This paper extends Lucas (1978) to a production economy with two capital goods. It is an RBC model in which each unit of investment requires a new idea, an "option". When options are scarce, new capital is harder to put in place and the value of old capital rises. Thus the stock market and...

We develop a model of investment with financial constraints and use it to investigate the relation between investment and Tobin's q. A firm is financed partly by insiders, who control its assets, and partly by outside investors. When their wealth is scarce, insiders earn a rate of return higher...

The optimal timing of real investment is studied under the assumptions that investment is irreversible and that new information about returns is arriving over time. Investment should be undertaken in this case only when the costs of deferring the project exceed the expected value of information...

We present a simple framework that incorporates a role for "interest rate spreads" in models of investment fluctuations. Formally, we develop a simple model of investment and financial contracting under asymmetric information that can he used to generate an Euler equation describing firms'...

What can explain the large changes in aggregate demand that occur in the absence of any seemingly corresponding shock to the underlying state variables of the economy? We show that macroeconomic volatility can arise from dispersions of beliefs among agents. These dispersions give rise to bets...

This paper provides an explanation for situations in which the state variables describing the economy do not change, but aggregate consumption experiences significant changes. We present a theory of pseudo-wealth--individuals' perceived wealth that is derived from heterogeneous beliefs and...

The extraordinary events surrounding the Great Recession have cast a considerable doubt on the traditional sources of macroeconomic instability. In their place, economists have singled out financial and uncertainty shocks as potentially important drivers of economic fluctuations. Empirically...

The aggregate neoclassical growth model - with a labor income tax or "labor market distortion" that began growing at the end of 2007 as its only impulse - produces time series for aggregate labor usage, consumption, investment, and real GDP that closely resemble actual U.S. time series. Of...

The observation that liquidations are concentrated in recessions has long been the subject of controversy. One view holds that liquidations are beneficial in that they result in increased restructuring. Another view holds that liquidations are privately inefficient and essentially wasteful. This...

In this paper, I examine the effect of business cycles on the employment, earnings, and income of persons in different demographic groups. I classify individuals by sex, education, and race. The analysis uses data from the Current Population Survey's Outgoing Rotation Group file, covering the...