This paper solves a real business cycle model with heterogeneous agents and uninsurable income risk using perturbation methods. A second order accurate characterization of agent's optimal decision rules is given, which renders the implications of aggregation for macroeconomic dynamics...

This paper presents a new approach to assess the role of price mismeasurement in the productivity slowdown. I invert the firm's investment decision to identify the embodied and disembodied components of productivity growth. With a Cobb-Douglas production function, output price mismeasurement...

This paper characterizes the frequency domain properties of feedback control rules in linear systems in order to better understand how different policies affect outcomes frequency by frequency. We are especially concerned in understanding how reductions of variance at some frequencies induce...

Biofuel production is being promoted through various policies such as mandates and tax credits. This paper uses a dynamic, spatial, multi-market equilibrium model, Biofuel and Environmental Policy Analysis Model (BEPAM), to estimate the effects of these policies on cropland allocation, food and...

Markov-switching DSGE (MSDSGE) modeling has become a growing body of literature on economic and policy issues related to structural shifts. This paper develops a general perturbation methodology for constructing high-order approximations to the solutions of MSDSGE models. Our new method, called...

This paper explores the relationship between the closely linked concepts of E-stability and least-squares learnability, featured in recent work by Evans and Honkapohja (1999, 2001), and the minimum-state-variable (MSV) solution defined by McCallum (1983) and used by many researchers for rational...

This paper shows that standard empirical methods for estimating log-linearized consumption Euler equations cannot successfully uncover structural parameters like the coefficient of relative risk aversion from the dataset of simulated consumers behaving exactly according to the standard model....

Economists working with numerical solutions to the optimal consumption/saving problem under uncertainty have long known that there are quantitatively important interactions between liquidity constraints and precautionary saving behavior. This paper provides the analytical basis for those...

The standard approach to modelling consumption/saving problems is to assume that the decisionmaker is solving a dynamic stochastic optimization problem. However, under realistic descriptions of utility and uncertainty, the optimal consumption/saving decision is so difficult that only recently...

Patients needing kidney transplants may have willing donors who cannot donate to them because of blood or tissue incompatibility. Incompatible patient-donor pairs can exchange donor kidneys with other such pairs. The situation facing such pairs resembles models of the "double coincidence of...