Microeconomic lumpiness matters for macroeconomics. According to our DSGE model, it is responsible for 92 percent of the smoothing in the investment response to aggregate shocks, and it introduces important nonlinearities and history dependance in business cycles and policy sensitivity. General...

We develop a model of investment with financial constraints and use it to investigate the relation between investment and Tobin’s q. A firm is financed partly by insiders, who control its assets, and partly by outside investors. When insiders’ wealth is scarce, they earn a rate of...

In a model with housing collateral, the ratio of housing wealth to human wealth shifts the conditional distribution of consumption growth. In the model, a decrease in house prices reduces the collateral value of housing, increases household exposure to idiosyncratic risk, reduces the amount of...

This paper compares wealth portfolios across countries. The household sector in the US and Canada owns much more financial wealth, and much less housing wealth, than the household sector in most of Europe. We address this fact using a calibrated two sector growth model with endogenous financial...

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...

How will capital market imperfections, such as private information and costly state verification, affect international capital market flows between countries that are identical in every way but their initial capital stocks? To answer this question, we devise a dynamic infinite-horizon model with...

The paper derives conditions for ex ante efficient intergenerational risk sharing in overlapping generations models. I show how the efficiency of a fiscal policy can be evaluated without distributional judgments, I derive efficiency conditions, and then examine specific models. For models with...

We ask for which part of the observed cross-country differences in the level of per-capita income monopoly rights can account. We answer this question in a calibrated growth model with capital. Monopoly rights in the capital-producing sector shield labor market insiders from the competition by...

In this paper, we construct the first constant-quality aggregate price index for the stock of residential land in the United States. In the process, we uncover four main results: (a) since 1970, residential land prices have risen nearly twice as fast, but also have been twice as volatile as...