Volume 12, Issue 1

We propose a method for estimating household income uncertainty that does not impose restrictions on the underlying income shocks or assumptions about household behaviors. We measure income uncertainty as the variance of linear projection errors at various future horizons, up to 25 years ahead, conditional on only the information available to households when the projection is made. Our uncertainty estimates change substantially over the life cycle. We calibrate an income process to match our estimates, allowing the variances of both transitory and persistent shocks to change over the life cycle. Relative to previous studies, we find lower and less persistent income uncertainties that call for a life cycle consumption profile with a less pronounced hump.

I evaluate the welfare effects of exogenous changes in immigration policy by constructing a heterogeneous agent overlapping generations model with agents differing in age, origin, and skills. Calibrating the model to Germany, I match the main features of the social security and tax systems, and account for differences in inter-generational transmission of skills and fertility between immigrants and natives. I find that a prohibition on immigration reduces welfare for the natives, whereas a policy that allows an annual inflow equal to 0.4 percent of the population increases welfare for all agents on the new balanced growth path. Interactions between the social security system, taxes, and equilibrium prices are crucial: immigration reduces wages, but raises the rental rate of capital and the number of workers per retiree, allowing for higher pension benefits and a lower consumption tax rate.

While theory predicts different effects of household credit and enterprise credit on the economy, the empirical literature has mainly used aggregate measures of overall bank lending to the private sector. We construct a new dataset from 45 developed and developing countries, decomposing bank lending into lending to enterprises and lending to households and assess the different effects of these two components on real sector outcomes. We find that: 1) enterprise credit is positively associated with economic growth whereas household credit is not; and 2) enterprise credit is significantly associated with faster reductions in income inequality whereas household credit is not. We also find that the share of household credit is higher in more urban societies, in countries with smaller manufacturing sectors and more market-based financial systems, while market structure and regulatory policies are not related to credit composition.

Using survey evidence, I estimate the impact of $21 billion in household payments delivered in Australia between December 2008 and May 2009. Forty percent of households who said that they received a payment reported having spent it. This is a higher spending rate than has been recorded in surveys assessing the 2001 and 2008 tax rebates in the United States. One possible explanation for this is that individuals are more likely to spend “bonuses” (as the Australian payments were described) than “rebates” (as the US payments were described). Using an approach for converting spending rates into an aggregate marginal propensity to consume (MPC), the Australian results are consistent with an aggregate MPC of 0.41-0.42. Since this estimate is based largely on first-quarter spending, it may understate the longer-run impact of the package on consumer expenditure.

Using data for 162 countries for the period 1962-2006, this paper examines the importance of the national economic growth rate for the ability of a national leader to retain his or her position. To address the potential endogeneity of economic growth, I use commodity prices, export partner incomes, precipitation, and temperature to instrument for a country’s growth rate. The results indicate that faster economic growth increases the short-run likelihood that leaders will remain in office. The results are robust to controlling for a host of leader-, party-, and country-level variables. The effect of growth on the likelihood of leader exits appears to be generally similar across both democracies and autocracies. Economic growth has the largest impact on the likelihood of regular leader exits rather than irregular exits such as coups. Evidence is also presented on whether economic growth affects the likelihood that leaders employ oppressive tactics against opponents.

This study offers an explanation of the common empirical finding in the literature that exchange rate uncertainty only slightly or insignificantly impacts export volume. When export volume is decomposed into the extensive and intensive margins, panel regressions presented in this study reveal that exchange rate uncertainty negatively affects the extensive margin and positively affects the intensive margin, with both effects being statistically significant. These two opposing effects cancel each other out when combined, producing an insignificant effect on overall export volume. This study goes on to develop an analytically tractable monetary model of heterogeneous firms and endogenous extensive and intensive margins, which predicts these empirical results.

Using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with housing, this paper shows that strong monetary reactions to accelerator mechanisms that push up credit growth and house prices can help macroeconomic stability. In addition, using a macroprudential instrument specifically designed to dampen credit market cycles would also provide stabilization benefits when an economy faces financial sector or housing demand shocks. However, the optimal macroprudential rule under productivity shocks is to not intervene. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the source of house price booms for the design of monetary and macroprudential policy.

This paper develops a statistical framework of steady-state identities which enable us to match the distributions of durations found in the micro-data to generalized Taylor and Calvo models of time-dependent pricing. We illustrate the approach with the UK micro CPI data for 1996-2009, and employ the pricing models in a simple macromodel. We find that the Generalized Taylor Economy generates a hump shaped inflation impulse response function, whilst the Generalized Calvo does not.

