More advanced technologies demand higher degrees of specialization - and longer chains of production connecting raw inputs to final outputs. Longer production chains are subject to a "weakest link" effect: they are more fragile and more prone to failure. Optimal chain length is determined by the...

Over the last fifty years there have been large secular increases in educational attainment and R&D intensity. The fact that these trends have not stimulated more rapid income growth has been a persistent puzzle for growth theorists. We construct a model of endogenous economic growth in which...

It is often assumed that wedges evolve according to VAR(1) in the applications of business cycle accounting (BCA). However, recent research finds that the wedges have no VAR(1) representation in many dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) economies, and that there might be a...

The required degree of increasing returns-to-scale to satisfy the Benhabib-Farmer condition for local indeterminacy is too high to be empirically plausible. In the paper, we develop a natural extension of Benhabib and Farmer's (1994, Journal of Economic Theory) model by introducing aggregation...

It is generally agreed that within long-term relationships agents learn the characteristics of their market partners better than through spot transactions. In contrast, little is known on how relationship-based and transaction-based markets compare when agents learn about the aggregate economy...

All industrialized countries have experienced a transition from high birth rates, land-based production and stagnant standards of living to low birth rates and sustained income growth. To develop a better understanding of these economic and demographic transformations and the link between them,...

Using ideas from the endogenous growth literature, we present a model of the endogenous determination of productivity growth based on individual worker decisions about human capital investment. We calibrate a version of the model to match long run growth facts from the US and study the business...

This paper studies how idiosyncratic productivity risk impacts aggregate employment dynamics when there is a trade-off between workers' productivity and costs of job creation and destruction. In our analysis, increasing idiosyncratic risk induces a producer to move workers out of structured jobs...

Recent literature on structural vector autoregressions has attempted to identify the effects on the economy of an increase in the stock of money. This work has led to a broad concensus. Initially, an increase in money leads to an increase in economic activity. Output and employment go up, the...

We ask how barriers to international trade affect TFP when there are monopoly rights in the import--competing industries. Holmes and Schmitz (1995) show that without barriers to trade TFP in these industries is as large as possible. We study the general case of finite barriers to trade. We find...