It is known that a variety of economic time series exhibit asymmetry in the sense that the arrival of a recession is prompt, while the recovery from a recession appears protracted. This paper provides an explanation for the asymmetric movement of economic time series over business cycles by...

This paper develops a real business cycle model characterized by idiosyncratic employment shocks and quantitatively explores the behavior of aggregate variables under the assumptions of complete and incomplete insurance markets. The results show that the model with incomplete markets produces...

This paper estimates and simulates a sticky-price dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model with a financial accelerator, a la Bernanke, Gertler, and Gilchrist (1999), to assess the importance of the financial accelerator mechanism in fitting the data and its role in the amplification and...

Business cycles correlation between Mexico and the US changed from being on a downward sloping path before 1992 to an upward sloping path after that. This paper suggests that the North American Free Trade Agreement could be the explanation. NAFTA generated not only an increase in the volume of...

In a recent paper, Chang, Gomes, and Schorfheide (American Economic Review 2002, p. 1498-1520) extend the standard real business cycle (RBC) model to allow for a learning-by-doing (LBD) mechanism whereby current labor supply affects future productivity. They show that this feature magnifies the...

This paper analyzes optimal foreign aid policy in a neoclassical growth framework with a conflict of interest between the donor and the recipient government. Aid conditionality is modeled as a limited enforceable dynamic contract. We define the contract to be self-enforcing if, at any point in...

This paper introduces a form of boundedly-rational inflation expectations in the New Keynesian Phillips curve. The representative agent is assumed to behave as an econometrician, employing a time series model for inflation that allows for both permanent and temporary shocks. The near-unity...

This paper identifies two channels through which the economy can generate endogenous inflation and output volatility, an empirical regularity, by introducing model uncertainty into a Lucas-type monetary model. The equilibrium path of inflation depends on agents' expectations and a vector of...

Credit supply and demand changes are mostly unobserved, thus identifying completely the transmission of monetary policy through the credit channel is unfeasible. Bank lending surveys by central banks, however, contain reliable quarterly information on changes in loan conditions due to bank, firm...

This paper studies corporate debt structure over the business cycle and its implications for aggregate macroeconomic dynamics. We develop a tractable macro-finance model featuring debt heterogeneity with both secured and unsecured debt. Unlike secured debt, unsecured debt gives the lenders no...