The difference between average borrowing and lending rates in the United States is over 2 percent. In spite of this large difference, there is over 1.7 times GNP in 2007 of intermediated borrowing and lending between households. In this paper a model is developed consistent with these facts. The...

Restrictions that general equilibrium theory place upon average returns are found to be strongly violated by the U.S. data in the 1889–1978 period. This result is robust to model specification and measurement problems. We conclude that equilibrium models which are not Arrow-Debreu economies...

The neoclassical growth model is extended to include costly intermediated borrowing and lending between households. This is an important extension as substantial resources are used in intermediating the large amount of borrowing and lending between households. In 2007, in the United States, the...

There is a large amount of intermediated borrowing and lending between households. Some of it is intergenerational, but most is between older households. The average difference in borrowing and lending rates is over 2 percent. In this paper, we develop a model economy that displays these facts...

This paper examines the extent to which the equity premium puzzle can be resolved by taking account of the fact that stockholders bear a disproportionate share of output uncertainty. We do this in the context of a non-Walrasian RBC model where risk reallocation is justified by borrowing...

Many stock market analysts think that in 1929, at the time of the crash, stocks were overvalued. Irving Fisher argued just before the crash that fundamentals were strong and the stock market was undervalued. In this paper, we use growth theory to estimate the fundamental value of corporate...

In this paper we analyze the efficacy of seignorage as a tax associated with various monetary arrangements in a computable general equilibrium model. For the economies examined, we find that seignorage tax is not a good one relative to a tax on labor income. If the after-tax real return is –5...

Recent developments in business cycle theory are reviewed. The principal finding is that the growth model, which was developed to account for the secular patterns in important economic aggregates, displays the business cycle phenomena once it incorporates the observed randomness in the rate of...

A unified growth theory is developed that accounts for the roughly constant living standards displayed by world economies prior to 1800 as well as the growing living standards exhibited by modern industrial economies. Our theory also explains the industrial revolution, which is the transition...