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...

An empirical consensus suggests that there are small employment effects of minimum wage increases. This paper argues that these are short-run elasticities. Long-run elasticities, which may differ from short-run elasticities, are policy relevant. This paper develops a dynamic industry equilibrium...

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 this paper we characterize and estimate the degree to which liquidity constraints affect real activity. We set up a dynamic model of firm investment and debt in which liquidity constraints enter explicitly into the firm's maximization problem, so that investment depends positively on the...

This paper considers transition dynamics associated with a change in the rate of technological progress, using a general equilibrium framework that incorporates stochastic technology growth trends. The model suggests that these dynamics are associated with protracted transition periods,...

The uncertain and sequential trading (UST) model of inventories behavior with iid shocks predicts that (a) the beginning of period inventories is a sufficient statistic for past variables and (b) an increase in the beginning of period inventories reduces output, employment, hours per employee,...

We study the propagation of monetary shocks in a sticky price model with capital utilization and labor effort. Variable factor utilization enriches the propagation mechanism of monetary shocks by reducing the sensitivity of marginal costs to changes in aggregate output. Variable labor effort is...

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 estimates the economic value in the 1980s and 1990s of corporate assets in Japan, including both tangible and intangible assets, based on the neoclassical framework of McGrattan and Prescott (2005). Our estimates use a new micro-data set that comprises the accounting statements of all...