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This paper analyzes the effect on the economy dynamics of alternative formulations of habit persistence in an endogenous growth model. The focus is on the impact on the convergence speed, which is the key determinant of the local dynamics. In contrast with previous numerical results, we show that the external-habits economy may converge at a higher, lower or equal rate than the internal-habits economy depending on the specification of the utility function. We also prove that the higher the strength of habits and the lower the speed of adjustment of habits to current consumption, the lower the convergence speed.

We consider optimal monetary policy in New Keynesian models with inertia due to lagged effects of inflation and output. We characterize the conditions for the unconditionally optimal equilibrium and compare them with those identifying optimality from the timeless perspective. Implementation of optimal policy is considered via construction of suitable interest-rate rules. We characterize the collection of all interest-rate rules consistent with the optimal equilibrium, and we identify among them an expectations-based rule that guarantees uniqueness and stability under learning.

A major development in recent decades in industrialized countries is the decline in national savings rates. Over the same period, in many countries the labor's share of national income has declined and liberalizing labor market reforms have been implemented. This paper seeks to provide a unified account of these developments. We show that globalization, in the form of increased capital mobility, provides incentives to implement labor market reforms that raise the returns to capital and improve efficiency. Nevertheless, in a world where aggregate savings reflect life-cycle motives and are mainly performed out of labor income, the associated fall in the labor share reduces aggregate savings and the pace of capital accumulation.

People who face adverse economic prospects save in order to maintain consumption. During wars and other periods of distress, the incentive to save was so strong that there would have been excess saving and a corresponding excess supply of commodities without a negative real interest rate. During the Great Depression, the interest rate mechanism failed to achieve macroeconomic equilibrium because the nominal interest rate could not fall further and deflation produced a positive real interest rate. The lesson from American economic history is that central banks should accept moderate inflation if an adverse political or economic shock causes consumer pessimism.

This paper considers an optimal pricing model in continuous time that combines state and time dependent elements usually examined separately in the literature. In this model we find that recessions and booms are of roughly equal amplitude, contrary to results in Ball and Mankiw (1994) and Conlon and Liu (1997). On the other hand, while the amplitudes of booms and recessions are similar, their lengths differ. Applying the intuition developed in Ball and Mankiw to our model indicates that firms raise prices less frequently during recessions but more frequently during booms, so price-setters respond to booms more quickly.

There is now considerable evidence that a range of institutional, legal, cultural, political and religious variables determine financial development. But economists have conjectured that the presence of diversification opportunities in the real economy can also shape the development of the financial sector. This paper finds evidence in support of this conjecture. Both the OLS estimates, and the IV results, which use instruments derived from topographical characteristics, suggest that increased economic concentration can impede financial development. Thus, financial underdevelopment might have not only socio-cultural and political causes. Risk diversification opportunities in the real economy might also be key.

This paper incorporates a distortionary tax into a micro-foundations of money framework and revisits the optimum quantity of money. The money constraint in the decentralized market plays a key role in the optimal policy. Only if the constraint is binding can fiscal policy increase the buyer's surplus; monetary, but not fiscal, policy affects the agents' bargaining position, leaving a special role for monetary policy. If the buyer's surplus share is inefficiently small, the intensive margin is distorted and the constrained optimal policy includes a money growth rate above that prescribed by the Friedman rule, even in the presence of fiscal policy instruments. This effect is also present under competitive pricing.

It is well-established that the presence of deterministic and/or stochastic trends in DSGE models may imply that the agents' objective functions attain infinite values. This is the case even if the subjective discount factor is strictly less than one. Currently, sufficient conditions ensuring finiteness of the objective functions when deterministic and stochastic trends are included have not been derived. This paper derives such conditions.

This paper applies the business cycle accounting method à la Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007) to a standard neoclassical small open economy model and assesses the economic crises in Hong Kong, Korea and Thailand. Quantitative results show that distortions in production efficiency are important in all countries in accounting for the sudden output collapses while distortions in the investment and international financial markets are not. If domestic or international financial frictions are the main source of the Asian crisis, they must have operated through total factor productivity (TFP).

We study some economic consequences of aging in a general equilibrium overlapping generations model in which agents make optimal retirement decisions. The transitional dynamics of the economy are sensitive to the nature of the aging process, that is, the balance of declining fertility and rising longevity. Population aging unambiguously increases capital intensity in the long-run, but a rise in longevity that improves the health of the population will delay retirement and consequently decrease capital intensity in the short-run. The joint long-run effect of declining fertility and rising longevity on capital intensity is more than additive.

