Michael Christian’s paper presents a human capital account for the United States for the period 1994 to 2006. The main findings are twofold. First, the total human capital stock is about three-quarters of a quadrillion dollars in 2006. This estimate is roughly 55 times gross domestic product (GDP) and 16 times the net stock of fixed assets plus consumer durables. His second finding is that the ...

We develop a tractable two-country overlapping generations model and show analytically that the cross-country differences in financial development help explain three recent empirical facts characterizing international capital flows: financial capital flows from relatively poor to relatively rich countries while FDI flows in the opposite direction; net capital flows are from poor to rich countri...

Using Compustat, we present a surprising empirical fact: that at the firm level, the capital stock is at least as volatile as labor if not more. Given both recent research which has found unexpected large labor movements at the micro-level, and the standard textbook assumption that the capital stock is fixed in the short run, this finding seems even more unforeseen. This result holds for a wide...

Firm-level and sectoral heterogeneity is pervasive in data. Equilibrium models in macro and finance typically assume a representative firm, as in Cochrane (1991). This representative firm paradigm leaves no role for the distribution of capital. We jointly model capital reallocation and asset pricing in a general equilibrium model with two sectors. Existing multisector equilibrium models assume ...

In this paper we show that firms’ market power and flexibility in the utilization of capital crucially affect how investment-specific technology (IST) shocks impact asset prices. We develop a two-sector general equilibrium model in which households have recursive preferences and obtain three main results. First, the equilibrium price of risk for IST shocks changes sign from negative, under fixe...

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there is interest in reforming bank regulation such that capital requirements are more closely linked to a bank’s contribution to the overall risk of the financial system. In our paper we compare alternative mechanisms for allocating the overall risk of a banking system to its member banks. We explicitly take into account that overall risk as well as ea...

This paper investigates how firms dynamically adjust their use of capital, labor, energy, and materials using the Colombian Census of Manufacturing. This Census contains data at the establishment level and provides evidence of a mix of smooth and lumpy adjustments and of interrelated factor adjustments. Based on this evidence, I propose a dynamic firm model that incorporates five key features: ...

In this article we extend the comparative analysis between the results of a pooled OLS regression and the use of fixed effects panel models concerning the determinants of debt, comparing the results of using static panel models and dynamic panel estimators, including the dynamic estimator of correction of fixed effects. The results show that the differences between the results of static panel m...

This paper, considering revenue and cost exposure channels, investigates the effects of exchange rate behaviour on fixed capital investment in Mexican manufacturing sector over 1994-2002. We find that i) currency depreciation has a positive (negative) effect on fixed investment through the export (import) channel; ii) exchange rate volatility impacts mostly export oriented sectors; iii) the sen...

Increasing demand for video content, Mobile broadband and Cloud services are pushing the limits of service provider networks. Service providers need to add network capacity at the lowest cost per bit and reduce their network operations cost. Traditionally, operators have implemented separate networks for separate services (e.g., fixed and mobile) which results in a sub optimal utilization of ne...