The U.S. has experienced three episodes in which public expenditure temporarily increased to very high levels: the Civil War, World War I and World War II. These wars share a set of stylized facts regarding the behavior of tax revenue, government debt, primary deficit, inflation and output. I present a theory of government policy determination, whose primary ingredients are intertemporal distortion-smoothing and limited commitment, that matches these regularities qualitatively and displays empirically plausible quantitative behavior.

We introduce endogenous probability of survival in the Keynes-Ramsey optimal growth model. An individual's probability of survival is assumed to be dependent on past levels of consumption. Endogenous probability of survival implies that the rate of time preference (or degree of patience) of an individual is endogenously determined. We solve the dynamic optimization problem facing an agent and provide a complete characterization of the steady states and their stability properties. We find that with endogenous rate of time preference an economy may have multiple steady state equilibria. The equilibrium an economy converges to depends on its initial conditions. The results are interpreted in light of the growth experiences of developing economies. The model can explain why two economies that have identical production technologies and identical preferences may converge to different levels of income depending on initial conditions. We estimate the relationship between adult probability of survival and lagged consumption for a cross section of countries. Our estimation results and subsequent simulations of the model suggest that if we interpret capital in our model broadly to include both physical and human capital, poverty traps are empirically plausible.

This paper examines the link between foreign aid and the composition of government spending in aid-recipient countries. Two questions are addressed: (i) does foreign aid crowd out government spending in aid-recipient countries, and (ii) does the degree of fungibility vary across different categories of aid? Using a panel dataset of 67 countries for 1972-2000 we find that at the aggregate level about 70 percent of total aid is fungible. We also find that aid targeted for public investment crowds out about 80-90 percent of domestic government spending on public investment. Aid does not affect private investment, but has a strong positive impact on household consumption. The results are also robust to checks for causality. These findings are significant, since more than two-thirds of all aid flows to developing countries are tied to public investment projects.

Over the last century, there have been four major peacetime crashes in aggregate nominal spending in the United States. We argue in this paper that these great spending crashes can be best understood from a monetary disequilibrium perspective. We examine this hypothesis using a structural vector autoregression that identifies the key monetary shocks implied by the monetary disequilibrium view. We find that these monetary shocks are the main contributors to each of the great spending crashes.

Different modeling techniques have been proposed in the literature to solve the issue of amplification in response to shocks in Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) models. This paper analyzes the impact of variable capital utilization on the amplification mechanism of productivity shocks. It builds a DSGE model which includes a link between capital utilization and shiftworking, consistently with the empirical literature. This paper shows that capital utilization cannot be the main mechanism which amplifies the effects of the shocks hitting the economy.

I compare unemployment expectations from the Michigan Survey of Consumers to VAR forecastable movements in unemployment. I document three key facts: First, one-half to one-third of the population expects unemployment to rise when it is falling at the end of a recession, even though the VAR predicts the fall in unemployment. Second, more people expect unemployment to rise when it is falling at the end of a recession than expect it to rise when it is rising at the beginning of a recession even though the VAR predicts these changes. Finally, the lag change in unemployment is almost as important as the VAR forecast in predicting the fraction of the population that expects unemployment to rise. Professional forecasters do not exhibit these discrepancies. Least squares learning or real time expectations do little to help explain these facts. However, delayed updating of expectations can explain some of these facts, and extrapolative expectations explains these facts best. Individuals with higher income or education are only slightly less likely to have expectations which differ from the VAR, and those whose expect more unemployment when the VAR predicts otherwise are 8-10 percent more likely to believe it is a bad time to make a major purchase.

This paper highlights the significance of labor market distortions in explaining cross-country income differences using a two-sector general equilibrium model that incorporates modern intermediate inputs used in agriculture together with sector-specific human and physical capital. Using the best available information, I construct new sectoral data on quality-adjusted human capital and PPP-adjusted physical capital. Although both types of capital - physical capital in particular - play important roles, using a sample of 43 countries, I find that in terms of capturing the observed disparities, either in relative labor productivity in agriculture or aggregate output per worker between the rich and the poor countries, the role of labor market distortions outweighs the role of either sectoral human or physical capital.

This paper presents a dynamic model of power competition in a nondemocracy. In each period, a ruler from an incumbent dynasty is challenged. If he survives, he hands over power to a (biological or ideological) offspring. He can control his offspring's chances of surviving future threats, by choosing how competent and loyal administrators to hire, and how many. The society can stay for a long time on a volatile path where subsequent dynasties of rulers regularly replace one another, each purging the preceding dynasty's competent administrators, replacing them with loyalists, thus keeping competence bouncing around a low level. This may be followed by an endogenous transition to a path without such purges and a simultaneous rise in competence.

