This paper recognizes two main factors that cause the capital requirement to affect the weighted average cost of capital and hence the investment behavior of banks: underpriced debt resulting from the deposit insurance and information asymmetry between managers and the stock market. For a bank...

This paper develops an analytically tractable general-equilibrium model of inventory dynamics based on a precautionary stockout-avoidance motive. The model’s predictions are broadly consistent with the U.S. business cycle and key features of inventory behavior. It is also shown that...

Conventional wisdom has it that inventory investment destabilizes the economy because it is procyclical to sales. Khan and Thomas (2007) show that the conventional wisdom is wrong in a general equilibrium (S,s) model with capital. We argue that their finding is not robust—the conventional...

I study the aggregate implications of the entry of Multinational Firms (MNFs) in a two country Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model in which firms have heterogeneous productivity in the sense of Ghironi and Melitz (2005). Unlike the extant open economy macroeconomics literature, this...

There is substantial evidence that countries or regions with stronger trade linkages tend to have business cycles which are more synchronized. However, the standard international business cycle framework cannot replicate this finding. In this paper we study a multiple- country model of...

The nature of the business cycle appears to have changed. Prior to the 1990s, recoveries from recessions were quick and steep; after the past three recessions, however, recoveries were weak and prolonged. We consider the effect of a number of countercyclical policies intended to shorten...

This paper constructs several models in which, unlike the standard neoclassical growth model, positive news about future technology generates an increase in current consumption, hours and investment. These models are said to exhibit procyclical news shocks. We find that all models that exhibit...

A key question that has arisen during recent debates is whether government spending multipliers are larger during times when resources are idle. This paper seeks to shed light on this question by analyzing new quarterly historical data covering multiple large wars and depressions in the U.S. and...

This paper evaluates the role of the construction sector in accounting for the performance of the U.S. economy in the last decade. During the Great Recession (2008-09) employment in the construction sector experienced an unprecedented decline that followed the largest expansion in employment...

Past studies have argued that housing is an important driver of business cycles. Housing markets, however, are highly localized, while business cycles are often measured at the national level. We model a national housing cycle using a panel of cities while also allowing for idiosyncratic...