Why are aggregate equity payouts and debt issued positively correlated over the business cycle in U.S. data? Standard real business cycle (RBC) models have few predictions about capital structure, because they assume that financial markets are frictionless. On the other hand, the tradeoff theory...

Can a standard open economy macro model generate realistic international diversification in debt AND equity? We address this question by solving for steady-state portfolios in a two-country, two-good DSGE endowment model with consumption home bias. We compare two different asset trading regimes....