Now that Congress has passed the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, regulators promulgating the rules under this new bill must tackle a major problem that the reform bill addresses only indirectly. This is the problem of excessive “leverage” – financing with too...

We study competitive search in goods markets in a heterogeneous-agent monetary model. The model accounts for three stylized facts connecting inflation to consumption inequality, to price dispersion, and to the speed of monetary payments. With competitive search, individuals’ endogenous...

We propose a model that reconciles microeconomic evidence of frequent and large price changes with sizable monetary non-neutrality. Firms incur separate lump-sum costs to change prices and to gather and process some information about marginal costs. Additional relevant information is...

The generation and implementation of ideas, or knowledge, is crucial for economic performance. We study this process in a model of endogenous growth with frictions. Productivity increases with knowledge, which advances via innovation, and with the exchange of ideas from those who generate them...