Over the last 20 years, the annual average U.S. and Canadian productivity growth rates have been 2.3% and 1.3%, respectively. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we empirically document the firm size distribution and the productivity for the two countries. Second, we quantitatively...

In this paper we attempt to provide evidence on the structure of technology in the three industrial branches of French economy, when capital is treated as quasi-fixed input. However instead of choosing a single functional form as an approximation to the variable cost function, modified versions...

Shifts in the long-run rate of productivity growth--such as those those experienced by the U.S. economy in the 1970s and 1990s--are difficult in real time to distinguish from transitory fluctuations. In this paper, we explore how economists' projections of trend productivity growth gradually...

By following the spirit in Favero and Milani (2005), we use recursive thick modeling to take into account model uncertainty for the choice of optimal monetary policy. We consider an open economy model and generate multiple models for only the aggregate demand and aggregate supply. Models are...

Dynamic models with inequality constraints pose a challenging prob- lem for two major reasons: Dynamic Programming techniques often necessitate a non established differentiability of the value function, while Euler equation based techniques have problematic or unknown convergence properties....

We present a multi-stage stochastic programming model for managing portfolios of stock and bond indices denominated in multiple currencies. The portfolios are exposed to market risks and currency risks. Uncertainty in asset returns and exchange rates is represented by means of discrete...