We present a search-and-matching model of the housing market where potential buyers' willingness to pay is private information and sellers may become desperate as they are unable to sell. A unique steady state equilibrium exists where desperate sellers offer sizeable price cuts and sell faster....

This paper argues that the cross-sectional approach to durations is essential to understand nominal rigidity because this captures the fact that price-spells are generated by firms' price-setting behavior. Since the distribution of durations is dominated by a proliferation of short contracts,...

The seminal Barro (2006) closed-economy model of the equity risk premium in the presence of extreme events (disasters) allowed for leverage in the form of risky corporate debt which defaulted only in states when the Government defaulted on its debt. The probability of default was therefore...

This paper uses a simple new-Keynesian model (with and without capital) and calculates multipliers of four types. That is, we assume either an increase in government spending or a cut in sales/labor/capital tax that is financed by lump-sum taxes (Ricardian evidence holds). We argue that...

Forward-looking RE models such as the popular New Keynesian (NK) model do not provide a unique prediction about how the model economy behaves. We need some mechanism that ensures determinacy. McCallum (2011) says it is not needed because models are learnable only with the determinate solution...

In a Bertrand duopoly model, it is shown that an anti-dumping regulation can be strategically exploited by the domestic firm to reduce the degree of competition in the domestic market. The domestic firm commits not to export to the foreign market which gives the foreign firm a monopoly in its...

This paper analyses how product differentiation affects the volume of trade under duopoly using Shubik-Levitan demand functions rather than the Bowley demand functions used by Bernhofen (2001). The Shubik-Levitan demand functions have the advantage that an increase in product differentiation...

The current subprime crisis has prompted us to look again into the nature of risk at the tail of the distribution. In particular, we investigate the risk contribution of an asset, which has infrequent but huge losses, to a portfolio using two risk measures, namely Value-at-Risk (VaR) and...