This paper contributes to the literature on the changing transmission mechanism of monetary policy by introducing a model whose parameter evolution explicitly depends on the conduct of monetary policy. We find that the model fits the data well, in particular when complemented with an estimated...

Differences in electoral rules and/or legislative, executive or legal institutions across countries induce different mappings from election outcomes to distributions of power. We explore how these different mappings affect voters’ participation in a democracy. Assuming heterogeneity in the...

Since World War II there have been about fifty episodes of large-scale mass killings of civilians and massive forced displacements. They were usually meticulously planned and independent of military goals. We provide a model where conflict onset, conflict intensity and the decision to commit...

An important source of systemic risk is overlapping portfolio exposures among financial institutions. We develop a model where institutions form connections through swaps of projects in order to diversify their individual risk. These connections lead to two different network structures. In a...

We exploit time variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer-employee data to assess the role of the firm as an internal credit market. In less developed local credit markets firms can offer a atter wage-tenure profile than firms in more developed credit...

This paper studies capital adjustment at the establishment level. Our goal is to characterize capital adjustment costs, which are important for understanding both the dynamics of aggregate investment and the impact of various policies on capital accumulation. Our estimation strategy searches for...

Economic growth in Africa has long been disappointing. We document that the financial sectors of most sub-Saharan African countries remain significantly underdeveloped by the standards of other developing countries. We examine the factors that are associated with financial development in Africa...

Measuring and displaying uncertainty around path-forecasts, i.e. forecasts made in period T about the expected trajectory of a random variable in periods T+1 to T+H is a key ingredient for decision making under uncertainty. The probabilistic assessment about the set of possible trajectories that...

This paper studies the dynamic optimization problem of a household when portfolio adjustment is costly. The analysis is motivated by the observation that on a monthly basis, less than 10% of stockholders typically adjust their portfolio of common stocks. We use this, and related observations, to...

Barber and Odean (2000) study the relationship between trading frequency and returns. They find that households who trade more frequently have a lower net return than other households. But all households have about the same gross return. They argue that these results cannot emerge from a model...