This paper investigates the impact of economic reforms on China's growth in Total Factor Productivity (TFP). I build a model with two sectors in production -- the private and the state sectors -- that features capital market imperfections on the private sector.Following the removal of...

We study the effects of credit shocks in a model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financing constraints, and a realistic firm-size distribution. As entrepreneurial firms can grow only slowly and rely heavily on retained earnings to expand the size of their business, we show that, by reducing...

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...

Despite the widespread belief that technology shocks are the main source of business fluctuations, recent empirical studies indicate that in the absence of financial frictions, a shock to the marginal efficiency of investment is the main source and is closely related to financial conditions for...

This paper develops an RBC model where banks use short-term deposits to provide firms with long-term credit. The demand for long-term credit arises because firms borrow in order to finance their capital stock which they only adjust at infrequent intervals. We show that maturity transformation in...

This paper evaluates the role of internal capital markets in business groups for allocating capital to its most productive use. A quantitative model in which business groups arise endogenously as substitutes for imperfect credit markets explains several stylized facts about establishment size...

Over the last fifty years there have been large secular increases in educational attainment and R&D intensity. The fact that these trends have not stimulated more rapid income growth has been a persistent puzzle for growth theorists. We construct a model of endogenous economic growth in which...

It is often assumed that wedges evolve according to VAR(1) in the applications of business cycle accounting (BCA). However, recent research finds that the wedges have no VAR(1) representation in many dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) economies, and that there might be a...

More advanced technologies demand higher degrees of specialization - and longer chains of production connecting raw inputs to final outputs. Longer production chains are subject to a "weakest link" effect: they are more fragile and more prone to failure. Optimal chain length is determined by the...

This paper makes three contributions: First, I construct annual time series of gross domestic investment and national saving in the U.S. for the 1897–1949 period using historical component series. I compare the qualitative and quantitative properties of the newly constructed series with the...