We extend the Carlstrom and Fuerst (American Economic Review,1997, 87, pp. 893–910) agency cost model of business cycles by includingtime-varying uncertainty in the technology shocks that affectcapital production. We first demonstrate that standard linearizationmethods can be used to solve the...

This paper computes welfare-maximizing monetary and tax policy feedback rules in acalibrated dynamic general equilibrium model with sticky prices. The government makesexogenous final good purchases, levies a proportional income tax, and issues nominalone-period bonds. A quadratic approximation...

We document the recent phenomenon of uphill flows of capital from nonindustrial toindustrial countries and analyze whether this pattern of capital flows has hurt growth innonindustrial economies that export capital. Surprisingly, we find that there is a positivecorrelation between current...

There is a large body of evidence supporting the notion that a) those who grow up to be patient(forward-looking) do better in life compared to those who do not, and b) parents can inculcatethe virtue of delayed gratification in their children by taking the right sort of actions. We studya...

We study a variant of the conventional keeping-up-with-the-Joneses setup in whichheterogeneous-ability agents care both about consumption and leisure and receive anutility premium if their consumption exceeds that of the Joneses’. Unlike the conventionalsetup in which all agents are assumed to...

Taking location as given, we study imperfect competition on a circular city. In Bertrandoligopoly, we identify price harmonics as a function of firm unit costs and locations. The sumof oligopoly profits is larger when costs and/or locations are more dispersed in the ‘dihedralmajorization’...

In an equilibrium model of the labor market, workers and firms enter intodynamic contracts that can potentially last forever, but are subject to optimalterminations. Upon termination, the firm hires a new worker, and the workerwho is terminated receives a termination contract from the firm and...

When adjustment costs are present, cyclical preference and technology heterogeneities in aproduct’s markets induce cycles in production. We exploit cyclic and dihedral groupinvariances in an industry’s cost technology to describe these patterns. We show whenequilibrium cyclical pricing and...

Since the start of the financial crisis, industrial country public debt levels have increased dramatically. And they are set to continue rising for the foreseeable future. A number of countries face the prospect of large and rising future costs related to the ageing of their populations. In this...

This paper revisits the role played by myopia in generating a theoreticalrationale for pay-as-you-go social security in dynamically efficient economies.Contrary to received wisdom, if the real interest rate is exogenously fixed, enough myopiamay justify public pensions but never alongside...