Three issues regarding asset prices and monetary policy are clarified. First, increases in asset prices due to monetary expansion, despite their “paper” wealth nature, tend to make current consumers as a whole wealthier. Second, the weaker (stronger) effect of monetary policy on investment...

A person cannot make many decisions at a time, but an organization needs millions of interrelated decisions. We incorporate this idea into investment theory and examine its influence on a firm's growth rate. Two assumptions are emphasized: an agent cannot optimize more than one input at a time,...

It is common amonst macroeconomists to view aggregate investment fluctuations as a rational response to fluctuating incentives, driven by exogenous movements in total factor productivity. However, this approach raises a number of questions. Why treat investments in physical capital as...

We develop a model of 'intrinsic' business cycles, driven by the decentralized behaviour of entrepreneurs and firms making continuous, divisible improvements in their productivity. We show how equilibrium cycles, associated with strategic delays in implementation and endogenous innovation, arise...

A growing literature argues that the Information Technology rev- olution caused the stock market crash of 1973-1974, its subsequent stagnation and eventual recovery. This paper employs general equi- librium theory to test whether this good news hypothesis is consistent with the behavior of US...

The introduction of a common monetary policy in eleven European countries increased the need for leading indicators for that area. A reliable leading indicator should possess the following properties: (1) The movements in the indicator series should resemble those in the business cycle reference...

Regarding the trade-off between the depth and the duration of recessions, there exists a mounting empirical evidence of the idiosyncratic and non-synchronized behavior of the business cycle over time within and across countries. In this paper, I propose a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium...

In this paper we used a data set constructed for a companion paper (Fritsche/Stephan, 2000) where we explored the leading indicator properties of different time series for the German business cycle. Now we test for the ability of different indicator series to forecast recessions by using a...

The paper analyzes two questions: (i) the effect of a monetary policy shock on the business cycle and (ii) the extent to which a shift in a monetary policy affects the dynamics of business cycle. Unlike previous literature, to answer these questions, we measure cycle movements by calculating an...

We investigate the shape of the Italian personal income distribution using microdata from the Survey on Household Income and Wealth, made publicly available by the Bank of Italy for the years 1977-2002. We find that the upper tail of the distribution is consistent with a Pareto power-law type...