Essays in Macroeconomics

This dissertation consists of my essays in macroeconomics. In the first essay, I develop a new general equilibrium model to explain several facts about aggregate inventory that are challenging to existing inventory models. This work highlights the importance of taking into account consumers' search behavior in understanding aggregate inventory dynamics. In the second essay, I adapt a Markov-switching vector autoregression (MS-VAR) to uncover detailed asymmetries embedded in inventory dynamics. This work further demonstrates the shortcomings of existing inventory models and points to new directions in improving inventory models.