We develop a general equilibrium macroeconomic model with endogenous health accumulation, and we use the model's equilibrium condition to estimate the elasticity of substitution between medical care and leisure time in maintaining health, based on a cross-country panel dataset. Our econometric...

In this paper we investigate the nature of rational expectations equilibria for economic epidemiological models. Unlike mathematical epidemiological models, economic epidemiological models can produce regions of indeterminacy or instability around the endemic steady states. We consider SI, SIS,...

We argue that financial frictions and financial shocks can be an important factor behind the slow recoveries from the three most recent recessions. To illustrate this point, we augment a simple RBC model with a collateral constraint whose tightness is randomly disturbed by a shock that...

Increasing returns to scale and firms' market power are two potential sources of sunspot expectations in neoclassical models. We show that in New Keynesian models, returns to scale and market power can have fundamentally different implications for broad macroeconomic issues, including...

We argue that nonhomothetic preferences with habit formation in nondurable and durable consumption can be a driving force behind sectoral comovement in production. We make this point by augmenting a two-sector New Keyesian model a la Barsky, House and Kimball (2007) with these two real features...

We present an RBC model with a collateral constraint whose tightness is randomly disturbed by a financial shock and evidence that such shock has become more persistent since 1980s. We show that this can be an important contributor to the recent slow recoveries, and a key mechanism may have to do...

We argue that financial frictions and financial shocks can be an important factor behind the slow recoveries from the three most recent recessions. To illustrate this point, we augment a simple RBC model with a collateral constraint whose tightness is randomly disturbed by a shock that...

The cyclical behavior of real wages has evolved from mildly countercyclical during the interwar period to modestly procyclical in the postwar era. This paper presents a general-equilibrium business-cycle model that helps explain the evolution. In the model, changes in the real wage cyclicality...

Overconfidence is a widely documented phenomenon. In this paper, we study the implications of consumer overconfidence in a life-cycle consumption/saving model. Our main analytical result is a necessary and sufficient condition under which any degree of overconfidence concerning the mean return...