This paper studies the implications for inflation dynamics of introducing non-price competition into a New Keynesian model featuring both nominal rigidities, which are in the form of staggered prices, and real rigidities, which are in the form of strategic complementarities in price setting. Under very general assumptions, we show that the presence of non-price competition among firms dampens the overall degree of real rigidities in the economy, thereby increasing the sensitivity of inflation to movements in real marginal costs. Because of this property, our analysis provides additional insights to the existing theories on real rigidities, showing that the strong linkage between real rigidities and the sensitivity of inflation to real marginal costs that has been found in previous works is not robust across alternative assumptions about inter-firms competition.

In this paper, we examine the link between stock market uncertainty and monetary policy in the U.S. There are strong arguments as to why central banks should account for stock market uncertainty in their strategies. Amongst others, they can maintain the functioning of financial markets and moderate economic downswings. To describe the behavior of the Federal Reserve Bank, augmented forward-looking Taylor rules are estimated by GMM. The standard specification is expanded by measures of stock market uncertainty. We show that given certain levels of inflation and output, U.S. central bank rates are significantly lower when stock market uncertainty is high and vice versa. This result is valid for all tested measures of financial uncertainty.

This paper analyzes the interaction between inflation and the long-run levels of employment and output growth in a Schumpeterian growth model with quality improving innovations under nominal price rigidity. At the unique REE steady state equilibrium, both employment and growth are hump-shaped functions of money growth peaking at positive inflation rates.

This study examines the effect of shocks observed in financial markets on output and employment during the Great Depression. We present three main findings. First, an adverse financial shock leads to a decline in the manufacturing sector’s output and employment that peaks about 11 months afterward. Next, this shock has a much greater impact on the durables sector than the nondurables sector. Last, continuing financial market weakness in 1933 and 1934 may have restrained the recovery from the Great Depression. The findings suggest that financial market weakness contributed to the length and depth of the Great Depression, and that this occurred mainly through the investment channel. In addition, a counterfactual analysis using the estimates from the Great Depression suggests that the recent recession would have been less severe without the financial market disruptions in the fall of 2008.

Maccini, Moore, and Schaller (2004, hereafter MMS) recently uncovered a long-run inverse relationship between interest rates and finished goods in a number of nondurables industries and the nondurables sector overall. Their primary innovation is a regime-switching model of the real interest rate. This paper extends that model to include work-in-process and raw material inventories as well as industries that produce to order. A cointegrating model similar to that of MMS is then estimated for all three types of inventories and all industries in both the durables and nondurables sectors. The results reinforce the MMS conclusion of a long-run inverse relationship between the real interest rate and finished goods during the 1967-1997 period. But the results for the durables sectors, work-in-process and raw materials, and the 1997-2007 period are generally much less supportive. Moreover, results for the manufacturing aggregates suggest that the overall responses are small.

Many empirical studies argue that the inertial behavior of policy rates in industrialized countries can be well explained by a linear partial adjustment version of the Taylor rule. However, the explanatory power of the lagged interest rate has been questioned from various points of view. This paper formally examines a situation in which a central bank has an aversion to frequent policy reversals. Imposing an irreversibility constraint on the control space makes the lagged interest rate a state variable. However, the policy function cannot then be expressed as a partial adjustment form, even if the original Taylor rule would be the correct policy function in the absence of the irreversibility constraint. The simulation results reveal that conventional regression tends to falsely support the functionally misspecified partial adjustment model. This implies that the significant role of the lagged interest may simply reflect the central banks’ aversion to policy reversal.

Surveys taken in Bulgaria in both 2008 and 2009 show that people who had experienced a loss during an earlier banking crisis are significantly more likely to expect a new crisis. This result holds despite more than a decade between the earlier crisis and the surveys as well as the dramatically improved performance and stability of both the financial sector and the economy in the meantime. The loss experience also affects behavior. People who experienced a loss in the earlier crisis were more likely to have withdrawn funds from bank deposits in the midst of the international banking crisis in 2009.

