International capital flows have increased dramatically since the 1980s, with much of the increase being due to trade in equity and debt markets. Such developments are often attributed to the increased integration of world financial markets. We present a model that allows us to examine how...

This paper investigate how the degree of credit market development is related to business cycle fluctuations in industrialized countries. I show that a business cycle model with collateral constraints generate a negative relation between the volatility of the cyclical component of output and the...

The present project introduces the possibility of default on the trading contracts in an infinite horizon incomplete markets model, relaxing the usual assumption made in the literature with respect to the trading limits, which are chosen to be fixed or independent of the characteristics of the...

This paper investigates the role of financial market frictions on investment and the price of financial asset. We show that standard models with financial market imperfections can be summarized with a simple financing cost function, equal to the product of the financing premium and the amount of...

I provide empirical evidence that badly governed firms respond more to aggregate shocks than do well governed firms. I build a simple model where managers are prone to over-invest and where shareholders are more willing to tolerate such a behavior in good times. The model successfully explains...

This paper studies the provision of incentives to reallocate capital when managers are reluctant to relinquish control and have private information about the productivity of assets under their control. We show that when managers get private benefits from running projects substantial bonuses are...

This paper evaluates whether an estimated, structural, small open economy model of the Canadian economy can account for the substantial influence of foreign-sourced disturbances identified in numerous reduced-form studies. The analysis shows that the benchmark model --- and a number of variants...

This paper proposes a strategy to measure, in a unified setting, how the job finding probability and the job separation probability conditional on observable and unobservable individual characteristics varies over the business cycle. Recent papers by Shimer and Hall point out how new...

This paper combines a discrete-time dynamic general equilibrium articulation of the standard model of labor market search with observed U.S. time series measures on employment, vacancies, and aggregate output to uncover the cyclical properties of three unobserved forcing variables that comprise...