The electoral instability falls into the continuous shifts in paradigms, systems, values and economic performance which countries around the world still experience. We believe it is common sense that the election process in a democratic country has an important impact (even a manipulation...

Criminal activity performs like a tax on the entire economy - it discourages domestic and foreign direct investments, it reduces firms’ competitiveness, and reallocates resources creating uncertainty and inefficiency. Although the impact of economic variables on crime has been widely...

In this paper, I introduce lumpy micro-level capital adjustment into a sticky information general equilibrium model. Lumpy adjustment arises because of inattentiveness in capital investment decisions instead of the more common assumption of non-convex adjustment costs. The model features...

We find that capital renting makes up one fifth of US capital expenditures, and it increases during downturns. Further, we present cross-country evidence that output losses after financial crises are smaller where renting is more prevalent. To understand these findings, we build a general...

Housing construction, measured by housing starts, leads GDP in a number of countries. Measured as residential investment, the lead is observed only in the US and Canada; elsewhere, residential investment is coincident. Variants of existing theory, however, predict housing construction lagging GDP....

This volume analyzes two decisive factors that have become embedded in the world spread of capitalism, a shift toward dominance of the financial sector, now entailing massive greed and calling into question whether the ‘rules’ of capitalism have been broken, and of global wage differentials...

We use a variation on the business cycle accounting method of Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (CKM) to study the business cycle in Argentina from 1972 to 2006. The method uses real data together with the equilibrium conditions of a prototype growth model to measure four wedges that are explained by...

We use a variation on the business cycle accounting method of Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan to study the business cycle in Argentina from 1972 to 2006. We use capital utilization as a household decision variable to be able to better extract the wedge that functions as a tax on capital. Applying the...

The paper investigates the nexus between inventory investment and the change in aggregate production for 29 European countries over the period 2000-2009. A special interest is taken in the “Great Recession” of 2008/09. For most countries, a fairly uniform pattern emerges. Inventory...

This model adds to the standard neoclassical model of business fluctuations by introducing a more realistic capital structure problem, where firms have to balance the tax benefits of debt with the costs of potential financial distress.Therefore, firms solve a dynamic problem with both an...