In the New Keynesian model, even if the central bank does not have an over-ambitious output target, policy under discretion leads to an inefficiency known as the stabilization bias. In this paper, using a New Keynesian model, we explore and quantify how a cost channel and multi-period data revisions affect the size of the stabilization bias. We find that the presence of a cost channel in the model increases the stabilization bias significantly. On the other hand, multi-period revisions to output and inflation reduce the inefficiency associated with discretionary policy.

This paper develops a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model in which intertemporal fluctuations (and sectoral co-movement) are driven by idiosyncratic shocks to relative preferences among consumption goods. This class of shocks may be interpreted as shifts in consumer tastes. When shifts in preferences occur, consumers associate a new and different level of satisfaction to the same basket of consumption goods according to their modified preferences. This paper shows that if the initial composition of the consumption basket is sufficiently asymmetric, then a shift in relative preferences produces a “perception effect” strong enough to induce both intersectoral and intrasectoral positive co-movement of the main macroeconomic variables (i.e., output, consumption, investment, and employment). Furthermore, by extending the theoretical framework to a multisector model and introducing a more flexible structure for the relative-preference shock, we show that the parameter restrictions needed to observe sectoral co-movement after a relative-preference shock are much less severe. In particular, co-movement among most of the sectors emerges under general conditions, without requiring high levels of asymmetry in the consumption basket's composition and/or high aversion to risk. It is a welcome result that these findings are reached without introducing aggregate technology shocks, input-output linkages, or shocks perturbing the relative preference between aggregate consumption and leisure.

Data for the U.S. and the Euro-zone (12) during the post-Bretton Woods period show that nominal and real exchange rates are more volatile than consumption, very persistent, and highly correlated with each other. Open-economy models with price stickiness and local-currency pricing often require an average duration above 4 quarters to approximate those stylized facts. I argue that limited and asymmetric information introduces a lag in the consumption decisions, and as a result the real exchange rate becomes more volatile to ensure that goods markets clear at all times. Hence, informational frictions can explain the volatility of the real exchange rate without imposing price stickiness above the available estimates (e.g., Galí et al., 2001). I also find that differences in price stickiness across markets weaken the correlation between the nominal exchange rate and the CPI ratio between countries. This can increase the persistence of the real exchange rate, but often by worsening the model along other dimensions (e.g., by lowering the correlation between nominal and real exchange rates).

The communication of ideas fosters technological progress and prevents regress. This paper develops a growth model wherein an economy's technology is endogenous to agents' communication decisions. In equilibrium, there is too little communication and insufficient risk-taking relative to the first best. The model can generate an abrupt take-off of output growth without an exogenous "catastrophe." A numerical example illustrates such a take-off. In that example, the endogenous fall in the cost of communication leads to the acceleration of the growth rate of output by facilitating the transmission of knowledge and by encouraging risk-taking.

On-the-job search is something we all do from time to time. Indeed, a significant percentage of job changes made by workers involves no interim unemployment. The object of the study is to develop and analyze a labor market model where unemployed workers and firms bargain over the wage paid if employment is accepted. Any employed worker can choose to search for another job but only at a cost. It will be shown that in such an environment the bargaining set is not convex. Nevertheless, utilizing a strategic bargaining game we show there is a unique bargaining outcome which may involve a lottery. The resulting market equilibrium exists and if the cost of search is low enough the resulting equilibrium is where some employees search on-the-job even in the case where both workers and firms are homogeneous.

This paper studies the role of investment-specific shocks as an amplification mechanism of labor market fluctuations. We first show evidence suggesting that after a fall in the relative price of new equipment, not only do investment and output increase but firms also post more vacancies, hours worked increase and unemployment falls. Moreover, we study the quantitative impact of investment-specific shocks on the labor market by incorporating them in a Real Business Cycle model with search and matching frictions. We find that these shocks have a significant amplification effect on labor market fluctuations, increasing the volatility of unemployment, vacancies and total hours more than twofold.

This paper carries out the task of evaluating inflation forecasts from the Livingston Survey and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, using the Real-Time Data Set for Macroeconomists as a source of real-time data. We examine the magnitude and patterns of revisions to the inflation rate based on the output price index. We then run tests on the forecasts from the surveys to see how good they are. We find that there are several episodes in which forecasters made persistent forecast errors, but the episodes are so short that by the time they can be identified, they have nearly disappeared. Thus, improving on the survey forecasts seems to be very difficult in real time, and the attempt to do so leads to increased forecast errors.

