This paper explores the implications of economic and political inequality for the comovement of government purchases with macroeconomic fluctuations. We set up and compute a heterogeneous-agent neoclassical growth model, where households value government purchases which are financed by income...

We study the welfare implications of uncertainty in business cycle models. In the modern business cycle literature, multiplicative real shocks to production and/or preferences play an important role as the impulses that produce aggregate fluctuations. Introducing shocks in this way has the...

We document how informal employment in Mexico is countercyclical, lags the cycle and is negatively correlated to formal employment. This contributes to explaining why total employment in Mexico displays low cyclicality and variability over the business cycle when compared to Canada, a developed...

We extend the basic RBC model to allow for biased technical changes. One broad definition of biased technical changes is changes that directly affect factor elasticities. Given the link between changes in factor elasticities and factor shares, observed fluctuations in US labor's share are...

This paper introduces Heckscher-Ohlin trade features into a two-country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model, and studies the international transmission of productivity shocks through trade in goods. This framework improves upon existing international real business cycle models in that...

If entitlement to UI benefits must be earned with employment, generous UI is an additional benefit to working, so, by itself, it promotes job creation. If individuals are risk neutral, then there is a UI contribution scheme that eliminates any effect of UI on employment decisions. As with...

Recent cyclical episodes in the U.S. and G-7 economies are asymmetric: recoveries and expansions tend to be long and gradual and busts tend to be short and sharp. A large body of work views the two recent cyclical U.S. episodes, namely, the "new economy" boom in the late 1990s, and the 2000s...

We estimate a New-Neoclassical Synthesis business cycle model with two investment shocks. The first, an investment-specific technology shock, affects the transformation of consumption into investment goods and is identified with the relative price of investment. The second shock affects the...

Previous work of monetary dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with nominal rigidity a la Taylor, particularly the Cho-Cooley model, was abandoned in favor of the New-Keynesian analysis due to the model's failure to deliver business cycle statistics that match the U.S. economy along...

This paper presents a DGE model in which aggregate price level inertia is generated endogenously by the optimizing behaviour of price-setting firms. All the usual sources of inertia are absent here ie., all firms are simultaneously free to change their price once every period and face no...