In this paper, we investigate the welfare implications of alternative financial market structures in a two-country endowment economy model. In particular, we obtain an analytic expression for the expected lifetime utility of the representative household when sovereign bonds are the only...

Household production plays an important role in aggregate economic activity. It constitutes between 20 and 50 percent of the value of gross national product in several industrialized countries. We study cross-country differences and similarities in the dynamic behavior of production activities...

Do international business cycles only represent optimal responses by rational agents to erratic changes in technology, or are they also influenced by factors that are unrelated to fundamentals? This paper addresses this issue by exploring the role of such non-fundamental factors in improving...

In this paper we show that a model featuring durables consumption, weak credibility, and sticky prices can explain many of the stylized facts associated with exchange-rate-based stabilization, including the quantitative variation exhibited by key macroeconomic variables. In standard models, the...

In the last 20 years the U.S. economy has experienced a strong reduction in the volatility of GDP growth. By some measures it has declined nearly by half. This paper identifies, documents and models the rapid growth of multinational corporations as a source of gradual decline in output and...

Emerging market financial crises are abrupt and dramatic, usually occurring after a period of high output growth, massive capital flows, and a boom in asset markets. This paper develops an equilibrium asset pricing model with informational frictions in which vulnerability and the crisis itself...

Existing studies differ significantly on how much terms of trade shocks contribute to output fluctuations. Empirical studies based on VAR analysis find that terms of trade shocks explain less than 10% of output fluctuations while results from calibrated DSGE models suggest a figure of more than...

We assess the ability of new open economy models to match OECD business cycle data. We adopt a canonical new open economy model with varying degrees of nominal inertia, monopolistic competition and distribution costs and assess the contribution of each facet of this model to help explain jointly...