This study finds that a model with internal habit memory allowsto simultaneously explain a series of business cycle and asset pricing puzzles. Compared to the literature, the equity premium puzzle can be resolved in a model with endogenous labor, without giving rise to excessive risk free rate...

This paper argues that a specification of stochastic volatility commonly used to analyze the Great Moderation in DSGE models may not be appropriate, because the level of a process with this specification does not have conditional or unconditional moments. This is unfortunate because agents may...

We propose a novel method to estimate dynamic equilibrium models with stochastic volatility. First, we characterize the properties of the solution to this class of models. Second, we take advantage of the results about the structure of the solution to build a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm to...

How does access to credit impact consumption volatility? Theory and evidence from advanced economies suggests that greater household access to finance smooths consumption. Evidence from emerging markets, where consumption is usually more volatile than income, indicates that financial reform...

We seek to explain the economic volatility of the last 6 years, in particular the rapid expansion and contraction of the knowledge sectors. Our hypothesis is that these sectors amplify the business cycle due to their increasing returns to scale, growing faster than others in an upswing and...

This paper presents a New Keynesian DSGE model with inventory holding firms. The model distinguishes between goods and materials, for both production as well as for inventories. The more detailed treatment of inventory holdings offers new insights into the determinants of business cycles before...

Concave hiring rules imply that firms respond more to bad shocks than to good shocks. They provide a unified explanation for several seemingly unrelated facts about employment growth in macro and micro data. In particular, they generate countercyclical movement in both aggregate conditional...

This paper performs an empirical analysis of the international cross sectional distribution of gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates and business cycles. We consider a balanced panel of 91 countries in the period 1960-2010 and two different measures of GDP fluctuations: the logarithmic...

Traditionally, observed fluctuations in aggregate economic time series have been mainly modeled as being the result of exogenous disturbances. A better understanding of macroeconomic phenomena, however, surely requires looking directly at the relations between variables that may trigger...