Empirical studies showed that firm-level volatility has been increasing but the aggregate volatility has been decreasing in the US for the post-war period. This paper proposes a unified explanation for these diverging trends. Our explanation is based on a story of financial development -...

We develop a general-equilibrium model of inventories with explicit micro-foundations by embedding the production-cost-smoothing motive (e.g., Eichenbaum, AER 1989) into an otherwise standard DSGE model. We show that firms facing idiosyncratic cost shocks have incentives to bunch production and...

The profession has been longing for closed-form solutions to consumption functions under uncertainty and borrowing constraints. This paper proposes an analytical approach to solving buffer-stock saving models with both idiosyncratic and aggregate uncertainties. It is shown analytically that an...

How do movements in the distribution of income affect the macroeconomy? Krusell and Smith (1998) analyzed this question in a neoclassical growth model, and their results show that the representative-agent assumption provides a good approximation for aggregate behaviors of heterogeneous agents....

Why are asset prices so much more volatile and so often detached from their fundamentals? Why does the burst of financial bubbles depress the real economy? This paper addresses these questions by constructing an infinite-horizon heterogeneous-agent general-equilibrium model with speculative...

Using a rational expectations model of profit maximizing firms facing demand uncertainty, this paper derives a closed-form relationship between the optimal volume of labor hoarding and other important economic variables such as profit, expected demand, interest rate, inventory level, output...

Why is there inventory investment when its expected rate of return is strictly dominated by that of fixed-capital investment? Why is inventory investment procyclical at business-cycle frequencies but countercyclical at the very high frequencies (e.g., 2-3 quarters per cycle)? Why does the...