Using plant-level data from Chile and the U.S. we show that investment spikes are highly pro-cyclical, so much so that changes in the number of establishments undergoing investment spikes (the quot;extensive marginquot;) account for the bulk of variation in aggregate investment. The number of...

What is the long-run effect of dividend taxation on aggregate capital accumulation? To address this question, we build a dynamic general equilibrium model in which there is a continuum of firms subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks. We show that at any point in time, a firm may lie in one...

investment, even controlling for past investment and sales. We re-calibrate the Thomas (2002) model (that includes fixed costs of investing) so that it assigns a prominent role to extensive adjustment. The recalibrated model has very different properties than the standard RBC model for some shocks.

Using plant-level data from Chile and the U.S. we show that investment spikes are highly pro-cyclical, so much so that changes in the number of establishments undergoing investment spikes (the "extensive margin") account for the bulk of variation in aggregate investment. The number of...

This paper addresses the following question: what ties together the traditional commercial banking activities of deposit-taking and lending? We begin by observing that since banks often lend via commitments, or credit lines, their lending and deposit-taking may be two manifestations of the same...

We argue that the deregulation leading up to the Big Bang has played a major role in the current banking problems. This deregulation allowed large corporations to quickly switch from depending on banks to relying on capital market financing. We present evidence showing that large Japanese...

In this paper, we propose a bank-based explanation for the decade-long Japanese slowdown following the asset price collapse in the early 1990s. We start with the well known observation that most large Japanese banks were only able to comply with capital standards because regulators were lax in...