We study the effects of credit shocks in a model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financing constraints, and a realistic firm-size distribution. As entrepreneurial firms can grow only slowly and rely heavily on retained earnings to expand the size of their business, we show that, by reducing...

Hayashi and Prescott speculate that the anemic performance of the Japanese economy since the early 1990s can be understood in terms of how any "well functioning" private sector might react to an exogenous productivity shock. In particular, they downplay the role of monetary and financial factors...

When young individuals face binding debt constraints, their human capital investments will be insufficiently financed by private creditors. If generations overlap, then a well-designed fiscal policy may be able to improve human capital investments by replacing missing capital markets with an...