The sensitivity of US aggregate investment to shocks is procyclical. The response upon impact increases by approximately 50 percent from the trough to the peak of the business cycle. This feature of the data follows naturally from a DSGE model with lumpy microeconomic capital adjustment. Beyond...

In this paper, the authors derive a model of aggregate investment that builds from the lumpy microeconomic behavior of firms facing stochastic fixed adjustment costs. Instead of the standard sharp (S, s) bands, firms' adjustment policies take the form of a probability of adjustment (adjustment...

This paper studies two episodes where an exporting industry saw its sales plummet after importing countries banned their products to protect their citizens' health. The first case is the poisoned grapes crisis involving Chile and the United States in 1989. The second is the mad cows dispute...

This paper argues that, despite important productivity gains, reforms have benefited consumers much less than expected in El Salvador. Antitrust legislation, consumer protection and an adequate regulation of privatized utilities are central ingredients of a successful market economy. Major...

The government contracts with a foreign firm to extract a natural resource that requires an upfront investment and which faces price uncertainty. In states where profits are high, there is a likelihood of expropriation, which generates a social cost that increases with the expropriated value. In...

What is the relation between infrequent price adjustment and the dynamic response of the aggregate price level to monetary shocks? The answer to this question ranges from a one-to-one link (Calvo, 1983) to no connection whatsoever (Caplin and Spulber, 1987). The purpose of this paper is to...

This paper studies quarterly employment flows of approximately 10,000 large U.S. manufacturing establishments. We use establishments' hours-week to construct measures of the deviation between desired and actual employment and then we use these as the state variables upon which units decide their...

En este trabajo se compara la capacidad predictiva de mediano plazo (1 a 5 años) de una variada gama de modelos de series cronológicas para el precio del cobre. El criterio de comparación es el error cuadrático medio de predicciones fuera de muestra. Entre los modelos considerados destacan...