This paper explores the effects of incomplete markets and positive spillovers on aggregate and industry output behavior. We consider an economy composed of a fixed set of infinitely-lived industries. When industries coordinate production decisions they jointly improve their productivity. Markets...

This study of the determinants of earnings among adult foreign-born men using the 1990 Census of Population focuses on the effects of the respondent's own English language skills, the effects of living in a linguistic concentration area, and the effects of the stage of the business cycle at...

This paper shows that the precautionary motive, combined with asset incompleteness, is a major source of volatility and indeterminacy in financial markets. Price fluctuations originate from agents' efforts to insure themselves through time by borrowing and lending instead of shifting income...

This study compares the international transmission of both nominal and real business cycle shocks from 1861 to 1913 in Scandinavia and the Southern European countries of Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Cointegration analysis and estimated vector autoregression for real GDP and inflation reveal the...

In the business cycle literature of the inter-war years, the role of the interest rate in coordinating, or failing to co-ordinate, agents' choices about the allocation of resources over time was an important theme, to which Axel Leijonhufvud (1981) gave the name "the Wicksell connection". The...

This paper examines whether there is any reason to believe that the expansion phase of the Canadian business cycle is more likely to end as time passes. Three issues are analysed -- whether there is evidence of "duration dependence" in business cycle phases, whether the pattern of business cycle...