After liberalizing international transactions of financial assets, many countries experience large swings in asset prices, capital flows, and aggregate production. This paper studies how the adjustment to capital account liberalization depends upon the degree of development of a domestic...

In this article I provide a perspective on the current state of modern business cycle theory. This theory has developed from an application of the Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium framework to the neoclassical growth model. On the positive side, this approach is able to accommodate various...

In this article I provide a perspective on the current state of modern business cycle theory. This theory has developed from an application of the Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium framework to the neoclassical growth model. On the positive side, this approach is able to accommodate various...

This article reexamines the conventional wisdom that commercial banking is in severe decline. A careful reading of the evidence does not support it. True, on-balance sheet assets held by commercial banks have declined as a share of total intermediary assets. But this measure ignores the...

Over the past twenty years the world's major central banks have been largely successful at bringing inflation under control. While it is premature to suggest that inflation is no longer an issue of great concern, it is quite conceivable that the next battles facing central bankers will lie on a...

In this paper we present a simple, theory-based measure of the variations in aggregate economic efficiency associated with business fluctuations. We decompose this indicator, which we refer to as the gap, into two constituent parts: a price markup and a wage markup, and show that the latter...