Recent advances in measuring cyclical changes in the income distribution raise new questions: How might these distributional changes affect the business cycle itself? We show how counter-cyclical income dispersion can generate counter-cyclical markups in the goods market, without any preference...

Recent advances in measuring cyclical changes in the income distribution raise new questions: How might these distributional changes affect the business cycle itself? We show how counter-cyclical income dispersion can generate counter-cyclical markups in the goods market, without any preference...

using a novel plant-level dataset from Taiwan (1992-2004), that new product introductions are a key contributor to increases in plant-level factor productivity. We then formulate and calibrate a span-of-control model of product choice and firm dynamics in which new products embody the frontier...

A pervasive prediction of business cycle models is that investment by firms in durable goods (capital, inventories) is highly sensitive to fluctuations in real interest rates (Thomas 2002, House 2007, Kryvtsov and Midrigan 2008). This prediction stands in sharp contrast with the data: investment...

A large body of empirical work documents that specialized asset markets (e.g. stocks, bonds, derivatives) seem to be segmented: local asset prices are driven in part by local factors such as local demand or local changes in idiosyncratic risk. The goal of this paper is to study the aggregate...

from the National Income and Product Accounts to evaluate the quantitative success of the model relative to a single-good benchmark.

The literature assessing whether mutual fund managers have skill typically regards skill as an immutable attribute of the manager or the fund. We show that many measures of skill, such as returns, alphas, and measures of stock-picking and market-timing, appear to vary over the business cycle. We...

The network model also explains why societies with a high prevalence of contagious disease might evolve toward growth-inhibiting social institutions and how small initial differences can produce large divergence in incomes. Empirical work uses differences in the prevalence of diseases spread by...