The real business cycle literature has largely ignored the empirical question of what role technology shocks actually play in business cycles. The observed procyclicality of total factor productivity (TFP) does not prove that technology shocks are important to business cycles, since demand...

The real business cycle literature has largely ignored the empirical question of what role technology shocks actually play in business cycles. The observed procyclicality of total factor productivity (TFP) does not prove that technology shocks are important to business cycles, since demand...

The real business cycle literature has largely ignored the empirical question of what role technology shocks actually play in business cycles. The observed procyclicality of total factor productivity (TFP) does not prove that technology shocks are important to business cycles, since demand...

Does corporate diversification reduce shareholder value? Since firms endogenously choose to diversify, exogenous variation in diversification is necessary in order to draw inferences about the causal effect. We examine changes in the within-firm dispersion of industry investment, or diversity.'...

This paper examines the extent to which permanent terms-of-trade shocks have an asymmetric effect on private savings. The first part uses a simple three-period model to show that, if households expect to face binding borrowing constraints in bad states of nature, savings rates will respond...

The paper extends previous analysis of closed-economy inflation targeting to a small open economy with forward-looking aggregate supply and demand with some microfoundations, and with stylized realistic lags in the different transmission channels for monetary policy. The paper compares targeting...

This paper presents evidence that the cost channel' may be an important part of the monetary transmission mechanism. We argue that if working capital is an essential component of production and distribution, monetary contractions can affect output through a supply channel as well as the...