According to Ljungqvist and Sargent (1998), high European unemployment since the 1980s can be explained by a rise in economic turbulence, leading to greater numbers of unemployed workers with obsolete skills. These workers refuse new jobs due to high unemployment benefits. In this paper we...

In this paper, we study the short-run and long-run comovement between prices and real activity in the G7 countries during the postwar period using vector autoregressive systems and frequency-domain filters. We find several patterns that are robust across countries and time periods. Typically,...

This paper develops a model with multiple steady states (low tax and unemployment rate versus high tax and unemployment rate) in which equilibrium selection is not conditioned on a sunspot variable. Instead, large enough shocks initiate unavoidable transitions from one regime to the other. The...

This paper develops a model according to which the costs of business cycles are nontrivial because they reduce the average level of output. The reason is an interaction between job creation costs and an agency problem. The agency problem triggers separations during economic downturns even though...

We document the cyclical behavior of debt, equity, and retained earnings for different firm categories using firm-level Canadian data. There is evidence of both procyclical equity and debt issuance for all firm categories but the timing differs. In particular, there is strong evidence that...

We study the gains from trade in an economy with oligopolistic competition, firm heterogeneity, and innovation. Oligopolistic competition together with free entry make markups responsive to firm productivity and trade costs. Lowering trade costs reduces markups on domestic sales but increases...

We study the gains from trade in a model with oligopolistic competition, heterogeneous firms and innovation, and provide a formula to decompose the mechanism. The new insight we provide is that market concentration can be a welfare-relevant feature of market power above and beyond markup...

This paper proposes a simple iterative method - time iteration - to solve linear rational expectation models. I prove that this method converges to the solution with the smallest eigenvalues in absolute value, and provide the conditions under which this solution is unique. In particular, if...

We study how social interaction and friendship shape students' political opinions in a natural experiment at Sciences Po, the cradle of top French politicians. Quasi-random assignments of students into the same short-term integration groups before their scholar curriculum reduce political...

This survey reviews the recent research on trust, institutions and growth. It discusses the various measures of trust and documents the substantial heterogeneity of trust across space and time. The conceptual mechanisms and the methods employed to identify the causal impact of trust on economic...