How does uncertainty and credit constraints affect the cyclical composition of investment and thereby volatility and growth? This paper addresses this question within a model where firms engage in two types of investment: a short-term one; and a long-term one, which contributes more to...

Economics

Economics

Economics

Information regarding economic fundamentals is widely dispersed in society, is only imperfectly aggregated through prices or other indicators of aggregate activity, and cannot be centralized by the government or any other institution. In this paper we seek to identify policies that can improve...

This paper investigates how incomplete information impacts the response of prices to nominalshocks. Our baseline model is a variant of the Calvo model in which firms observe the underlyingnominal shocks with noise. In this model, the response of prices is pinned down by threeparameters: the...

This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed informationabout the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and—potentially—shocks tomonopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significantinertia in the...

Economics

We re-examine the Lewis undermigration by studying a two-sector model in which there is a trade-off between higher productivity in the modern sector and better information in the traditional sector. The consequent presence of well-functioning local insurance markets in the traditional sector and...

We examine the interactions between different institutional arrangements in a general equilibrium model of a modernizing economy. There is a modern sector, where productivity is high but information asymmetries are large, and a traditional sector where productivity is low but information...