What is the impact of international migration on the wage structure? Empirically, it is difficult to find any effect at all. This essay gives a new theoretical explanation for this conspicuous absence, emphasising non-convexities in the technology of individual firms due to communication costs....

Using a simple model of social learning, we endogenize growth and distribution in a dualistic developing society. For given parameters of the learning technology, a trade-off between growth and equity results. On the other hand, more intensive social interaction between agents will raise the...

In economic reality, reactions to external shocks often come with a delay. On the other hand, agents try to anticipate future developments. Both can lead to difference-differential equations with an advancing argument. These are more difficult to handle than either difference or differential...

The interrelationship between financial constraints and firm activity is a hotly debated issue. The way firms cope with financial constraints is fundamental to the analysis of monetary transmission, of financial stability and of economic growth and development. The CBI Industrial Trends Survey...

This paper studies the impact of sales uncertainty on firms' investment outlays using the database of the Deutsche Bundesbank's corporate balance sheet statistics. The sample used for estimation is a panel of 4'234 west German manufacturing firms with 33'217 observations, covering the years...

This paper proposes a new framework for studying the effects of monetary policy on business investment. Important ambiguities with the modeling of investment dynamics and interactions between real and financial decisions suggest modeling investment spending as a VAR. Based on a panel of...

This paper presents a comparable set of results on the monetary transmission channels on firm investment (the interest rate channel and the broad credit channel) for the four largest euro-areacountries (Germany, France, Italy and Spain), using particularly rich micro datasets for eachcountry...

In this paper we present comparable results on the determinants of firms' investment and their link to monetary policy. The results have been obtained by the Eurosystem Monetary Transmission Network. This network has produced a series of papers in which the use of micro data permits estimating...