This paper reproduces Lucas's analysis of the costs of business cycles in an economy with a low probability, crash state in consumption growth. For reasonable parameter values, it is shown that the presence of a crash state dramatically increases the costs ofconsumption volatility. Specifically,...

We extend the Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) agency cost model of business cycles by including time varying uncertainty in the technology shocks that affect capital production. We first demonstrate that standard linearization methods can be used to solve the model yet second moment effects still...

Typically real-business-cycle models are assessed by their ability to mimic the covariances and variances of actual business cycle data. Recently, however, advocates of RBC models have used them to fit the historical path of real GDP using the Solow residual as a driving process. We demonstrate...

We extend the Carlstrom and Fuerst (1997) agency cost model of business cycles by including time varying uncertainty in the technology shocks that affect capital production. We first demonstrate that standard linearization methods can be used to solve the model yet second moment effects still...