In order to develop a model that fits both business cycles and asset pricing facts, this paper introduces a small, time-varying risk of economic disaster in an otherwise standard real business cycle model. This simple feature can generate large and volatile risk premia. The paper establishes two...

What accounts for the unprecedented decline in world trade during the crisis? What have been the consequences of shifting risk appetites for international capital flows? How have they differed across developed and developing economies? We answer these questions in an international real business...

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Firms spend substantial resources on creating and maintaining customer relationships. We explore the role of this customer capital for firm level and aggregate dynamics. Building on the neoclassical adjustment cost model of investment, we propose a tractable search theoretic general equilibrium...

A large amount of recent research in macroeconomics emphasizes the role of uncertainty as a driver of business cycles, but the majority of this work takes uncertainty as exogenous. This paper proposes a model where aggregate uncertainty is endogenously time-varying through financial distress...

investment, even controlling for past investment and sales. We re-calibrate the Thomas (2002) model (that includes fixed costs of investing) so that it assigns a prominent role to extensive adjustment. The recalibrated model has very different properties than the standard RBC model for some shocks.

What is the long-run effect of dividend taxation on aggregate capital accumulation? To address this question, we build a dynamic general equilibrium model in which there is a continuum of firms subject to idiosyncratic productivity shocks. We show that at any point in time, a firm may lie in one...

What is the macroeconomic effect of having a substantial number of firms close to default? This paper studies financial distress costs in a model where customers, suppliers and workers suffer losses if their employer goes bankrupt. I show that this mechanism generates amplification of...

This paper attempts to reconcile the high apparent aggregate elasticity of labor supply with small micro estimates. We elaborate on Rogerson's seminal work (1988) and show that his results rely neither on complete markets nor on lotteries, but rather on the indivisibility and the fact that the...

In this paper, I propose and test a simple technology-based theory of firms' sensitivities to aggregate shocks. I show that when the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is below unity, low profitability firms are more sensitive to aggregate shocks, i.e. to the business cycle....