We draw on stylized facts from the finance literature to build a model where altering the relative costs of bank and bond financing changes the entire distribution of firm size, with implications for the aggregate capital stock, output, and welfare. Reducing transactions costs in the bond market increases the output and profits of mid-sized firms at the expense of both the largest and smallest firms. In contrast, reducing the frictions involved in bank lending promotes the expansion of the smallest firms while all other firms shrink, even as it increases the profitability of both small and mid-size firms. Although both policies increase aggregate output and welfare, they have opposite effects on the extensive margin of production--promoting bond issuance causes exit while cheaper bank credit induces entry. When reducing transactions costs in one market, the resulting increase in output and welfare are largest when transactions costs in the other market are very high.

This paper studies the transitional dynamics in a quality ladder model of endogenous growth in which North-South trade leads to technological diffusion through reverse engineering of intermediate goods. The concept of learning-to-learn is incorporated into both imitative and innovative processes, which in turn drive domestic technological progress. International trade with imitation leads to feedback effects between Southern imitators and Northern innovators who compete for the world market. Consequently, both regions face transition paths dependent on their relative technologies. We solve the model numerically to illustrate the transition paths and welfare effects of Southern trade liberalization. While particular welfare results depend on parameter choices, we demonstrate that focusing solely on steady-state results can lead to incorrect welfare interpretations.

The evidence of the last 20 years of recurring output busts and rapid reversals of the current account in emerging markets indicates that domestic agents may not be able to borrow in international capital markets to fully insure themselves against internal and external shocks. This paper models this phenomenon as a form of excess volatility by introducing a financial friction into a stochastic model of a small open economy. The financial friction limits the current account deficit to a fixed fraction of gross domestic product. The paper shows that conditional volatility and asymmetry are significant statistical characteristics of the GDP and current account that reflect the excess volatility and the current account reversals. The economic model can explain the conditional volatility and asymmetry of Mexican GDP and the current account.

The composition of capital inflows to emerging market economies tends to follow a predictable dynamic pattern across the business cycle. In most emerging market economies, total inflows are procyclical, with debt and portfolio equity flowing in first, followed later in the expansion by foreign direct investment (FDI). To understand the dynamic composition of these flows, we use a small open economy (SOE) framework to model the composition of capital inflows as the equilibrium outcome of emerging market firms' financing decisions. We show how costly external financing and FDI search costs generate a state-contingent cost of financing such that the cheapest source of financing depends on the phase of the business cycle. In this manner, the financial frictions are able to explain the interaction between the types of flows and deliver a time-varying composition of flows, as well as other standard features of emerging market business cycles. If, as this work suggests, flows are an equilibrium outcome of firms' financing decisions, then volatility of capital inflows is not necessarily bad for an economy. Furthermore, using capital controls to shut down one type of flow and encourage another is certain to have both short- and long-run welfare implications.

The cyclical components of U.S. macroeconomic time series exhibit significant nonlinearities. Standard equilibrium models of business cycles cannot replicate nonlinear features of the data. Applying the efficient method of moments (Gallant, A.R., Tauchen, G., 1996. Which moments to match? Econometric Theory 12(4), 657-681) to build an algorithm that searches over the model's parameter space establishes the parameterization that best allows replication of all statistical properties of the data. The results show that under this parameterization, the model captures nonlinearities in investment but fails to account for observed properties of consumption.

A simple intellectual property rights (IPR) framework is introduced into a dynamic quality ladder model of technological diffusion between innovating firms in one country and imitating firms in another country. The presence of technological spillovers and feedback effects between firms in the two countries demonstrates that preferred IPR regimes are ones that positively affect world growth and, hence, welfare in both countries. Most existing models of international IPRs, however, generally find that high intellectual property enforcement in the imitating country leads to welfare gains in the innovating country at the expense of the imitating country. A well-designed IPR regime imposed at the time of trade liberalization will be welfare-enhancing for both regions relative to trade liberalization without IPR enforcement. Moreover, the preferred IPR regime will be one that maintains competition from imitative activity but enforces some remuneration to innovators for the spillovers they generate.

The recent collapse of the Argentine currency board raises new questions about the desirability of formal fixed exchange rate regimes. This paper examines the relative performance of a currency board with costly abandonment in the presence of dollarized liabilities to a fully discretionary regime. Our results demonstrate that neither regime necessarily dominates with only idiosyncratic firm shocks, but discretion unambiguously dominates with the addition of shocks to the dollar-euro rate. The relatively strong performance of the discretionary regime in this model stems from the benign impact of dollarized liabilities on the monetary authority's time inconsistency problem.