This Paper entertains the notion that disturbances on the demand side play a central role in our understanding of the Great Depression. In fact, from Euler equation residuals I am able to identify a series of unusually large negative demand shocks that appeared to have hit the US economy during...

The Paper finds empirical evidence on the ripple effect of sunspots on the interwar German economy. It identifies a sequence of negative shocks to expectations for the 1927-32 period. The artificial economy predicts the 1928-32 depression and a long boom from 1933 onwards. Overall, a tangible...

This Paper derives new results on the effects of employing Taylor rules in economies that are subject to real-market imperfections such as production externalities. It suggests that rules that should be avoided (chosen) in perfect-markets environments do in fact ensure (yield) unique (multiple)...

This Paper evaluates the role of the demand side during the Great Depression in Germany. From Euler equation residuals we are able to identify a series of contractionary demand shocks that pounded the German economy from 1929-32. We apply the detrimental preference innovations to a dynamic...

This paper presents a small open economy version of the Benhabib and Farmer [2] two sector optimal growth model with production externalities. It is shown that indeterminacy is considerably easier to obtain under a regime of perfect world capital markets than in the closed economy variant....

Payroll taxes represent a major distortionary influence of governments on labor markets. This paper examines the role of payroll taxation and the social safety net for cyclical fluctuations in a nonmonetary economy with labor market frictions and unemployment insurance, when the latter is only...

The aim of the present paper is to analyze the link between price rigidity and indeterminacy. This is done within a cash-in-advance economy from which we know that it exhibits indeterminacy at high degrees of relative risk aversion. I find that price stickiness reduces the scope of these sunspot...

This paper evaluates complementarities of labour market institutions and the business cycle in the context of a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium model economy. Matching between workers and vacancies with endogenous time spent in search, Nash-bargained wages, payroll taxation, and...

We apply a dynamic general equilibrium model to the period of the Great Depression. In particular, we examine a modification of the real business cycle model in which the possibility of indeterminacy of equilibria arises. In other words, agents' self-fulfilling expectations can serve as a...