Countries with more developed financial markets (as measured by the private debt-to-GDP ratio) tend to have significantly lower aggregate volatility. This relationship is also highly non-linear starting from a low level of financial development the reduction in aggregate volatility by financial...

Empirical studies showed that firm-level volatility has been increasing but the aggregate volatility has been decreasing in the US for the post-war period. This paper proposes a unified explanation for these diverging trends. Our explanation is based on a story of financial development -...

This paper shows that (i) fluctuations driven by self-fulfilling expectations can negatively affect long-run growth and (ii) the welfare gain from further stabilizing the U.S. economy can be several orders larger than that calculated by Lucas (1987) because policies designed to reduce...

"This paper provides a dynamic optimization model of durable good inventories to study the interactions between investment demand and production of capital goods. There are three major findings: First, capital suppliers' inventory behavior makes investment demand more volatile in equilibrium;...