The worst global downturn since the Great Depression has caused ballooning budget deficits in most nations, as tax revenues collapse and governments bail out financial institutions and attempt countercyclical fiscal policy. With notable exceptions, most economists accept the desirability of...

Different frameworks of analysis lead to different conceptions of financial instability and financial fragility. On one side, the static approach conceptualizes financial instability as an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism that results from unpredictable random forces that no one can do...

This paper uses a tractable macroeconomic model with idiosyncratic human capital risk and incomplete markets to analyze the growth and welfare effects of business cycles. The analysis is based on the assumption that the elimination of business cycles eliminates the variation in idiosyncratic...

A notable feature of the Japanese economy in the last two decades is the large fluctuations in asset prices. We examine whether they can by accounted for by a stochastic growth model with habit persistence and costly capital adjustment. For the real estate price, people’s expectations on the...

We study how the output gap affects potential output over time-i.e., the dynamic hysteresis effect. To do so, we introduce novel unobserved components (UC) models that consider hysteresis as a sequence of lagged effects, thus separating the long-run recession-induced adverse effects from other...

We argue that a fundamental difference between Post-Keynesian approaches to economic growth lies in their treatment of investment. Kaleckian-Robinsonian models postulate an investment function dependent on the accelerator and profitability. Some of these models rely on the importance of...

This paper investigates how concentrated ownership of capital influences the pricing of risky assets in a production economy. The model is designed to approximate the skewed distribution of wealth and income in U.S. data. I show that concentrated ownership significantly magnifies the equity risk...

Progress on the question of whether policymakers should respond directly to financial variables requires a realistic economic model that captures the links between asset prices, credit expansion, and real economic activity. Standard DSGE models with fully-rational expectations have difficulty...

We investigate the behavior of the equilibrium price-rent ratio for housing in a simple Lucas-type asset pricing model. We allow for time-varying risk aversion (via external habit formation) and time-varying persistence and volatility in the stochastic process for rent growth, consistent with...

In a classic article, Granger (1966) asserted that most economic time series measured in level have spectra that exhibit a smooth declining shape with considerable power at very low frequencies. There has been no systematic attempt to examine Granger,s assertion with international data. We...