We study an optimal growth model with one-hoss-shay vintage capital, where labor resources can be allocated freely either to production, technology adoption or capital maintenance. Technological progress is partly embodied. Adoption labor increases the level of embodied technical progress....

Monetary policy is often analysed in terms of simple rules. Such rules may be useful for many purposes, even when they do not describe the actual monetary policy strategy exactly. This paper compares monetary policy in Sweden during the inflation-targeting regime 1993-2002 with the policies...

It has been shown that a one-sector real business cycle model with sufficient increasing returns in production may possess an indeterminate steady state that can be exploited to generate business cycles driven by "animal spirits" of agents. This paper shows how an income tax schedule that...

We construct a vintage capital model à la Whelan (2002) with both exogenous embodied and disembodied technical progress, and variable utilization of each vintage. The lifetime of capital goods is endogenous and it relies on the associated maintenance costs. We study the properties of the...

We prove the existence of monetary equilibrium in a finite horizon economy with production. We also show that if agents expect the monetary authority to significantly decrease the supply of bank money available for short term loans in the future, then the economy will fall into a liquidity trap...

A two-sector real business cycle model, estimated with postwar U.S. data, identifies shocks to the levels and growth rates of total factor productivity in distinct consumption- and investment-goods-producing technologies. This model attributes most of the productivity slowdown of the 1970s to...

In the U.S. labor market, the vacancy-unemployment ratio and employment react sluggishly to productivity shocks. The authors show that the job matching model in its standard form cannot reproduce these patterns due to excessively rapid vacancy responses. Extending the model to incorporate sunk...

This paper examines the historical effects of El Nino on world prices and economic activity. Although the primary focus is on world real non-oil primary commodity prices, the effects on G-7 consumer price inflation and GDP growth are also considered. This paper has several distinct advantages...

In aggregate U.S. data, exogenous shocks to labor productivity induce highly persistent and hump-shaped responses to both the vacancy-unemployment ratio and employment. The authors show that the standard version of the Mortensen-Pissarides matching model fails to replicate this dynamic pattern...

This article discusses a more general interpretation of the two-step minimum distance estimation procedure proposed in earlier work by Sbordone. The estimator is again applied to a version of the New Keynesian Phillips curve, in which inflation dynamics are driven by the expected evolution of...