I analyze the implications of moral hazard in dynamic economy with production. In particular, I add agency frictions to a benchmark stochastic growth model, by assuming that firms observe output but hours worked and productivity are unobservable. I cast the problem as a continuous time principal...

This paper evaluates whether an estimated, structural, small open economy model of the Canadian economy can account for the substantial influence of foreign-sourced disturbances identified in numerous reduced-form studies. The analysis shows that the benchmark model --- and a number of variants...

This paper combines a discrete-time dynamic general equilibrium articulation of the standard model of labor market search with observed U.S. time series measures on employment, vacancies, and aggregate output to uncover the cyclical properties of three unobserved forcing variables that comprise...

Through marriage, individuals can share some risks that would otherwise be uninsurable. In this paper, we ask how much idiosyncratic income risk can be diversified away through marriage contracts alone versus how much risk there remains for public unemployment insurance programs to alleviate. We...

So far the literature on DSGE models with energy price shocks models energy on the production side only. In these models, energy shocks are responsible for only a negligible share of output fluctuations. We study the robustness of this finding. The aim of our paper is to model the response of...

We study a multiperiod principal-agent problem with moral hazard in which the agent is required to exert effort only in the initial period of the contract. The effort choice of the agent in this first period determines the conditional distribution of output in the following periods. The paper...

The role of credit market imperfections as source of amplification and persistence of temporary exogenous shocks to the economy is widely accepted in the literature. Little attention has been paid to the possibility that credit frictions also generate instability. This paper proposes a theory of...

This paper studies amplification of productivity shocks in labor markets through on-the-job-search. There is incomplete information about the quality of the employee-firm match which provides persistence in employment relationships and the rationale for on-the-job search. Amplification arises...

Beginning with the seminal work by Kydland and Prescott, standard business cycle theory has credited technology shocks with being a major source of business cycle fluctuations. Unfortunately, these shocks, by their nature, are hard to identify and measure. This paper utilizes new measures of...