We show that a straight forward approximation of the distribution of durable goods holdings gives rise to a tractable equilibrium (S,s) model of durable demand. We analyze both competitive and monopoly supply. We show that equilibrium interactions lead to elongated impulse responses in demand,...

This paper presents an extension of the life-cycle permanent-income model of consumption to the case of a durable good whose purchase involves lumpy trans- actions costs. Where individual behavior is concerned, the implications of the model are different in some respects from those of standard...

One important channel through which real interest rates affect aggregate demand is consumer expenditure on durable goods. This paper examines empirically the link between interest rates and consumer durables. Solving for the decision rule relating income and interest rates to consumer demand is...

Previous tests of the permanent income hypothesis (PIH) have focused on either nondurables or durables expenditures in isolation. This paper studies consumer purchases of nondurables and durables as the outcome of a single optimization problem.It is shown that the presence of adjustment costs of...

Classical spectral techniques can provide sharp insights into the cyclical patterns in a time series of economic data. Various problems in the application of classical spectral techniques, such as the choices of smoothing routine and bandwidth and the appearance of end-effects, inhibit the...

Popular wisdom holds that publishers revise college textbooks mainly to kill off the secondary market for used books. While this behavior might be profitable if consumers are myopic, uninformed or have high short-run discount rates (that exceed the publishers'), neoclassical authors have noted...

Aggregate expenditure on durable goods responds too slowly to wealth and other aggregate innovations to be consistent with the simplest frictionless version of PIH (permanent income hypothesis). In this paper I present a model of aggregate expenditure on durab1es that builds up from the lumpy...

I examine price markups in monopolisticly-competitive markets that experience fluctuations in demand because the economy experiences cyclical fluctuations in productivity. Markups depend positively on the average income of purchasers in the market. For a nondurable good average income of...

In this paper I provide a production theory-based framework for measuring markups of price over marginal coat, and the effects of cost and demand characteristics on these markups. Price to marginal coat ratios are measured for various Canadian manufacturing industries, and the impacts of...

This paper develops a simple but important point which is often overlooked: It is quite possible that the best policy for a rational, optimizing agent is to do nothing for long periods of time--even if new, relevant information becomes available. We illustrate this point using the market for...