What fraction of the business cycle volatility of government purchases is accounted for as endogenous reactions to overall macroeconomic conditions? We answer this question in the framework of a neoclassical representative household model where the provision of a public consumption good is...

I provide empirical evidence that badly governed firms respond more to aggregate shocks than do well governed firms. I build a simple model where managers are prone to over-invest and where shareholders are more willing to tolerate such a behavior in good times. The model successfully explains...

This paper studies the provision of incentives to reallocate capital when managers are reluctant to relinquish control and have private information about the productivity of assets under their control. We show that when managers get private benefits from running projects substantial bonuses are...

Standard RBC models predict forecastable movements in output, consumption and hours that differ from those obtained from a VAR estimated on US data. The paper investigates whether introducing bounded rationality and learning generates business cycles properties which are empirically plausible....

Gali (1999) used a VAR with productivity and hours worked to argue that technology shocks are negatively correlated with labor and are unimportant for the business cycle. More recently, Beaudry and Portier (2003) studied a VAR in productivity and stock prices. Remarkably, they found that the...

Recessions appear to be times when markets function less efficiently. This phenomenon has been the domain of theories that rely on changes in preferences (demand shocks) or constraints on price-setting (sticky prices). In our simple model of decentralized trade with asymmetric information,...

We present a tractable model of state-dependent pricing and study the incentive for firms to adjust their price in response to shocks. We find a distinct asymmetry in this response. Positive shocks generate greater price flexibility (and smaller output effects) than negative shocks of the same...

Recent empirical work using structural VARs with long-run restrictions assesses whether hours worked per capita rises or falls following a technology improvement. This literature reaches divergent conclusions on the sign of this effect, depending on whether hours worked enters the VAR in...