In this paper we present a macroeconomic model in which changes in the variance (and higher moments of the distribution) of firm's financial conditions - i.e. "distributive shocks" - are bound to play a crucial role in the determination of output fluctuations. Firms differ by degree of financial...

In the late '90s Kiyotaki and Moore (KM) put forward a new framework (Kiyotaki and Moore,1997) to explore the Financial Accelerator hypothesis. The original model was framed in an Infinitely Lived Agent context (ILA-KM economy). As in KM we develop a dynamic model in which the durable asset...

From the point of view of the average macroeconomist, agent based modelling has an obvious drawback: It makes impossible to think in aggregate terms. The modeller, in fact, can reconstruct aggregate variables only "from the bottom up" by summing the individual quantities. As a consequence the...

In this short paper we cast the Greenwald-Stiglitz financial accelerator framework - which was originally defined in a period by period optimization setting - in an intertemporal context. In this way we overcome one of the most frequent objections to this approach according to which agents are...

Should the central bank act to prevent "excessive" asset price dynamics or should it wait until the boom spontaneously turns into a crash and intervene afterwards to attenuate the fallout on the real economy? The standard "three equation" New Keynesian framework is inadequate to analyse this...