To analyze business fixed investment in Japan, which has been unusually volatile in recent years, we develop and apply a loglinear flexible accelerator model. We find that movements in business fixed investment are consistent with movements in output and the tax- adjusted cost of capital, both...

In this article I provide a perspective on the current state of modern business cycle theory. This theory has developed from an application of the Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium framework to the neoclassical growth model. On the positive side, this approach is able to accommodate various...

The paper presents a model of a monetary economy where there are differences in liquidity across assets. Money circulates because it is more liquid than other assets, not because it has any special function. There is a spectrum of returns on assets, reflecting their differences in liquidity. The...

Housing is a long-lived asset whose value is sensitive to variations in long-term growth and interest rates. When a large fraction of the population is leveraged, housing price fluctuations cause large-scale redistribution and consumption volatility. We examine policies to mitigate the impact of...

This paper is a theoretical study into how credit constraints interact with aggregate economic activity over the business cycle. We construct a model of a dynamic economy in which lenders cannot force borrowers to repay their debts unless the debts are secured. In such an economy, durable assets...

The classical and early neoclassical economists knew that the essential function of money was its role as a medium of exchange; Recently, this idea has been formalized using search-theoretic noncooperative equilibrium models of the exchange process. The goal of this paper is to use a simple model...

We examine the effects of shocks to aggregate productivity, foreign output demand, government expenditures, and demand for foreign liquidity on dynamics of products and exports of heterogeneous firms. The framework is motivated by open economy general equilibrium models of Bilbie, Ghironi and...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model that attempts to reconcile the observation that aggregate movements of exports and imports are disconnected from real exchange rate movements, while firm-level exports co-move significantly with the real exchange rate. Firms are...

We introduce liquidity frictions into an otherwise standard DSGE model with nominal and real rigidities and ask: Can a shock to the liquidity of private paper lead to a collapse in short-term nominal interest rates and a recession like the one associated with the 2008 U.S. financial crisis? Once...