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...

In this paper, the authors study the dynamic behavior of a menu-cost economy where firms are heterogeneous. In this contex t, they generalize the Caplin and Spulber (1987) monetary-neutrality result; show that uniqueness of equilibria depends on the degree of dispersion of firms' positions in...

Aggregate expenditure on durable goods responds too slowly to wealth and other aggregate innovations to be consistent with the simplest frictionless version of PIH (permanent income hypothesis). In this paper I present a model of aggregate expenditure on durab1es that builds up from the lumpy...

The sensitivity of U.S. aggregate investment to shocks is procyclical: the initial response increases by approximately 50% from the trough to the peak of the business cycle. This feature of the data follows naturally from a DSGE model with lumpy microeconomic capital adjustment. Beyond...

The 90s have witnessed a revival in economists' interest and hope of explaining" aggregate and microeconomic investment behavior. New theories, better econometric" procedures, and more detailed panel data sets are behind this movement. Much of the progress" has occurred at the level of...

The conventional wisdom is that politicians' rent-seeking motives increase public debt and deficits. This is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible. An implication of this argument is that governments will under-save during a...

The world has a shortage of financial assets. Asset supply is having a hard time keeping up with the global demand for store of value and collateral by households, corporations, governments, insurance companies, and financial intermediaries more broadly. The equilibrium response of asset prices...