Standard theory of small open economies predicts a smooth path for consumption and investment over time, and procyclical current account balances and employment. This contrasts with the data for emerging countries, where consumption, investment and employment are highly procyclical and volatile,...

This paper presents a theory of location choice that draws on insights from the incomplete contracts and investment flexibility (real option) literatures. We provide conditions under which human capital is more efficiently created and better utilized within industrial clusters that contain...

This paper proposes the view that financial development and economic growth are linked through the characteristics of technology. The most obvious connection between technology and financial innovation emerges through risk-sharing. Technology is modeled as a distribution over outcomes....

Structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) have become a standard tool used to determine the roles of monetary policy shocks in generating cyclical fluctuations in the United States. Using both long- and short-run identifying restrictions, various authors have explored the empirical response of...

The large wealth and consumption inequality in the U.S. is usually attributed to two market frictions: debt constraints and incomplete markets. Recent literature has argued that debt constraints are the critical friction while market incompleteness plays only a secondary role. We evaluate the...

If firm sizes have a small dispersion, microeconomic shocks lead to negligible aggregate fluctuations. This has led economists to appeal to macroeconomic (sectoral or aggregate shocks) shocks to explain aggregate fluctuations. However, the empirical distribution of firms is fat-tailed. This...

Empirical evidences tell us that in the recent years the expansion period is increased with reduction of the contraction period in the U.S. business cycles. Moreover, the business cycles in the United States also show the trend to be moderated with recent economic growth induced and supported by...

This paper proposes a new empirical representation of US inflation expectations in a Stace-Space Markov-Switching framework in order to identify the expectations regimes which are associated with short and long term Phillips curves. Results suggest that the dynamics of in‡ation expectation...

The paper examines the processes underlying economic fluctuations by investigating the volatility moderation of U.S. economy in the early 1980's. We decompose the volatility decline using a dynamic factor framework into a common stochastic trend, common transitory component and idiosyncratic...

I examine the statistical model of permanent and transitory shocks to output under the following structural assumptions: An aggregate supply shock that raises output will cause the price level to fall and an aggregate demand shock that initially raises output will cause the price level to rise....