This paper studies the relationship between the availability of unsecured credit to households and unemployment. We extend the Mortensen-Pissarides model to include a goods market with search and financial frictions. Households, who have limited commitment, face endogenous borrowing constraints...

A widely cited failing of real business cycle models is their inability to account for the cyclical patterns of ?nancial variables. Perhaps less well known is the fact that the return to capital and equity are identical in the neoclassical growth model. This paper constructs a measure of the...

Job amenities are explicitly included in a model of job choice over the life cycle. The amenities are characterized by an indivisibility--a worker must be present at a job to enjoy its amenities. This chacterization has implications on initial job choice, a worker's wage profile and whether they...

How much technological progress has there been in structures? An attempt is made to measure this using panel data on the age and rents of buildings. The data are interpreted with the help of a vintage capital model where buildings are replaced with some chosen periodicity. The results indicate...

We introduce household production and the production of houses (construction) into a monetary model. Theory predicts inflation, as a tax on market activity, encourages substitution into household production and hence investment in housing. In the model, the stock and appropriately-deflated price...

Coinciding with the start of the housing boom were large increases in home-equity lending and loan-to-equity ratios. We study this in models where housing bears a liquidity premium because it collateralizes loans. Even with fundamentals constant, since liquidity depends on beliefs,...

What are the conditions under which Gresham's Law holds? And what are the mechanics of a debasement? To analyze these questions, we develop a model of commodity money with light and heavy coins, imperfect information, and prices determined via bilateral bargaining. There are equilibria with...

We analyze a two-sided search model in which we assume utility is not perfectly transferable. Except for this assumption the model is standard, yet it generates results that are quite different from those obtained in models with transferable utility. In particular, the model has multiple...