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...

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...

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 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...

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...

We show that in a two-sector real business cycle model wtih sufficiently strong investment externalities, a regressive tax policy can stabilize the economy against fluctuations driven by agents' animal spirits. By contrast, this economy with a flat or progressive tax scheme (such as that in the...

We apply recursive methods to obtain a finite dimensional and recursive representation of an equilibrium of one of Townsend's models of 'forecasting the forecasts of others'. The equilibrium has the property that decision makers make common forecasts of the hidden state variable whose presence...

We show that the aggregate Frisch elasticity of labor supply can greatly exceed the corresponding individual-level parameter, and we illustrate the "anatomy" of the former in terms of intensive and extensive margins. The methodology consists of using micro data from the PSID to construct a panel...

Financial crises in emerging economies are accompanied by a large fall in total factor productivity. We explore the role of financial frictions in exacerbating the misallocation of resources and explaining this drop in TFP. We build a two-sector model of a small open economy with a working...

I construct a two-sector growth model to study the effect of the structural transformation between manufacturing and services on the decline in GDP volatility in the US. In the model, a change in the relative size of the two sectors affects the transmission mechanism that relates sectoral TFP...