We incorporate remittances and microentrepreneurship (self-employment) into a small openeconomy business cycle model with capital and labor market frictions. Countercyclical remittances moderate the decline of households' consumption during recessions. These remittances also are used to finance...

We use micro data on product prices linked to information on the firms that set them to test for selection effects (state dependence) in micro-level producer pricing. In contrast to using synthetic data from a canonical menu-cost model, we find very weak, if any, micro-level selection effects...

We build an equilibrium business cycle model in which agents cannot perfectly distinguish between the permanent and transitory components of TFP shocks and learn about those components using the Kalman filter. Calibrated to Mexico, the model predicts a higher variability of consumption relative...

This paper investigates the relationship between the main business cycles features and the institutional and structural characteristics of countries in which they are observed. We derive the business cycle characteristics of the individual countries using the nonparametric Harding-Pagan...

This paper characterizes business cycle phenomena in a sample of 22 developed and developing economies using a univariate Markov regime switching approach. It examines the efficacy of this approach for detecting business cycle turning points and for identifying distinct economic regimes for each...

Using data on product-level prices matched to the producing firm's unit labor cost, we reject the hyptothesis of a full and immediate pass-through of marginal cost. Since we focus on idiosyncratic variation, this does not fit the predictions of the Maćkowiak and Wiederholt (2009) version of the...

Stylized facts on U.S. output and interest rates have so far proved hard to match with simple DSGE models. I estimate covariances between output, nominal and real interest rate conditional on structural shocks, since such evidence has largely been lacking in previous discussions of the...

I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about an idiosyncratic shock to their value of leisure. I consider the mechanism design problem for this economy and describe a computational method to solve it. This is an important contribution of the paper since...

Like other macroeconomic variables, residential investment has become much less volatile since the mid-1980s (recent experience notwithstanding.) This paper explores the role of structural change in this decline. Since the the early 1980s there have been many changes in the underlying structure...

This paper develops a Walrasian equilibrium theory of establishment level dynamics and matching frictions and uses it to evaluate the effects of congestion externalities in the matching process and determine the government interventions that are needed to implement a Pareto optimal allocation....