially depends on the degree of idiosyncratic uncertainty. The analysis uncovers a new effect whereby an increase in...