This paper studies quarterly employment flows of approximately 10,000 large U.S. manufacturing establishments. We use establishments' hours-week to construct measures of the deviation between desired and actual employment and then we use these as the state variables upon which units decide their...

In this paper we derive a model of aggregate investment that builds from the lumpy microeconomic behavior of firms facing stochastic fixed adjustment costs. Instead of the standard (S,s) bands, firms' adjustment policies are probabilistc, with a probability of adjusting specification of the...

The sensitivity of U.S. aggregate investment to shocks is procyclical: the response upon impact increases by approximately 50% from the trough to the peak of the business cycle. This feature of the data follows naturally from a DSGE model with lumpy microeconomic capital adjustment. Beyond...

Microeconomic lumpiness matters for macroeconomics. According to our DSGE model, it explains roughly 60% of the smoothing in the investment response to aggregate shocks. The remaining 40% is explained by general equilibrium forces. The central role played by micro frictions for aggregate...