This paper investigates a real-business-cycle economy that features dispersed information about the underlying aggregate productivity shocks, taste shocks, and, potentially, shocks to monopoly power. We show how the dispersion of information can (i) contribute to significant inertia in the...

We examine how credit constraints affect the cyclical behavior of productivity-enhancing investment and thereby volatility and growth. We first develop a simple growth model where firms engage in two types of investment: a short-term one and a long-term productivity-enhancing one. Because it...

We introduce a neoclassical growth economy with idiosyncratic production risk and incomplete markets. Each agent is an entrepreneur operating her own neoclassical technology with her own capital stock. The general equilibrium is characterized in closed form. Idiosyncratic production shocks...

We dissect the comovement patterns of the macroeconomic data, identify a single shock that accounts for the bulk of the business-cycle volatility in the key quantities, and use its empirical properties to appraise parsimonious models of the business cycle. Through this lens, the data appears to...

We consider a stationary setting featuring forward-looking behavior, higher-order uncertainty, and learning. We obtain an observational equivalence result that recasts the aggregate dynamics of this setting as that of a representative-agent model featuring two distortions: myopia in the sense of...

The notion that business cycles are driven by demand shocks is subtle. I first review some of the conceptual and empirical challenges faced when trying to accommodate this notion in micro-founded, general-equilibrium models. I next review my own research, which sheds new light on the observed...

We develop a tractable method for augmenting macroeconomic models with autonomous variation in higher-order beliefs. We use this to accommodate a certain type of waves of optimism and pessimism that can be interpreted as the product of frictional coordination and, unlike the one featured in the...

What are the welfare effects of the information contained in macroeconomic statistics, central-bank communications, or news in the media? We address this question in a business-cycle framework that nests the neoclassical core of modern DSGE models. Earlier lessons that were based on "beauty...