This paper discusses the link between financial development and macroeconomic volatility by exploring some of the ways through which financial development may affect business cycle fluctuations. To be specific, we examine whether stock market development exerts an unambiguous effect on...

A Ricardian-type set-up is used to explore the linkage between financial development and the business cycle. Though financial advancement may be good for growth due to making possible a higher degree of division of labor, it may, for the same reason, be bad for the business cycle. Building on...

In this paper, we examine the influence of information rigidities concerning the net worth of banks on the real economy over time. In a first part, we show empirically that expectations about the net earnings of banks (as growth of net worth) are truly biased, particularly during the financial...

We use a French firm-level panel data set over the period 1993-2004 to analyze the relationship between credit constraints and firms' R&D behavior over the business cycle. Our main results can be summarized as follows: (i) the share of R&D investment over total investment is countercyclical...

This paper addresses the fifty-year decline in growth for the U.S. and other advanced economies. The paper develops a growth model based upon an economy's capital accounts and illustrates how customary growth factors such as labor and total factor productivity are embedded within investment...

We examine how credit constraints affect the cyclical behavior of productivity-enhancing investment and thereby volatility and growth. We first develop a simple growth model where firms engage in two types of investment: a short-term one and a long-term productivity-enhancing one. Because it...

I use micro data to quantify key features of U.S. firm financing. In particular, I establish that a substantial 35% of firms' investment is funded using financial markets. I then construct a dynamic equilibrium model that matches these features and fit the model to business cycle data using...