This paper analyzes the implications of heterogeneity in price setting for both price and inflation inertia. Standard models based on Taylor- or Calvo-style price setting usually assume ex-ante identical firms, while Calvo's approach implies only ex-post heterogeneity. While it is known that...

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the stock wealth effect of consumption exhibits structural change(s) or behaves asymmetrically over business cycles. We first perform a general test of linearity for the behavior of aggregate consumption in response to changes in stock wealth based...

Empirical studies of economic growth across countries are abundant and rich in conclusions, some of them widely accepted. This is not the case, however, with the empirics of business cycles. Particularly, there exists little evidence explaining why some countries take more time than others...

In this paper we use optimal-instrument and new finite-sample methods to test the empirical relevance of the New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) equation. Unlike generalized method of moments-based methods, these generalized Anderson-Rubin tests are immune to the presence of weak instruments,...

We investigate the extent to which firm-level data are consistent with the microeconomic foundations of the benchmark financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999). To that purpose, we construct a new dataset that directly links firm-specific balance sheet variables to...

This paper formulates a model of dynamic, endogenous reform of political institutions. Specifically, a class of dynamic political games (DPGs) is introduced in which institutional choice is both recursive and instrumental. It is recursive because future political institutions are decided under...

We model electoral competition between two parties in a winner take all election. Parties choose strategically first their platforms and then their campain spending under aggregate uncertainty about voters' preferences. In the unique Nash equilibrium larger elections are characterized by a...

Spatial models of voting behaviour are the dominant paradigm in political science. Consistent with this approach, it will be the case that, ceteris paribus, voters should vote for the party nearest to them on the political spectrum. A key question is how we measure nearness or distance. We...

We examine the incentives of an interest group to provide a political decision-maker with policy-relevant information and to exert pressure on her. Both activities are costly but may induce the lobby's preferred policy. Our paper provides an integrated analysis of both lobbying activities and...

The phenomenon of "choice shifts" in group decision-making is fairly ubiquitous in the social psychology literature. Faced with a choice between a ``safe" and ``risky" decision, group members appear to move to one extreme or the other, relative to the choices each member might have made on her...