In many emerging economies such as Brazil, pension programs of public sector workers are more generous than pension programs of private sector workers. The opportunity costs of running generous public pension schemes for civil servants are potentially large in emerging economies that often suffer from low public investments in education and infrastructure. In this paper, we develop a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium framework to quantify these opportunity cost effects. We find that the efficiency and welfare gains of reallocating government resources from non-productive public sector pensions to productive public education and infrastructure investments are larger than the welfare effects created by classic public pension reforms that simply reduce savings and tax distortions by making pensions less generous. Calculating transitions to the post-reform steady state, we find that welfare losses for the generation born before the reform are offset by welfare gains by the generations born after the reform.

This paper embeds a long-term financial contract subject to asymmetric information into an industry equilibrium model to explore the quantitative implications of endogenous financing constraints for job reallocation. In the model, firms sign upon entry long-term contracts with banks that finance their entry and per period labor costs. Firms may exit due to liquidation by banks or exogenous exit shocks. The model has a unique stationary equilibrium with turnover of jobs and firms. A quantitative exercise shows that endogenous financing constraints account for a significant amount of job reallocation observed in U.S. manufacturing and the observed negative relationship between gross job flow rates and firm size as measured by employment.

Entrepreneurs invest a large share of their financial wealth in a single business that they personally manage. Despite the large risk implied by this undiversified investment they do not seem to require any extra return on a diversified public equity index. In light of the large public equity premium, this fact poses a new asset pricing puzzle. In the present paper, I use a quantitative model to explore the issue and find that the choice to become entrepreneur can be rationalized even with a negative private equity premium when the full return on entrepreneurial investment is properly accounted for. The key assumption is that the quality of a business project is not precisely known upon entry and is learned over time. As long as it is possible to switch back to paid-employment, it is worth experimenting with entrepreneurship to find out if the project is good even if initially the expected return is low.

A news-driven business cycle is a positive comovement in consumption, labor, investment, and output caused by positive news about the future. Standard real business cycle models do not generate it. In this paper, we find that a used market friction – i.e., sticky prices – can be a source of news-driven business cycles from news about future technology growth, technology level, and expansionary monetary policy shocks. The key mechanism is the countercyclical movements of markups through nominal rigidities.

High income elasticity of demand for services and low income elasticity of demand for food (Engel's law), and relatively slow productivity growth in the service sectors (Baumol's disease) have been viewed as key drivers of rising share of services in employment in the United States during the 20th century. How much of the rising share of services can be explained by these two forces? A calibrated model of structural change shows that jointly Engel's law and Baumol's disease could explain about two-thirds of the reallocation of labor into services.

Bayesian and maximum-likelihood estimates of structural parameters in DSGE approximating models are invariant to shifts in policy only when the model is correctly specified. Since DSGE models are approximations, strict invariance is unattainable. Despite that, DSGE models might be useful for policy analysis provided that structural parameters are approximately invariant. We discuss this issue in the context of an example involving a pair of new Keynesian DSGE models in which the central bank's policy model includes a misspecified Phillips curve. In our example, the approximating model is a useful guide for policy despite the failure of strict invariance.

This paper analyzes an urn-ball matching model in which workers decide how intensively they sample job openings and apply at a stochastic number of suitable vacancies. The model allows for tractable equilibrium characterization with a continuous search intensity margin. Equilibrium is not constrained efficient; entry is excessive, search intensity can be too high or too low, and an inefficient discouraged-worker effect among homogenous workers emerges under adverse labor market conditions. Unlike existing coordination-friction economies with fixed search intensity, the model can account for the empirical relation between the job-finding rate and the vacancy-unemployment ratio, provided that search costs are small and that search intensity is sufficiently procyclical.

Recent research has established that households “absorb” from professional forecasters as they form their inflation expectations. Professionals’ forecasts are transmitted, or “absorbed,” throughout the population slowly but eventually. This provides the microfoundations for “sticky information” expectations. Using a unique survey-based dataset for the UK that distinguishes between professional and non-professional forecasts and where the former is further categorize by occupations, the present paper attempts to identify the professional forecaster. The paper also considers whether absorption rates take place heterogeneously amongst the “absorbing” agents. We identify “active” and “passive” absorbers amongst the agents and they are distinguished by their respective absorption rates. The present analyses also consider whether these absorption rates are non-linear.

