This paper presents evidence on the speed of evolution (or lack thereof) of a wide range of values and beliefs of different generations of European immigrants to the US. The main result is that persistence differs greatly across cultural attitudes. Some, for instance deep personal religious...

We test whether adverse changes to banks' market valuations during the financial and sovereign debt crises, and the associated increase in banks' cost of funding, affected firms' real decisions. Using new data linking over 3,000 non-financial Italian firms to their bank(s), we find that...

We show how to relate the welfare of a country's infinitely-lived representative consumer to observable aggregate data. To a first order, welfare is summarized by total factor productivity and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country,...

By 1989 the Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) had experienced approximately 50 percent sample loss from cumulative attrition from its initial 1968 membership. We study the effect of this attrition on the unconditional distributions of several socioeconomic variables and on the...

The objective of this paper is to investigate if and how capital adjustment departs from the smooth pattern implied by standard model based on convex adjustment costs. Using Norwegian micro data, we start by documenting various aspects of the distribution of investment rates. We then present two...

This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. In particular, we investigate how different types of fiscal policy affect profits and , as a result, investment. We find a sizable negative effect of public spending -- and in particular of its...

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model that integrates inventory and labor decisions. We extend a model of inventory behavior to include a detailed specification of the role of labor input in the production process and of the costs associated with it. In particular, we distinguish...

It is widely known that when there are negative moving average errors, a high order augmented autoregression is necessary for unit root tests to have good size, but that information criteria such as the AIC and BIC tend to select a truncation lag that is very small. Furthermore, size distortions...

Ever since the development of the Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) model (Engle [1982]), testing for the presence of ARCH has become a routine diagnostic. One popular method of testing for ARCH is T times the R^2 from a regression of squared residuals on p of its lags. This...

It is often argued that monetary instability reduces the informational content of market signals and thereby hinders the efficient allocation of investment. In this paper we use a signal extraction framework to give empirical content to this idea. In particular, we show why this framework...