We propose a new business cycle theory. Firms need to randomize over firing or keeping workers who have performed poorly in the past, in order to give them an ex-ante incentive to exert effort. Firms have an incentive to coordinate the outcome of their randomizations, as coordination allows them to load the firing probability on states of the world in which it is costlier for workers to become ...

I. Why is it that, in capitalist economies, aggregate variables undergo repeated fluctuations about trend, all of essentially the same character? Prior to Keynes’ General Theory, the resolution of this question was regarded as one of the main outstanding challenges to economic research, and attempts to meet this challenge were called business cycle theory. Moreover, among the interwar business ...

This paper examines an overlapping generations version of the Shapley-Shubik market game. We show existence of equilibria for the simple one commodity model and analyze the dynamics of the equilibrium trajectories generated in the model. Because of the non-linearities generated by strategic interaction of agents in the model, we find that complex and chaotic equilibrium dynamics are possible in...

This paper develops an empirical macroeconomic framework to analyze the relationship between major political disruptions and business cycles of a country. We combine a new dataset of political revolutions (mass domestic political campaigns to remove dictators and juntas) across the world since 1960, with coup data and traditional macro data (of output, investment, trade, inflation and exchange ...

We studied the cyclical and growth properties of Brazilian per capita output from 1850 to 2000. Contrary to the experience of some developed countries, we did not find large changes in the volatility of per capita output. However, we obtained evidence that the oscillations in economic activity became more persistent after World War II.

This paper presents two dynamic models of the economy in which credit constraints arise because creditors cannot force debtors to repay debts unless the debts are secured by collateral. The credit system becomes a powerful propagation mechanism by which the effects of shocks persist and amplify through the interaction between collateral values, borrowers' net worth and credit limits. In particu...

convergence hypothesis is one of the results of neoclassical growth model, which has been examined recently. this hypothesis has two forms of absolute and conditional beta-convergence and implies that regions with lower per capita output have higher per capita growth rates. since there is no data for regional gdp in iran, there has been n study to test convergence hypothesis in iran. our main c...