The paper sets out a monetary business cycle model extended to include the production of credit that serves as an alternative to money in transactions and is subject to productivity shocks. The model provides some improvement on certain puzzles, in particular by capturing the procyclic movements...

Modelling corruption explicitly in this paper produces changes in the predictions about how taxes affect the size of the "underground", non-market, or shadow, economy. Instead of inducing shifts towards the non-market good as in standard models without explicit corruption, here government tax...

We explain the close correlation of volatilities of GDP growth and inflation over the 1919-2004 period, using credit and money shocks that have "bad" and "good" effects that are defined in terms of their effects on the spectral variation in GDP. With these shocks, plus standard TFP productivity...

I propose a new valuation ratio: durables price over the rental cost of capital, which is a direct analogue of the price-dividend ratio. I show that it is a rational forecast of future discount rates and future growth rates of the rental cost. In order to impute the unobservable rental cost, I...

We develop a new methodology for finding optimal government policies in economies with heterogeneous agents. The methodology is solely based on three classes of equilibrium conditions from the government's and individual agent's optimization problems: 1) the first order conditions; 2) the...

In this paper we develop a new general methodology for computing the optimal, welfare maximizing social planner's policies for economies with heterogeneous agents in which the stationary distribution of agents is a part of the optimization problem. Previous models analyzing the effects of...