I add a moral hazard problem between banks and depositors as in Gertler and Karadi (2009) to a DSGE model with a costly state verification problem between entrepreneurs and banks as in Bernanke et al. (1999) (BGG). This modification amplifies the response of the external finance premium and the...

As is well known, one of the major shortcomings of the New Keynesian model (NKM) with Calvo-type price setting is the lack of a microeconomic foundation of its most important building block - price stickiness. In this paper I investigate the ability of a monetary Customer Markets model to...

As GDP is highly correlated with both entering and exiting firms, we develop a totally microfounded DSGE model with endogenous firms entry as well as exit decisions. We show that the simplifying assumption of a constant firms' death rate made by the recent literature on DSGE modelling can lead...

We test the menu cost model of Ball and Mankiw (1994, 1995) on data from the inflation and deflation periods in Japan and Hong Kong. We calculate the moments of the distribution of price changes using a random split procedure to overcome the bias noted by Cecchetti and Bryan (1999). The key...

Expectations matter for economic activity. To the extent that they are fundamentally unwarranted, they represent "undue optimism or pessimism" (Pigou, 1927). In this paper, we identify empirically the effect of undue optimism/pessism ("optimism shocks") on economic activity. In a first step, we...

We show that an otherwise standard one-sector real business cycle model with variable capital utilization and mild increasing returns-to-scale is able to generate qualitatively as well as quantitatively realistic aggregate fluctuations driven by news shocks to two formulations of future...

We offer a new explanation as to why international trade is so volatile in response to economic shocks. Our approach combines the uncertainty shock idea of Bloom (2009) with a model of trade, extending the idea to the open economy. Firms import intermediate inputs from home or foreign suppliers,...

This paper studies the effect of labor market reform on the welfare cost of business cycles. Motivated by the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005, the so-called Hartz reforms, the paper focuses on two labor market institutions: the unemployment insurance system determining search incentives...

We estimate a three-country model using 1995 2013 data for Germany, the Rest of the Euro Area (REA) and the Rest of the World (ROW) to analyse the determinants of Germany s current account (CA) surplus after the launch of the euro. Our results suggest that the German surplus reflects a...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that product creation is procyclical and it occurs largely within existing fi rms. Motivated by these findings, the current paper investigates the role of intrafi rm product scope choice in a general equilibrium economy with oligopolistic producers. We show...