We examine whether the Mortensen-Pissarides matching model can account for the business-cycle facts on employment, job creation, and job destruction. A novel feature of our analysis is its emphasis on the reduced-form implications of the matching model. Our main finding is that the model can...

This paper develops a simple model of sovereign debt in which defaulting nations are excluded from capital markets and regain access by making partial repayments. This implication of the model is consistent with the historical evidence that defaulting countries return to international loan...

What determines the technology that a country adopts? While many factors affect technological adoption, the efficiency of the country's financial system may also play a significant role. To address this question, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with...

This paper develops a differentiated product model with endogenous specialization in which either money or a costly alternative transactions technology can be used for market purchases. The authors discuss the real effects of monetary growth in this model--which differ from those in standard...

The authors argue that many goods and decisions are not allocated or made through markets. They interpret an agent's status as a ranking device that determines how well he or she fares in the nonmarket sector. The existence of a nonmarket sector can endogenously generate a concern for relative...

We consider an environment in which individuals receive income shocks that are unobservable to others and can privately store resources. We provide a simple characterization of the unique efficient allocation of consumption in cases in which the rate of return on storage is sufficiently high or,...

We characterize the values of government debt and the debt's maturity structure under which financial crises brought on by a loss of confidence in the government can arise within a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model. We also characterize the optimal policy response of the government...