I study the asset pricing implications and the efficiency of a tractable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets along the lines of Krebs [Krebs, T., 2003. Human Capital Risk and Economic Growth. Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(2),...

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...

This paper investigates the impact of economic reforms on China's growth in Total Factor Productivity (TFP). I build a model with two sectors in production -- the private and the state sectors -- that features capital market imperfections on the private sector.Following the removal of...

In times series data, energy use does not change much with energy price changes. However, energy use is responsive to international differences in energy prices in cross-section data across countries. In this paper we consider a model of energy use in which production takes place at individual...

We examine the effects of government redistribution schemes in an economy where agents are subject to uninsurable, individual specific productivity risk. In particular, we consider the trade-off between positive insurance effects and negative distortions on labor supply and saving. We...

We estimate a New-Neoclassical Synthesis business cycle model with two investment shocks. The first, an investment-specific technology shock, affects the transformation of consumption into investment goods and is identified with the relative price of investment. The second shock affects the...

This paper makes three contributions: First, I construct annual time series of gross domestic investment and national saving in the U.S. for the 1897–1949 period using historical component series. I compare the qualitative and quantitative properties of the newly constructed series with the...

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...

This paper makes three contributions: First, I construct annual time series of gross domestic investment and national saving in the U.S. for the 1897-1949 period using historical component series. I compare the qualitative and quantitative properties of the newly constructed series with 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...