One of the main causes behind the trade collapse of 2008-09 was a significant fall in the demand for durable goods. This paper develops a small country, overlapping generations model of international trade in which goods durability gives rise to a more than proportional fall in trade volumes, as observed in 2008-09. The model has three goods two durable, traded goods and one non-durable, non-tr...

Using a multi-period general equilibrium model, this paper extends the results of Mankiw (1991) by showing that monopolistically competitive firms may require ‘relatively large’ menu costs to dissuade them from changing prices in response to an aggregate demand shock that is perceived to be permanent. Thus, “small” menu costs may be insufficient to contribute to large business cycles. JEL Class...

I show that 1) the policy-relevant “global multiplier” can be written as the sum of a spending component and a taxation component, all scaled up by spillover effects, 2) the “local multiplier” is exactly the spending component, and 3) if trade is anonymous, the local effects of a shock to federal government purchases in a county will be identical to the effects of a shock to consumer demand for...

This paper extends Nolan and Thoenissen (2009), hence NT, model with an explicit financial intermediary that transfer funds from households to entrepreneurs subject to a well defined loan production function. The loan productivity shock is treated as the supply side financial disturbance. Together with NT’s net worth shock that resembles the credit demand perturbation, both of the two-sided sho...

UK regional policy has been advocated as a means of reducing regional disparities and stimulating national growth. However, there is limited understanding of the interregional and national effects of such a policy. This paper uses an interregional computable general equilibrium model to identify the national impact of a policy-induced regional demand shock under alternative labour market closur...

In this paper, we propose a methodology of jointly estimating the demand and cost functions of the differentiated goods oligopoly models when there are both data on demand and cost of firms. An important characteristics of the method is that it deals both with endogeneity of prices from the unobserved quality term, and the endogeneity of output in the cost function from the unobserved cost shoc...

This paper establishes a theoretical and empirical link between the use of aggressive mortgage lending instruments, such as interest only, negative amortization or subprime, mortgages and the underlying house price volatility. Such instruments, which come into existence through innovation or financial deregulation, allow more borrowing than otherwise would occur. Within the context of a theoret...

Although a lot of the empirical research have studied the relationship between changes of oil price and economic activity, it is surprising that little research has been conducted on the relationship between oil price shocks and the Greater China region (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan). Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to apply a detail monthly data from 1997/7 to 2008/9 to fill up this ...

This paper examines how the demand for commodities adjusts to supply shocks, and shows the importance of capturing this adjustment process when calculating welfare effects. A dynamic capital adjustment model for U.S. softwood stumpage markets is developed, and compared to a traditional lagged adjustment model. The results show that timber markets in the U.S. adjusted to the large supply shock o...

This paper analyzes the transmission mechanisms of a contractionary monetary policy shock on the real economy. The sufficiently long regime uniform time period since the political transformation in the Czech Republic provides evidence for effective inflation targeting by the Czech National Bank. I apply a recursive vector autoregression (VAR), a structural VAR, and structural vector error corre...