This paper examines empirically the nonlinear business cycle dynamics due to the presence of financial frictions. Using a threshold vector auto regression, the authors estimate the behavior of interest rate shocks in which a regime change occurs if the two respective threshold variables namely...

I study the welfare cost of business cycles in a complete-markets economy where some people are more risk averse than others. Relatively more risk-averse people buy insurance against aggregate risk, and relatively less risk-averse people sell insurance. These trades reduce the welfare cost of...

Previous studies on financial frictions have been unable to establish the empirical significance of credit constraints in macroeconomic fluctuations. This paper argues that the muted impact of credit constraints stems from the absence of a mechanism to explain the observed persistent comovements...

The paper examines three aspects of a financial crisis of domestic origin. The first section studies the evolution of a debt-financed consumption boom supported by rising asset prices, leading to a credit crunch and fluctuations in the real economy, and, ultimately, to debt deflation. The next...

The current crisis and discussions, in the euro area in particular, show that sovereign debt crises/defaults are no longer restricted to developing economies. After crises in many Latin American countries, the literature on quantitative dynamic macro-models of sovereign default has been...

We provide two ways to reconcile small values of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) that range between 0.35 and 0.5 with empirical evidence that the IES is large. We do this reconciliation using a model in which all agents have identical preferences and the same access to asset...

We present a model where the saving rate of the household sector, especially households at the bottom of the income distribution, becomes the endogenous variable that adjusts in order for full employment to be maintained over time. An increase in income inequality and the current account deficit...

This paper investigates multivariate Beveridge-Nelson decomposition of key macro aggregate data. We find (a) inflation seems to be dominated by its trend component, and, perhaps as a result of this, the short-term interest rate is also trend dominated; and (b) consumption also seems to be...

The use of various moving average (MA) rules remains popular with financial market practitioners. These rules have recently become the focus of a number empirical studies, but there have been very few studies of financial market models where some agents employ technical trading rules of the type...

In standard production models wage volatility is far too high and equity volatility is far too low. A simple modification - sticky wages due to infrequent resetting together with a CES production function - leads to both (i) smoother wages and (ii) higher equity volatility. Furthermore, the...