This paper intends to discuss some problematic properties IS-LM and loanable funds together have when dealing with fiscal deficits. Many others have focused on its assumptions for criticism of IS-LM, but I will mainly focus on its fundamental modelling nature. To say more specifically, I will...

This paper introduces the rational inattention hypothesis (RI) -- that agents process information subject to finite channel constraints -- into a stochastic growth model with permanent technology shocks. We find that RI raises consumption volatility relative to output by introducing an...

This paper studies conditions under which demand-side shocks can generate realistic business cycles in RBC models. Although highly persistent demand shocks are necessary for generating procyclical investment, variable capacity utilization and habit formation can reduce the required degree of...

Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies more beneficial than widely thought. This paper shows that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble mini “disasters.” By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using long-run historical data, we show...

The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that malaria, a parasitic disease transmitted by mosquitoes, causes over 300 million episodes of quot;acute illnessquot; and more than one million deaths annually. Most of the deaths occur in poor countries of the tropics, and especially sub-Saharan...

Satiation of need is generally ignored by growth theory. I study a model where consumers may be satiated in any given good but new goods may be introduced. A social planner will never elect a trajectory with long-run satiation. Instead, he will introduce enough new goods to avoid such a...

We develop an aggregate demand analysis of a small open economy based on all agents' dynamic optimization. Murota and Ono (2015) present a simple Keynesian cross analysis with dynamic optimization. This paper extends it to a small-country setting with two factors and two commodities, of which...

Why do advanced economies fall into prolonged periods of economic stagnation, particularly in the aftermath of credit booms? We present a model of persistent aggregate demand shortage based on strong liquidity preferences of households, in which we incorporate financial imperfections to study...

Disaster models are typically agnostic as to what spawns tail events, but are often calibrated on labor shocks. Using a novel way to construct rare event factors using the CEX survey data, I study whether the type of idiosyncratic shock modeled matters empirically. I estimate an augmented...

We document in US data that returns to wealth across households are significantly heterogeneous, and persistently so. Motivated by this observation, we build a tractable general equilibrium model where households face persistent idiosyncratic returns to study the US wealth distribution. We show...