We use novel and unique data to study the effect of price changes in the market for luxury and middle class homes. We find that luxury home sales respond less to price changes than the middle-class home sales; in the market for luxury homes, past prices affect current prices; luxury home prices...

How far do China’s property prices need to drop in order to send the country into a recession? What does this question tell us about the way Bubble Economies work? In this paper, we develop a theory of Bubble Economics – non-linear and often “systemic” (in the mathematical sense of the...

This paper examines the macroprudential roles of bank capital regulation and monetary policy in a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model with endogenous financial frictions and a borrowing cost channel. We identify various transmission channels through which credit risk, commercial bank...

In this paper we investigate the quantitative importance of efficiency wages in explaining fluctuations in Bulgarian labor markets. This is done by augmenting an otherwise standard real business cycle model a la Long and Plosser (1983) with unobservable workers effort by employers and wage...

In this paper we introduce reciprocity in labor relations and government sector to investigate how well the real wage rigidity that results out of that arrangement ex- plains business cycle fluctuations in Bulgaria. The reciprocity mechanism described in this paper follows Danthine and Kurmann...

Motivated by the high public employment, and the public wage premia observed in Europe, a Real-Business-Cycle model, calibrated to German data (1970-2007), is set up with a richer government spending side, and an endogenous private-public sector labor choice. To illustrate the effects of fiscal...

This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between rent-seeking behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill, which is taken to represent the rent component. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals...

This paper studies the wasteful effect of bureaucracy on the economy by addressing the link between opportunistic behavior of government bureaucrats and the public sector wage bill. In particular, public officials are modeled as individuals competing for a larger share of those public funds. A...

This paper shows that a modified real business cycle (RBC) model, one that includes home production and fiscal spending shocks, can solve one of the RBC puzzles and generates zero correlation between wages and hours. In addition, the micro-founded model presented here provides a sound...

We present a model in which banks and other financial intermediaries face both occasionally binding borrowing constraints, and costs of equity issuance. Near the steady state, these intermediaries can raise equity finance at no cost through retained earnings. However, even moderately large...