According to prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), gains and losses are measured from current wealth, which serves as a reference point. We attempted to ascertain to what extent the reference point shifts following gains or losses. In questionnaire studies we asked subjects what stock...

We ask two questions related to how access to credit affects the nature of business cycles. First, does the standard theory of unsecured credit account for the high volatility and procyclicality of credit and the high volatility and countercyclicality of bankruptcy filings found in U.S. data?...

How does inequality motivate people and at what cost? We develop a model of perpetual youth with heterogeneous upward-looking aspirations -- people value their consumption relative to the conditional mean of those above them in the distribution. Their survival depends on health capital produced...

In the paper, we simulate a heterogeneous-agent version of the wage-posting model as derived by Montgomery (1991) with homogeneous workers and differently-productive employers. Wage policy of particular employer is positively correlated with employer’s productivity level and the wage policy of...

Using a multi-country general equilibrium model, we demonstrate that when agents face credit constraints in an international financial market, rational expectations, which are ex-post heterogeneous between countries, cause business fluctuations. If the international financial market becomes...

We study the dynamic properties of growth rates in an overlapping generations economy with credit market imperfections. The analysis demonstrates that in early stages of financial development where credit constraints are severe, growth rates evolve monotonically. At the intermediate level of...

I construct the life-cycle model with equilibrium default and preferences featuring temptation and self-control. The model provides quantitatively similar answers to positive questions such as the causes of the observed rise in debt and bankruptcies and macroeconomic implications of the 2005...

We assess the consequences of increases in the scale of tax and transfer programs in the context of a model with idiosyncratic productivity shocks and incomplete markets. We contrast the outcomes for both hours worked and welfare relative to the results obtained in a stand-in household model,...

This paper investigates how financial globalization and financial development affect income inequality within a country. We demonstrate that when a country is financially closed to the world market, the Gini coefficient is monotonically decreasing with respect to the degree of financial...

Stock prices often diverge from measures of fundamental value, which simple present value models fail to explain. This paper tries to find causes for these long-run price movements and their persistence by estimating a STAR model for the price-earnings ratio of the S&P500 index for 1961Q1 -...