This paper applies global games to the study of an economy with investment complementarities and heterogeneous private information. I establish a two-sector OLG model in which capital goods can be produced by two technologies. One is a safe technology with a publicly known constant return. The other is a risky technology exhibiting technological externalities with an uncertain return about which economic agents have heterogeneous private information. I find that coordination failure arises, and is most severe when the returns of the safe and risky technologies are close. I also find that more precise private information does not necessarily improve social welfare, while more precise public information can unambiguously improve social welfare. Moreover, risk attitudes of economic agents can affect the economy, inducing a positive relationship between economic growth and volatility. Last, I find that a subsidy on the risky technology investment can greatly alleviate coordination failure and improve social welfare.

Romer [1993] hypothesized that the output cost of a disinflation (the sacrifice ratio) falls with trade openness. Subsequent empirical work in many instances finds the reverse. We theorize that the sacrifice ratio increases with openness in production. When the production process is more open then changes in output lead to smaller changes in marginal costs, because costs are to a greater extent driven by exogenous factors. As a result price responses to output fluctuations are dampened and the output-inflation trade-off increases. Empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that greater imported commodity intensity in production increases the sacrifice ratio. Consistent with theory this relationship is stronger in fixed exchange rate regimes. Controlling for imported commodity intensity also leads to a finding of a significant negative impact of trade openness on the sacrifice ratio, consistent with Romer's original hypothesis.

We derive and estimate an aggregate Euler consumption equation in which non-separability between consumption and leisure and borrowing constrained households makes current consumption dependent on labour and asset (house) prices. Estimation results suggest that when labour is included in the aggregate consumption equation it proves to be more important than house prices in explaining the wide fluctuations in Finnish consumption data. Moreover, the evidence of excess sensitivity of consumption to income virtually disappears as the consumption Euler equation accounts for predictable changes in labour in the Finnish data.

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, we propose a method for checking empirically whether inflation expectations are anchored in the long run, and at what level. The extent of anchoring then serves as a proxy for the credibility of the monetary authority. Second, to assess how well this measure proxies credibility, we cross-check it against periods for which the level of credibility is known and generally agreed upon. To this end, we apply our measure to the US inflation history since 1963, which includes both the period of the Great Inflation, in which credibility was poor and deteriorating, as well as the period of the Great Moderation during which credibility in the monetary authority was gradually re-established. Finally we check what our measure of credibility tells us about the crisis period.

The slope of the sticky information Phillips curve proposed by Mankiw and Reis (2002) is based on the degree of information rigidity on the part of firms. Carroll (2003) uses an epidemiology model of expectations and finds evidence for the U.S. of a one-year lag in the transmission of information from professional forecasters to households. Using financial institutions’ and firms’ survey data from Peru and the model proposed by Carroll, I estimate the degree of information rigidity for the Peruvian economy. This paper also considers heterogeneous responses and explores the cross-sectional dimension of these survey forecasts. I find that the degree of information stickiness ranges between one and two quarters, a result that is robust to different specifications.

This paper presents an empirical study of a potential asymmetry in the response of monetary policy to stock prices in the US. The main finding is that while monetary policy reacts significantly to stock price drops, no significant reaction to stock price increases is found. This result is obtained by applying the method of identification through heteroskedasticity to a daily dataset covering the period 1998-2008. The result is confirmed in an estimated, augmented Taylor rule based on monthly data for the same period. The size of the estimated, asymmetric reaction is modest.The study constitutes an empirical contribution to the debate about the role of asset prices in monetary policy, which has seen a revival in the aftermath of the crisis. In particular, the results lend empirical support to recent claims that the pre-crisis approach to monetary policy implied an asymmetric policy stance towards stock price movements.

Overly optimistic expectations concerning productivity and consequent downward revisions are commonly viewed as a key determinant of U.S. investment during the boom-bust cycle of 1995--2003. This view is formalized and evaluated in a general equilibrium model with news shocks about future productivity and preferences for financial wealth. The model generates a boom-bust cycle in response to good news that is not realized. A method is devised to estimate "the productivity prospects": a series that captures the effects of news shocks on economic decisions. The estimated series rises during the boom, falls during the recession and helps forecast future productivity shocks at several horizons. The model's predictions for sample paths of hours worked, output, investment, consumption, wages and stock prices are largely in conformity with U.S. data. The model therefore offers a possible solution to several puzzles identified in the literature regarding the 1990's boom and the 2001 recession.

