In this paper, public investment provision takes place in a stochastic environnement. The role of the government is to remove a part of the uncertainty faced by the firm. If the government simply maximizes the value of the firm, then the optimal tax is smaller under imperfect competition than it...

Home renovation is generally asserted to be a highly effective means for households to lower expenditures on energy. In this sense, home renovation can also be thought as a means to reduce GHG emissions. In this paper we consider a homeowner who makes an irreversible energy-efficiency investment...

In this paper, the public investment provision takes place in a stochastic environnement. The role of the government is to remove a part of the uncertainty faced by the firm. If the government simply maximizes the value of the firm, then the optimal tax is smaller under imperfect competition...

Investment is often irreversible, especially at the aggregate level. This paper proposes and solves a general equilibrium model of technology adotpion when investment in the new technlogy is irreversible. In contrast to prior research, we consider a setup where the returns on technology adoption...

In this paper, we consider a two-country model based on Svensson (1989) in order to analyze how fiscal harmonization impacts on economic growth and welfare through its effects on agents portfolio decisions in an uncertain world. We derive the conditions under which fiscal harmonization proves to...

U.S. household consumption declined sharply in late 2008, marking a departure from the trend of a steady increase in U.S. consumption as a share of income since the 1980s. Combining econometric and simulation analysis, we estimate that this departure will be sustained beyond the crisis: the U.S....

Output gap estimates are subject to a wide range of uncertainty owing to data revisions and the difficulty in distinguishing between cycle and trend in real time. This is important given the central role in monetary policy of assessments of economic activity relative to capacity. We show that...

We examine the impact of uncertainty on employment dynamics. Alternative measures of uncertainty are constructed based on the survey of professional forecasters, and regressionbased forecasting models for GDP growth, inflation, S&P500 stock price index, and fuel prices. Our results indicate that...

Rollover risk imposes market discipline on banks’ risk-taking behavior but it can be socially costly. I present a two-sided model in which a bank simultaneously lends to a firm and borrows from the short-term funding market. When the bank is capital constrained, uncertainty in asset...