Search Results
Showing results 1 to 4 of approximately 4.
(refine search)
Working Paper
The Trade-Comovement Puzzle
Standard international transmission mechanism of productivity shocks predicts a weak endogenous linkage between trade and business cycle synchronization: a problem known as the trade-comovement puzzle. We provide the foundational analysis of the puzzle, pointing to three natural candidate resolutions: i) financial market frictions; ii) Greenwood–Hercowitz–Huffman preferences; and iii) dynamic trade elasticity that is low in the short run but high in the long run. We show the effects of each of these candidate resolutions analytically and evaluate them quantitatively. We find that, while ...
Report
Understanding international prices: customers as capital
This paper develops a theory of pricing-to-market driven by marketing and bargaining frictions. Our key innovation is a capital theoretic model of marketing in which relations with customers are valuable. In our model, producers search and form long-lasting relations with their customers, and marketing helps overcome the search frictions involved in forming such matches. In the context of international business cycle patterns, the model accounts for observations that are puzzles for a large class of theories: (i) pricing-to-market, (ii) positive correlation of aggregate real export and import ...
Working Paper
Long-Run Trade Elasticity and the Trade-Comovement Puzzle
We show that the trade-comovement puzzle - theory's failure to account for the positive relation between trade and business cycle synchronization - is intimately related to its counterfactual implication that short- and long-run trade elasticities are equal. Based on this insight, we show that modeling the disconnect between the low short- and the high long-run trade elasticity in consistency with the data is promising in resolving the puzzle. In a broader context, our findings are relevant for analyzing business cycle transmission in a large class of models and caution against the use of ...
Report
Insolvency after the 2005 bankruptcy reform
Using a comprehensive panel dataset on U.S. households, we study the effects of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), the most substantive reform of personal bankruptcy in the United States since the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978. The 2005 legislation introduced a means test based on income to establish eligibility for Chapter 7 bankruptcy and increased the administrative requirements to file, leading to a rise in the opportunity cost and, especially, the financial cost of filing for bankruptcy. We study the effects of the reform on bankruptcy, insolvency, ...