In this paper, we document a 75 percent increase in stockholders' share of aggregate labor income in the U.S. from 1962 to 2000 using data from Survey of Consumer Finances. Our decomposition of the increase in stockholders' share of aggregate labor income documents that one half is due to the equi-proportional increase in participation and one quarter each is due to the non-proportional part of the changes in stockmarket participation and changes in the income distribution, respectively. The change due to the labor income distribution is driven entirely by the increase in the share of labor income accounted for by the top labor income decile. Using a simple model with limited stockmarket participation, we present a mechanism for how the increase in stockholders' share of aggregate labor income has affected the ex ante equity premium (i.e. the discount rate applied to equity). The mechanism works through the composition of income of stockholders. The resulting decrease in the equity premium is 44 percent, which roughly coincides with the historical change in the post-1951 equity premium implied by the simple dividend growth model in Fama and French (2002).

We provide an explanation for the high equity premium and related puzzles based on persistent dividend growth and idiosyncratic income risk that have previously been shown to have potential for explaining the variance of stock prices, and the low risk-free rate. We show how these two elements can be integrated in a tractable framework to offer a convincing overall account for the history of U.S. asset prices. Our main explanation for the high equity premium is that there is a small persistent component to changes in dividend growth. This component, driven by the "business cycle," makes equity prices very volatile, and hence a poor insurance instrument. The model also explains the extreme volatility of stock prices: the price-dividend ratio predicted by the model based on U.S. consumption data from 1891-2001 has a correlation of 72% with the actual price-dividend ratio in the S&P 500. In addition, we show that a high equity premium is consistent with plausible levels of risk aversion and a low inter-temporal elasticity of substitution, as long as consumption growth is less persistent than income growth.

This paper shows that the standard Calvo model clearly fails to account for the distribution of price durations found in micro data. We propose a novel price setting model that fully captures heterogeneity in individual pricing behavior. Specifically, we assume that there is a continuum of firms that set prices according to a Calvo mechanism, each of them with a possibly different price adjustment parameter. The model is estimated by maximum likelihood and closely matches individual consumer and producer price data. Incorporating estimated price setting rules into a standard DSGE model shows that fully accounting for pricing heterogeneity is crucial to understanding inflation and output dynamics. The standard calibration that assumes within sector homogeneity, as in Carvalho (2006), is at odds with micro data evidence and leads to a substantial distortion of estimates of the real impact of monetary policy.

The literature on training has pointed out that macroeconomic fluctuations can have a positive or a negative effect on training decisions. On the one hand, the opportunity cost to train is lower during downturns, and thus training should be counter-cyclical. On the other hand, a positive shock may be related to the adoption of new technologies and increased returns to skill, making training incidence pro-cyclical. The first contribution of this paper is to document, using the Canadian panel of Workplace and Employee Survey (WES), that (i) training moves counter-cyclically with aggregate output fluctuations (more training in downturns), while at the same time (ii) the relative position of sectoral output has a positive impact on training decisions (more training in sectors doing relatively better). This second fact is novel and unexplored. Overall, the results show that the firms' decisions to train are quite complex; in order to fully understand them, one needs to take into account not only the change in aggregates, but also the relative position of each sector in the economy. The second contribution of the paper is to illustrate the mechanisms at work by incorporating training decisions into a standard Mortensen-Pissarides model. In the standard model, production takes place if workers' productivity is above a reservation threshold. In our extension, this threshold gets expanded into a whole interval within which production takes place if workers are trained. The quantitative analysis from the calibrated model illustrates the counter-cyclical opportunity cost adjustment from aggregate shocks and the pro-cyclical adjustment coming from sectoral reallocation.

I develop an equilibrium, a two-sided search model of marriage with endogenous population growth, to study the interaction between fertility, the age structure of the population and the age of men and women at first marriage.Within a simple two-period overlapping generation model, I show that given an increase of the desired number of children age at marriage is affected through two different channels. First, as population growth increases, the age structure of the population produces a thicker market for young people, inducing early marriages. The second channel comes from differential fecundity: if the desired number of children is not feasible for older women, women tend to marry younger and men older, with single men outnumbering single women in equilibrium.Using an extended version of the model to a finite number of periods and fertility data, I show that two mechanisms described above may have acted as persistence mechanisms after the U.S. Baby Boom. Specifically, I find that the demographic transitional dynamics after the Baby Boom may account for approximately 23 percent of the increase in men's age of marriage between 1985 and 2009, although the impact on women's age is small.