This paper studies the role of credit in the business cycle, with a focus on private credit overhang. Based on a study of the universe of over 200 recession episodes in 14 advanced countries between 1870 and 2008, we document two key facts of the modern business cycle: financial-crisis...

Fluctuations in firms' revenues reduce firms' viability and are costly from a social welfare point of view even when agents are risk neutral if (i) the decision to continue operating a firm is not efficient at the margin so that fluctuations shorten firms' life expectancy (because they increase...

This paper investigates the accuracy and heterogeneity of output growth and inflation forecasts during the current and the four preceding NBER-dated U.S. recessions. We generate forecasts from six different models of the U.S. economy and compare them to professional forecasts from the Federal...

The objective of this Paper is to propose a number of alternative decentralized interpretations of representative agent style stochastic growth economies and to explore their implications for the generality of this model construct. Under our first interpretation, firms exist forever and...

Do firms reduce employment when their insiders (established, incumbent employees) claim higher wages? The conventional answer in the theoretical literature is that insider power has no influence on employment, provided that the newly hired employees (entrants) receive their reservation wages....

How does a monetary union work when labour markets are heterogeneous? Since shocks are transmitted via both trade links and the common monetary policy and propagated via labour market responses, it follows that labour market institutions may have not only national but also union-wide...

This Paper identifies optimal interest-rate rules within a rich, dynamic, general equilibrium model that has been shown to account well for observed aggregate dynamics in the post-war United States. We perform policy evaluations based on second-order accurate approximations to conditional and...