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...

A central determinant of the political economy of capital-labor relations is the appropriability of specific quasi-rents. This paper is concerned with the general-equilibrium interaction of appropriability and characteristics of technology--namely, the embodiment of technology in capital and...

This paper assembles elements that are essential in forming an integral picture of the way a "churning" economy functions and of the disruptions caused by transactional difficulties in labor and financial markets. We couch our analysis in a stochastic equilibrium model anchored with U.S....

The pace of industrial innovation and growth is shaped by many forces that interact in complicated ways. Profit-maximizing firms pursue new ideas to obtain market power, but the pursuit of the same goal by other means that even successful inventions art eventually superseded by others; this...

Large Japanese banks often engaged in sham loan restructurings that kept credit flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers (which we call zombies). We examine the implications of suppressing the normal competitive process whereby the zombies would shed workers and lose market share. The congestion...

Hidden behind a number of economic crises in the mid- to late 1990s-including Argentina's headline-grabbing monetary and political upheaval-is that fact that Latin American economies have, generally speaking, improved dramatically in recent years. Their success has been due, in large part, to...

Over the past fifteen years, a significant number of industrialized and middle-income countries have adopted inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policymaking. As the name suggests, in such inflation-targeting regimes, the central bank is responsible for achieving a publicly announced...

We study the effects of aggregate and idiosyncratic uncertainty on the entry of firms, total investment, and prices in a competitive industry with irreversible investment. We first use standard dynamic programming methods to determine firms' entry decisions, and we describe the resulting...