Investment in business inventories has averaged roughly one-half of 1 percent of real GDP in the United States over the post–World War II period. Given its relatively minor role as a component of output, it might seem curious that inventory investment has traditionally drawn a great deal of interest from macroeconomists and policymakers. One reason is that although the level of inventory invest...

We consider a simple variant of the standard real business cycle model in which shareholders hire a self-interested executive to manage the firm on their behalf. Delegation gives rise to a generic conflict of interest mediated by a convex (option-like) compensation contract which is able to align the interests of managers and their shareholders. With such a compensation contract, a given increa...

Procyclicality has emerged as a potential drawback to adoption of risk-sensitive bank capital requirements. Systematic risk factors may result in increases (decreases) in bank capital requirements when the economy is depressed (overheated), thereby decreasing (increasing) bank lending capacity and exacerbating business cycle fluctuations. Procyclicality may result from systematic risk emanating...

There is now a great deal of empirical evidence that business cycle fluctuations contain asymmetries. I focus on a theoretical model intended to capture the nonlinear behavior of aggregate output following a large negative shock. Nonlinearity introduced by Bayesian updating and an information externality produces an economy in which the response to large negative shocks is an increase in future...

We develop a generalised impulse response function (GIRF) approach to explore the different impacts of aggregate and sectoral shocks within a VAR-GARCH-M model. Using the output of our GIRF analysis, we explore the behaviour of three European countries (Germany, Spain and the UK). We analyse the aggregate and sectoral responses to discriminate among three different hypotheses of business cycle ...

Quit Turnover and the Business Cycle: A Survey The focus of this chapter is to consider new developments in the search and matching literature where wages, quit turnover and unemployment are endogenously determined in economies with aggregate shocks. The aim of the discussion is not only to highlight possible market failures but also to explain how on-the-job search and employee turnover fundam...

Using a small open economy framework, we model the composition of capital inflows as the equilibrium outcome of emerging market firms’ financing decisions. We show that debt limits, equity issuing costs, and foreign direct investment search costs generate a financing premium and that the ”cheapest” source of financing depends on the phase of the business cycle and past financing decisions. The ...

This chapter assesses how models with search frictions have shaped our understanding of aggregate labor market outcomes in two contexts: business cycle fluctuations and long-run (trend) changes. We first consolidate data on aggregate labor market outcomes for a large set of OECD countries. We then ask how models with search improve our understanding of these data. Our results are mixed. Search ...

Most countries have automatic rules in their tax-and-transfer systems that are intended, at least partly, to stabilize economic fluctuations. We measure how effective these automatic stabilizers are in a modern business-cycle model. We consider the effect of the stabilizers on aggregate demand, on the incentives to work and save, and on the distribution of income across households, all of which...

We build a Dynamic General Equilibrium model with search frictions for the allocation of physical capital and investigate its implications for the business cycle. While the model is in principle capable of generating substantial internal propagation to small exogenous shocks, the quantitative effects are modest once we calibrate the model to fit firm-level capital flows. We then extend the mode...