We review the labor market implications of recent real-business-cycle models that successfully replicate the empirical equity premium. We document the fact that all models considered in this survey with the exception of Boldrin, Christiano, and Fisher (2001) imply a negative correlation of...

During the recent financial crisis, euro area firms, and especially Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, have been reporting acute problems of access to external finance. Using firm-level replies to the SME survey on access to finance, we use two indicators of financing constraints based on...

We document the empirical fact that asset prices in the consumption-goods and investment-goods sector behave almost identically in the US economy. In order to derive the cyclical behavior of the equity returns in these two sectors, we consider a standard two-sector real-business cycle model with...

We investigate the short-term effects of fiscal adjustment on economic activity in 20 OECD countries from 1970 to 2009. We compare two approaches: the traditional approach based on changes in cyclically adjusted primary balance (CAPB) and the narrative approach based on historical records....

Ramey (2011a) and others argue that increases in government spending associated with wars and military build-ups constitute a good instrument for measuring the macroeconomic effects of fiscal shocks. We argue that this instrument has two important drawbacks: the composition of government...

Carbon pricing regulates emission flows and collects rents from underlying fossil resource stocks. The resulting investment shift implies lower climate policy costs and improved welfare if capital is underaccumulated. We prove that under emission trading, such a beneficial macroeconomic...

The value of the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital (ó) is a “crucial” assumption in understanding the secular decline in labor share of income (Piketty (2014a), Karabarbounis and Neiman (2014)) and long-run growth (Solow, 1956). This paper begins by examining the role of...

This paper studies loan activity in a context where banks must follow Basel Accord-type rules and acquire financing from households. Loan activity typically decreases when entrepreneurs’ investment returns decline, and we study which type of policy could revigorate an economy in a trough. We...

We investigate the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks in Korea. We compare results obtained with two alternative approaches: the narrative approach and Structural Vector-Autoregressive model (SVAR). We propose a new methodology for identifying exogenous and unexpected fiscal...

Are firms’ expectations systematically too optimistic or too pessimistic? Does it matter? We use micro data from the West German manufacturing subset of the IFO Business Climate Survey to infer quarterly production changes at the firm level and combine them with production expectations over a...