This dissertation comprises three distinct economic stduies. The first deals with the origin of business cycle fluctuations and the other two with the measurement of financial constraints and the identification of the respective treatment effect.

The paper studies empirically how relative supply and demand conditions on the capital market affected US firm-level investment over the business cycles from 1977 to 2011. A dynamic econometric specification of capital accumulation including sales growth, Tobin's q, the cash flow-capital ratio...

In this paper we present Aino 3.0, the latest vintage of the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used at the Bank of Finland for policy analysis. Aino 3.0 is a small-open economy DSGE model at the intersection of the recent literatures on so-called TANK (“Two-Agent New...

This paper argues that Hyman Minsky's financial instability hypothesis weaves together a medium term Keynesian approach to the business cycles in the spirit of Samuelson (1936) and Hicks (1950) with long cycle thinking of economists such as Schumpeter (1939) and Kondratieff. Post Keynesians have...

The role of fiscal austerity has been questioned for centuries, but a rapidly increasing deficit along with the financial crisis in 2007 / 2008 influenced a renewed debate on the economics of austerity. This paper analyzes the role of austerity versus the role of economic growth. It also...