During the booms that precede crises in emerging economies, policy makers often struggle to limit capital flows and their expansionary consequences. The main policy tool for this task is sterilization - essentially a swap of international reserves for public bonds. However, there is an extensive...

There is increasing empirical evidence that creative destruction, driven by experimentation and the adoption of new products and processes when investment is sunk, is a core mechanism of development. Obstacles to this process are likely to be obstacles to the progress in standards of living....

Emerging market economies are fertile ground for the development of real estate and other financial bubbles. Despite these economies' significant growth potential, their corporate and government sectors do not generate the financial instruments to provide residents with adequate stores of value....

When factors enter into joint-production, they typically develop a degree of specificity with respect to each other. It is well known that, when combined with contracting difficulties, specificity gives rise to a Williamsonian 'Fundamental Transformation' from an ex-ante competitive relationship...

During the booms that precede crises in emerging economies, policymakers often struggle to limit capital flows and their expansionary consequences. The main policy tool for this task is a sterilization of capital inflows - essentially a swap of international reserves for public bonds. Despite...

The basic implications of the frictionless permanent income hypothesis for durable goods purchases are strongly rejected by the data. At the aggregate level there is too much inertia. At the macroeconomic level purchases are too infrequent and lumpy. In principle these rejections can be...

The representative-agent framework has endowed macroeconomists with powerful microeconomic tools. Unfortunately, it has also blurred the distinction between statements that are valid at the individual level and those that apply to the aggregate. In this paper, the author argues that probability...

This paper studies quarterly employment flows of approximately 10,000 U.S. manufacturing establishments. The authors use establishments' hours-week to construct measures of the deviation between desired and actual employment and use these as the establishments' main state variables. The main...

The basic premise of this paper is that understanding aggregate dynamics requires considering that agents are heterogeneous and that they do not adjust continuously to the shocks they perceive. The authors provide a general characterization of lumpy behavior at the microeconomic level in terms...