In this paper I develop a dynamic structural model in which a firm makes rational decisions to buy or sell assets in the presence of idiosyncratic and aggregate productivity shocks. By identifying equilibrium asset prices, the model produces an industry with a well-defined panel of firms and jointly analyzes firms’ investment decisions and the aggregate activity of asset sales over the business...

This paper contributes to the literature on the role of technology shocks as source of the business cycle in two ways. First, we document that time-series of US productivity and hours are apparently affected by a structural break in the late 60’s, which is likely due to a major change in the monetary policy. Second, we show that the importance of demand shocks over the business cycle has sharpl...

This paper constructs a model economy to explain how uncertainty shocks can cause business cycle fluctuations. In the model, during times of high uncertainty, the representative agent, due to risk aversion motives, moves resources from a high risk/high return production process to a low risk/low return production process. High uncertainty thus causes the firm level technology frontier to endoge...

This paper studies optimal investment and dynamic behaviour of stochastically growing economies. We assume neither convex technology nor bounded support of the productivity shocks. A number of basic results concerning the investment policy and the Ramsey–Euler equation are established. We also prove a fundamental dichotomy pertaining to optimal growth models perturbed by standard econometric sh...

In this paper, we argue that firing decisions of firms can help explain the shape of the wage distribution. To emphasize this result, we consider a matching model with both idiosyncratic productivity shocks that hit jobs and heterogeneity of workers according to ex ante unobservable abilities. Computation experiments show that the model can generate a hump-shaped wage distribution despite assum...

Standard real business cycle models must rely on total factor productivity (TFP) shocks to explain the observed comovement of consumption, investment, and hours worked. This paper shows that a neoclassical model consistent with observed heterogeneity in labor supply and consumption can generate comovement in the absence of TFP shocks. Intertemporal substitution of goods and leisure induces como...

The 2007-2009 recession has witnessed two phenomena that standard search models of the labor market have difficulty reconciling: a large and persistent increase in unemployment and a sharp rise, above pre-recession levels, in labor productivity following a small initial drop. In addition, these observations were accompanied by a significant increase in the dispersion of firm growth rates. In th...

After the fall in fertility during the demographic transition, many developed countries experienced a baby bust, followed by the baby boom and subsequently a return to low fertility (BBB event). Demographers have linked these large fluctuations in fertility to the series of ‘economic shocks’ that occurred with similar timing – the Great Depression, World War II (WWII), the economic expansion th...

Recently, a number of studies have departed from the mainstream view that in order to explain economic fluctuations in emerging markets, theoretical models must take explicitly into account the role of policy and market failures. This line of research argues that business cycles in emerging countries can be explained well using a neoclassical model featuring no distortions and driven solely by ...