Entrepreneurs appear to borrow largely against their near-term revenues, even when their investment has a longer horizon. In this paper, we develop a model of credit horizons. A question of particular concern to us is whether persistently low interest rates can stifle economic activity. With...

The paper studies under what conditions the value of the firm occasionally increases for a while before it suddenly drops, like a "bubble". We consider the environment where the trend of net cash flow from a firm's production depends on uncertain quality of a manager, and the manager is...

Credit market imperfections provide the key to understanding many important issues in business cycles, growth and development, and international economics. Recent progress in these areas, however, has left in its wake a bewildering array of individual models with seemingly conflicting results....

To explain cross-country differences in economic performance, the economics of coordination failures typically portrays each country in a closed economy model with multiple equilibria and then argues that the poor countries are in an equilibrium inferior to those achieved by the rich. This...

The role of agricultural productivity in economic development is addressed in a two-sector model of endogenous growth in which a) preferences are non-homothetic and the income elasticity of demand for the agricultural good is less than unitary, and b) the engine of growth is learning-by-doing in...

We present an infinite horizon model with capital in which fiat money and barter are two competing means of payment. Fiat money has value because barter is limited by the extent of a double coincidence of wants. The pattern of exchange generally involves both money and barter. We find that the...

A long standing issue in macroeconomics is that of the relation of imperfect competition to fluctuations in output. In this paper we examine the relation between monopolistic competition and the role of aggregate demand in the determination of output. We first show that monopolistically...

We develop a model of banking crises which Is consistent with two important features of the data: First, banking crises are usually preceded by credit booms. Second, credit booms often do not result in a crisis. That is, there are "good" booms as well as "bad" booms in the language of Gorton and...

Japan has seen episodes in which boom and bust in land prices is accompanied by boom and bust in business fixed investment. We develop a model that includes land in the production function. We show that in this model movements in land prices will be associated with movements of the capital stock...

To analyze business fixed investment in Japan, which has been unusually volatile in recent years, we develop and apply a loglinear flexible accelerator model. We find that movements in business fixed investment are consistent with movements in output and the tax- adjusted cost of capital, both...