This paper presents empirical evidence concerning effects of cultural differences on parents' attitudes toward children from unique U.S. and Japanese survey data. These data sets have been collected by Osaka University, and contain questions concerning worldviews and religions, hypothetical...

Illiquid secondary asset markets have adverse effects on firms' funding conditions and investment decisions. Yet, the micro-foundations of asset liquidity and the impact on aggregate business cycle, and the transmission of (unconventional) monetary policy interventions are scarcely explored. We...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy in a small open economy under flexible prices. The paper's key innovation is to analyze this question in the context of environments where only a fraction of agents participate in asset market transactions (i.e., asset markets are segmented). In this...

The paper revisit the issue of whether tax competition is a race to the bottom. I analyze tax competion among a continuum of competing host countries facing an upward†sloping supply of would be igrants. Capital move freely across the host country economies. I show how the fiscal burden of...

We use three different micro data sets, the European Labor Force Survey, the Current Population Survey, and the German Microcensus, to obtain annual hours worked for various demographic subgroups in the US and 18 European countries. One major difficulty in constructing annual hours from micro...

We provide a disaster-based explanation for the failure of the CAPM in the post-Compustat sample as well as its success to explain the value premium in the long sample that includes the Great Depression. In an investment-based asset pricing model embedded with rare disasters, value stocks are...

Quantifying the gains from international trade is an area of research that has been widely studied using a variety of trade models. At the same time, it has been shown that non-homotheticities are useful for matching the systematic patterns of trade present in disaggregated trade data. We bring...

This paper studies the role of credit in the business cycle, with a focus on private credit overhang. Based on a study of the universe of over 200 recession episodes in 14 advanced countries between 1870 and 2008, we document two key facts of the modern business cycle: financial-crisis...

When the microeconomic adjustment underlying an aggregate variable is lumpy, conventional VAR procedures often imply less persistence than there really is. This is relevant for non-, semi- and structural models in macroeconomics. The extent to which persistence is underestimated decreases with...