This paper investigates the effect of uncertainty on the investment decisions of petroleum refineries in the US. We construct uncertainty measures from commodity futures market and use data on actual capacity changes to measure investment episodes. Capacity changes in US refineries occur...

An analysis of the quantitative effects of agency costs in a real business cycle model, showing that these costs can explain why output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons.

We develop a search-theoretic model of financial intermediation and use it to study how trading frictions affect the distribution of asset holdings, asset prices, efficiency and standard measures of liquidity. A distinctive feature of our theory is that it allows for unrestricted asset holdings,...

This research is the first to provide empirical evidence that social interaction is more prevalent amongst active rather than passive investors. While previous empirical work, spearheaded by Hong, Kubik, and Stein (2004), shows that proxies for sociability are related to participation in asset...

An innovation in this paper is to introduce a time-to-build technology for the production of market capital into a model with home production. The paper’s main finding is that the two anomalies that have plagued all household production models—the positive correlation between business and...