The purpose of the paper is to present a tractable model of an old topic which is becoming more important in macroeconomics: the link between financial structure and economic activity.

I study the consequences of heterogeneity of skills for the design of an optimal unemployment insurance, using a principal-agent set-up with a risk neutral insurer and infinitely lived risk averse agents. Agents, who are characterised by different productivities or skills, are employed by firms...

The “neoclassical synthesis” sticky price model exhibits strange behavior when augmented with markets for durable goods with flexible prices. While in the data the output of durable goods responds strongly and positively to a loosening of monetary policy, in dynamic general equilibrium...

It is commonly thought that interest rates should decrease in response to a positive velocity innovation. Velocity innovations, therefore, should lead to the same qualitative effects in the financial and goods markets as money supply innovations. The present paper represents an empirical...

In this paper we explore the possibility, heretofore unexplored in the marketing literature, that firms “invest funds” in their pricing processes. This builds on some of the recent economic work on the costs of price adjustment. To do this we undertook a two-year, cross- disciplinary,...

The main goal of this essay is to analyze the emergence of a barter economy, and the rise of centralized merchants and a barter redistribution system out of a primitive barter system. The environment is a spatial general equilibrium model where exchange is costly. Since exchange becomes more...

Through explicitly incorporating analysts' forecasts as observable factors in a dynamic arbitrage- free model of the yield curve, this paper proposes a framework for studying the impact of shifts in market sentiment on interest rates of all maturities. An empirical examination reveals that...

This paper investigates the existence and properties of stationary single-price equilibrium in a monetary random matching model where agents can hold an arbitrary amount of divisible money, and where production is costly. For some parameter values of the model, there exists a continuum of...

A two-block open economy model is estimated in this paper using Australian and U.S. data. Evaluation of the estimated model is carried out in relation to a simple closed economy alternative. Namely, we inspect the implied transmission mechanisms, and examine the relative out-of-sample...

We describe a multiproduct barter trading experiment in which students exchange real goods in an open market based on their own personal preference. The experiment is designed for simulating a pure exchange market in order to demonstrate the role of money and its functions in real economies by...