Cash holdings of nonfinancial firms range widely, and are related to firm size, industry and access to the public bond market. Cash holdings are positively correlated with agency proxies, suggesting that firms that cannot borrow easily due to agency problems hold greater cash stocks--perhaps as...

Lamont (1997) claims to find evidence of credit market imperfections that distort financing and investment decisions of a sample of oil-dependent firms, as investment by non-oil units fell when oil cash flow dropped. However, a simple test reveals that few of these firms behaved in a fashion...

It is widely known that a neoclassical growth model with sufficient increasing returns to production may feature an indeterminate steady state. This note shows how investment adjustment costs increase the degree of increasing returns required for indeterminacy to arise. We also argue that...

From a credit risk perspective, little is known about the distress factors -- economy-wide or firm-specific -- that are important in explaining variations in defaultable coupon yields. This paper proposes and empirically tests a family of credit risk models. Empirically, we find that...

This paper utilizes frequency-domain techniques to identify and characterize economically important properties of government spending. Using post-war data for the United States, the paper first identifies peaks in the estimated spectra of the major components of fiscal spending. Second, the...

The one-sector Solow-Ramsey model is the most popular model of long-run economic growth. This paper argues that a two-sector approach, which distinguishes the durable goods sector from the rest of the economy, provides a far better picture of the long-run behavior of the U.S. economy. Real...

In his 1999 monograph The Conquest of American Inflation Tom Sargent describes how a policymaker, who applies a constant-gain algorithm in estimating the Phillips curve, can fall into the grip of an induction problem: concluding on the basis of reduced-form evidence that the trade-off between...

This note presents a simple algorithm for characterizing the set of pure strategy Nash equilibria in a broad class of entry games. The algorithm alleviates much of the computational burden associated with recently developed econometric techniques for estimating payoff functions inferred from...