We consider business cycles driven by exogenous changes in total factor productivity and by credit shocks. The latter are financial shocks that worsen borrowers cash on hand and reduce the fraction of collateral lenders can seize in the event of default. Our nonlinear loan rate schedules drive...

We study the cyclical implications of endogenous firm-level entry and exit decisions in a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model wherein firms face persistent shocks to both aggregate and individual productivity. The model we explore is in the spirit of Hopenhayn (1992). Firms' decisions...

We introduce capital accumulation into an economy where individuals have private information with respect to productivity shocks. Efficient, incentive-compatible risk-sharing is achieved by conditioning current and future payoffs on the history of productivity reports. We develop a notion of...

We show that a rise in uncertainty on its own generates a substantial drop in employment, production and investment. In keeping with previous findings in the literature, we find these initial declines are larger in the presence of capital irreversibility than without, as firms experiencing...

We examine a monetary economy wherein endogenous asset market segmentation permits the extent of household participation in open market operations to vary smoothly with changes in aggregate conditions. While we impose no stickiness at the microeconomic level in either prices or portfolio...

We study the cyclical implications of credit market imperfections in a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium model wherein firms face persistent shocks to both aggregate and individual productivity. In our model economy, optimal capital reallocation is distorted by two frictions. First,...

We study an economy where households face transactions costs of participating in the housing market. In response to these costs, households choose to buy and sell houses infrequently. This, in turn, implies that the value of the typical transaction is large relative to income. In this way our...

In sum, we find that an unanticipated tightening in borrowing conditions on its own can generate a large recession that is far more persistent than the financial shock itself. Because it causes long-lived disruption in the distribution of capital, and thus production, an episode of tight credit...

An important insight of our analysis is that changes in the persistence and variability of idiosyncratic order costs and productivities alter the distribution of firms over inventory levels. This, in turn, affects the extent and speed of firms' responses to aggregate shocks, and thus the model's...

The typical shape of our model's two-dimensional hazard and its changes over time necessarily depend upon the distributions of menu costs and fixed order costs. We calibrate these distributions using firm-level pricing data (as used by Midrigan (2006)) alongside aggregate data on inventories,...