Against the backdrop of the theories developed in the real options and financing constraints literatures, this paper examines the impact of profit uncertainty and sunk costs on firms’ entry and exit decisions. For our empirical analysis, we compile an extensive dataset containing information...

This paper examines the role played by uncertainty and sunk costs on the timeseries fluctuations in industry structure as captured by the number of firms and establishments, and concentration. Using an extensive dataset covering 267 U.S. manufacturing industries over a 30-year period, our...

Evidence indicates that consumer durables are more flexibly priced than nondurable goods and services. In otherwise standard two-sector neoclassical sticky-price models with flexible durable prices, following monetary tightening, nondurables decrease but consumer durables increase. Friction in...

The recent credit crisis has raised a number of interesting questions regarding the role of the Federal Reserve Bank and the effectiveness of its expected and unexpected interventions in financial markets, especially during the crisis, given its mandate. This paper reviews and evaluates the...

Money demand specifications exhibits instability, especially for long spans of data. This paper reconsiders the welfare cost of inflation for the US economy using a flexible time-varying cointegration methodology to estimate the money demand function. We find evidence that the time-varying...

This paper investigates whether changes in the monetary transmission mechanism as captured by the interest rate respond to variations in asset returns. We distinguish between low-volatility (bull) and high-volatility (bear) markets and employ a TVP-VAR approach with stochastic volatility to...

This paper analyses the relationship between financial stress indicator variables and monetary policy in South Africa with emphasis on how robust these variables are related to the monetary policy interest rate. The financial stress indicator variables comprise a set of variables from the main...

In this paper we explore the effects of alternative combinations of fiscal and monetary policies under different income distribution regimes. In particular, we aim at evaluating fiscal rules in economies subject to banking crises and deep recessions. We do so using an agent-based model populated...

In this paper, we investigate the dynamic response of stock market volatility to changes in monetary policy. Using a vector autoregressive model, our findings reveal a significant and asymmetric response of stock returns and volatility to monetary policy shocks. Although the increase in the...

This paper investigates whether changes in monetary transmission mechanism respond to variations in asset prices. We distinguish between bull and bear markets and employ a TVP-VAR approach with stochastic volatility to assess the evolution of the monetary policy in relation to housing and stock...