We investigate the concepts of ‘activist macroeconomic policy’ and ‘stabilization’ within an optimal taxation framework when insurance markets are incomplete.

The literature on financial imperfections and business cycles has focused onpropagation mechanisms. In this paper we model a purereversion mechanism, such that the economy may converge to a two-period equilibrium cycle. This mechanism confirms that financial imperfections may have a dramatic...

A civic society is distinguished by its language and its law. In this paper I suggest a theory that links these institutions via the notion of a standard contract. The theory is based upon two observations: that contracts are compiled in words, and that more common (standardized) words are...

This paper is motivated by the observation that individuals sometimes tend to use a contract just because others have done so before. To put it more technically, the cost of executing a transaction under an existing standard seems to be much lower than doing so under a new innovation. The...

In this paper we argue that firms' financial distress should play a greater role in the macroeconomic analysis of the business cycle. We provide a non-technical account of a general equilibrium model that exhibits financially-driven equilibrium cycles. We show that the empirical evidence is...

In this paper we construct an evolutionary theory of bankruptcy law in which bankruptcy law is perceived as a mechanism for standardizing the default clauses in debt contracts. Our theory is motivated by the comparative histories of England and the US. A central normative question is why...

Motivated by the observation that exchange-rate management resembles market-making, we use microstructure theory to conduct a welfare analysis of exchange-rate management, including the “corner solutions” of a free float and a fixed peg. We show that a policy that smoothes out exchange-rate...

We use a unique data set to study how U.K. banks deal with financially distressed small and medium-sized companies under a ‘contractualist’ bankruptcy system. Unlike in the U.S., these procedures limit the discretion of courts to strict enforcement of debt contracts, without any dilution of...

This paper explores the business cycle implications of financial distress and bankruptcy law. We find that due to the presence of financial imperfections the effect of liquidations on the price of capital goods can generate endogenous fluctuations. We show that a law reform that ‘softens’...

We argue that, ceteris paribus, introducing a habit that resolves the equity–premium puzzle is equivalent to increasing the Arrow-Pratt coefficient of relative risk aversion, AP-RRA. If we constrain the AP-RRA to a constant ‘acceptable’ level, the effect on the equity premium is...