When capacity utilization is allowed to vary, standard equilibrium theory predicts that demand shocks can generate not only closed-economy business cycles that are previously thought explainable only by technology shocks, but also international business cycles that are more consistent with the...

Careful examination of aggregate data from the U.S. and other OECD countries reveals that production and inventory behavior exhibit paradoxical features: 1) Inventory investment is strongly countercyclical at very high frequencies (e.g., 2-3 quarters per cycle); it is procyclical only at...

We merely want to see whether, historically, fast growth of the monetary base has been associated with faster growth of real output.

Postwar U.S. data show that consumption growth "Granger-causes" output and investment growth, which is puzzling if technology is the driving force of the business cycle. The author asks whether general equilibrium models with information frictions and non-technology shocks can rationalize the...

The important point is that both the Chinese trade surplus with the United States and the amassed foreign reserves result from the savings decisions of Chinese consumers.

Investment booms and asset "bubbles" are often the consequence of heavily leveraged borrowing and speculations of persistent growth in asset demand. We show theoretically that dynamic interactions between leveraged borrowing and persistent asset demand can generate a multiplier-accelerator...

Financial capital and fixed capital tend to flow in opposite directions between poor and rich countries. Why? What are the implications of such two-way capital flows for global trade imbalances and welfare in the long run? This paper introduces frictions into a standard two-country neoclassical...

This paper develops an analytically tractable Bewley model of money featuring capital and financial intermediation. It is shown that when money is a vital form of liquidity to meet uncertain consumption needs, the welfare costs of inflation can be extremely large. With log utility and parameter...

This paper uncovers Taylor rules from estimated monetary policy reactions using a structural VAR on U.S. data from 1959 to 2009. These Taylor rules reveal the dynamic nature of policy responses to different structural shocks. We find that U.S. monetary policy has been far more responsive over...