The progress made by American women in higher education has been impressive. In 1970 a higher fraction of men than women completed a college education. During the following four decades, the gender gap in education not only decreased but became negative. However, this was not always so. The pre-1970 period (1950-1970) was characterized by an opposite trend: the gender gap strongly increased. This paper develops a model to quantify, within a unified framework, the relative importance of supply and demand forces on the rise and fall of the U.S. gender gap in education. Specifically, I build and calibrate an assignment model for the U.S. economy with endogenous human capital accumulation of women and men, where three different sources of education gains exist: (1) supply shifts, (2) a within-sector skill-biased technical change (SBTC), and (3) the creation of new high-skill services/sectors. I find that asymmetrical supply shifts by gender were the major force behind, first, the increase in the gender gap during the pre-1970 period and, second, the decrease in the gap during the post-1970 period. The empirical results show positive supply shifts for men but not for women during the pre-1970 period, and negative supply shifts for men together with no changes in supply for women during the post-1970 period. I discuss some explanations for the dissimilar behavior of women's and men's supply during both periods.

This paper analyzes productivity dispersion in the Bolivian manufacturing sector during the Market Liberalization Period: 1988-2001. We analyze the effects of resource misallocation on manufacturing total factor productivity (TFP) with firm-level data and by employing the Hsieh and Klenow (2009) model. We found that if resource misallocation was eliminated, the gains in productivity would have been on the order of 54 percent on average and would have ranged from -6 percent to 38 percent relative to the United States (benchmark country). We also test if misallocation is related to reforms, and firm or geographical characteristics. There is suggestive evidence that the second-generation reforms were associated with an increase in the misallocation of resources that reached a peak in 1998, the year the economy experienced an important economic downturn.

This paper studies the dynamics of state-contingent government debt in the case that the fiscal authority cannot commit to a future policy. As is well known, optimal policy under commitment calls for letting debt follow a stationary process, with values that depend on the initial conditions. In contrast, when the fiscal authority lacks the ability to commit, it manipulates its policy tools, i.e. the tax rate and government spending, in order to reduce the intertemporal price of current consumption goods, i.e. the real interest rate, and the intertemporal value of its current outstanding liabilities. If the economy converges, in any steady state the government has either no incentive or no ability to reduce the real interest rate any longer.

The overlapping-generations model à la Diamond is extended into a world of two large open economies to investigate the global transmission effects of government debts. Initially the world economy is in a long-run equilibrium without taxes and government expenditures. The government of one country then makes a transfer to the old generation, and finances the transfer through the issuance of government debts. Thereafter, this government adopts a debt management policy to maintain the debt per young individual at a constant level. The current young generation of the country is better-off if the interest rate is slightly higher than the population growth rate, but is worse-off if the factor share of capital in national income is high. Along the equilibrium path, the welfare of a generation is lower than that of its predecessor in each country. In the long run, the welfare in both countries is lower under the new steady state.

This paper uses a novel time-varying factor model to examine the dynamic effects of fiscal policy in Japan over the last three decades. This paper shows that despite Japan's high debt levels and long-term budgetary difficulties there is little evidence of any substantial Ricardian offset in the short-run, with private consumption and investment rising in response to discretionary government spending. Estimates drawn in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis report a potential multiplier value of around 1.2. The estimates imply that there is still scope for counter-cyclical fiscal policy despite Japan's long-term budgetary difficulties.

This paper investigates whether labor market search frictions affect the long run responses of government revenues to changes in income taxes. The findings show that labor market parameters may significantly change the tax base and affect the reaction of government receipts in the long run.

Standard models of intertemporal utility maximization assume that agents discount future utility flows at a constant rate—exponential discounting. Euler equations estimated over different time horizons should have equal discount rates but they do not. Rising term yield premia imply discount rates that rise with longer horizons since uncertainty is much too small to account for the difference in interest rates. Such deviations from exponential discounting are large enough to make a significant difference in consumption choices over long horizons. Our results can be viewed as providing estimates of horizon-specific discounts, or as a further puzzle concerning intertemporal substitution and uncertainty.

This paper documents stylized facts of international medium-term business cycles by exploring the pattern of comovement between a catching-up economy, Spain, and each of the obvious candidate countries to technological leadership of the 1950-2010 period, the U.S., France, Germany, Italy and the U.K. A remarkable feature of the international medium-term business cycle is the strong, positive lead displayed by the U.S. cycles of technology and international relative prices over Spain's macroeconomic aggregates. The corresponding evidence when the counterpart to Spain is a large European economy is weaker, particularly in the case of Europe's medium-term technology cycles. The vehicles that facilitate the international transmission of U.S. medium-term cycles are based on both bilateral trade and FDI linkages. International medium-term business cycle models may need to incorporate mechanisms relying on both embodied technical change and international relative prices to explain the observed stylized features.

Different industrializing experiences beginning on innovation or education could be explained not only by different structural parameters or policies but also by differences in factor endowments. In this paper, we consider an endogenous growth model with physical capital, human capital and R&D. We show that the initial endowments alone can determine the sequence of the phases of development that the economy follows; in particular, whether innovation precedes education or vice versa.