Does time-varying business uncertainty/volatility affect the price setting of firms and, if so, in what way? To address this question, we estimate from the firm-level micro data of the German ifo Business Climate Survey the impact of idiosyncratic volatility on the extensive margin of the price...

We introduce a simple adverse selection problem arising in credit markets into a standard textbook real business cycle model. There is a continuum of households and a continuum of anonymous producers who produce the final goods from intermediate goods. These producers do not have the resources...

This paper studies how financial information frictions can generate sentiment-driven fluctuations in asset prices and self-fulfilling business cycles. In our model economy, exuberant financial market sentiments of high output and high demand for capital increase the price of capital, which...

In the U.S. economy over the past twenty five years, house prices exhibit fluctuations considerably larger than house rents and these large fluctuations tend to move together with business cycles. We build a simple theoretical model to characterize these observations by showing the tight...

We study a model where some agents have private information about risky asset returns and trade to obtain capital gains, while others acquire the risky asset and hold it to maturity, forming expectations of returns based on market prices. We show that under such a structure, in addition to fully...

We formalize the Keynesian insight that aggregate demand driven by sentiments can generate output fluctuations under rational expectations. When production decisions must be made under imperfect information about demand, optimal decisions based on sentiments can generate stochastic...

What fraction of the business cycle volatility of government purchases is accounted for as endogenous reactions to overall macroeconomic conditions? We answer this question in the framework of a neoclassical representative household model where the provision of a public consumption good is...

We document a new business cycle fact: the cross-sectional standard deviation of firm-level investment (investment dispersion) is robustly and significantly procyclical. This makes investment dispersion different from the dispersion of productivity and output growth, which is countercyclical....