This paper evaluates which type of models can account for recent episodes of output drops in Latin America. I develop an open economy version of the business cycle accounting methodology (Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan, 2007) in which output fluctuations are decomposed into four sources: total...

Investment booms and asset "bubbles" are often the consequence of heavily leveraged borrowing and speculations of persistent growth in asset demand. We show theoretically that dynamic interactions between elastic credit supply (due to leveraged borrowing) and persistent credit demand (due to...

Firm-level investment is lumpy and volatile but aggregate investment is much smoother and highly serially correlated. These different patterns of investment behavior have been viewed as indicating convex adjustment costs at the aggregate level but non-convex adjustment costs at the firm level....

This paper characterizes the solution to a consumption/savings decision problem in which one of the consumption goods involves transaction costs. It then analyzes how such adjustment costs affect consumers' risk attitudes. Previous studies have suggested that transaction costs, by resulting in...

We study the effect of borrowing limits on welfare in several versions of exchange and production economies. There is a "quantity" effect of a larger borrowing limit which is beneficial for liquidity constrained agents, but essentially irrelevant otherwise. There is also a ``price effect" which...

We show that the long-run neutrality of inflation on capital accumulation obtained in complete market models no longer holds when households face binding credit constraints. Borrowing-constrained households are not able to rebalance their financial portfolio when inflation varies, and thus...

In a multiple-good risk-sharing environment with ex post private information, conditions are found under which collateralized debt is the optimal contract. The necessary and sufficient condition is that the borrower values the collateral good more highly than does the lender; otherwise the...

We study the effects of credit shocks in a model with heterogeneous entrepreneurs, financing constraints, and a realistic firm-size distribution. As entrepreneurial firms can grow only slowly and rely heavily on retained earnings to expand the size of their business, we show that, by reducing...

When faced with a speculative attack, banks and governments often hesitate, attempting to withstand the attack but giving up after some time, suggesting they have some ex-ante uncertainty about the attack they will face. I model that uncertainty as arising from incomplete information about...