Volume 19, Issue 2

In order to identify investment-specific technology (IST), most DSGE models assume a perfect inverse relationship between IST and the relative price of investment (RPI). This paper explores this relationship and provides evidence that the RPI also responds to changes in market power, which I find constitutes a third of volatility in the RPI. To corroborate this conclusion, two competing models are produced; the first is a two-sector model with a wedge separating the identification of IST with the inverse of the RPI. The RPI wedge is then estimated using Bayesian estimation techniques. A second, richer two-sector model is produced, where firms can vary markups depending on the number of competitors. This paper finds that changes in relative markups are highly correlated with the RPI wedge and help explain the sudden increase in the RPI following the Great Recession in the United States. In addition, with endogenous price markups, non-IST shocks can explain over a third of the volatility observed in the RPI, with marginal efficiency of investment contributing approximately 30 percent of the volatility in the RPI.

We evaluate the relative importance of aggregate labor productivity versus income taxes and social contributions for tax compliance in an economy with a large degree of informality. Empirical evidence points out that tax evasion in Europe happens through partially concealing wages and profits in formally registered enterprises. To this end, we build a model in which employer-employee pairs of heterogeneous productive capacities make joint decisions on the degree of tax evasion. The quantitative model is used to analyze the case of Bulgaria which has the largest informal economy in Europe and underwent a number of important tax reforms over the period 2000–2014, including the introduction of a flat income tax in 2008. The estimation strategy relies on matching the empirical series for the size of the informal economy and other aggregate outcomes for 2000–2014. Our counterfactual experiments show that the most important factor for the changing size of the informal economy is labor productivity, which accounts for more than 75% of the change. The variation in corporate income tax accounts for the rest. We find that the 2008 flat tax reform did not play any visible role in coping with informality.

Should individuals migrate before acquiring education or after? In order to analyze the optimality of the timing of migration, I develop a model of migration, which combines the two migration decisions into a unique model – the decisions about where to get an education and about where to work. The main reason for having a unified model is that investment in human capital cannot be disjoined from the decision about work. This paper shows that brain drain is usually an optimal solution. But, when we incorporate “brain waste” and “return migration”, then it is optimal to migrate when young.

In this paper we propose a theory to study how the aggregate demand of energy responds to energy prices and technical innovations that affect the price of energy services. In our theory, energy use is determined by the interaction of the choice of Energy Saving Technical Change with energy prices and Investment Specific Technical Change (ISTC). The key mechanism is that the energy saving technology is embodied in capital vintages as a requirement that determines their energy intensity. We show that higher ISTC that increases the quality of capital goods is an energy saving device and, therefore, a substitute for Energy Saving Technical Change (ESTC). However, higher ISTC that rises the efficiency in producing capital goods is energy consuming and fosters ESTC to compensate for the amount of energy required by the new investment. A higher price of energy also induces a higher level of ESTC, but the aggregate amount of energy used may not be affected as investment does not change. These effects are amplified with rising prices of energy. Thus, our theory can be used to test when and how we should see a rebound effect in energy use at the aggregate level and to evaluate the aggregate effect of any policy aiming to reduce energy use.

If a poverty trap exists, can a big-push policy lift the economy out of it? This paper applies Sargent’s [Sargent, Thomas J. 1993. Bounded Rationality in Macroeconomics . New York: Oxford University Press] bounded rationality approach to study the post-policy transition of an economy from a low-income equilibrium to a high-income equilibrium. The effectiveness of the policy diminishes if individuals are adaptive learners who cannot make optimal decisions instantaneously. This paper contributes to the renewed discussion on the effectiveness of massive aid policies for developing countries from a theoretical perspective.

This research explores whether religiosity has a persistent effect on economic outcomes. We follow a three-step analysis. First, we use a sample of migrants in the United States to establish that religiosity in the country of origin has a lasting effect on the religiosity of migrants. Second, by exploiting variation in the inherited component of religiosity of migrants and controlling only for a baseline set of controls, we uncover a causal link between several aspects of religiosity and income level. The empirical findings of the second step suggest that i) church attendance has a positive impact on income; and ii) stronger faith is associated with a higher income. Finally, we augment the set of controls included in the measure of inherited religiosity in order to capture the effects of social capital, education, and of traits conducive to income growth. When controlling for social capital, the effect of religious attendance on economic outcomes vanishes, and when controlling for the presence of traits conducive to growth, the effect of intensity of faith vanishes as well. We therefore conclude that when properly accounting for unobservables, religiosity does not affect per capita income.

We develop a two-industry R&D growth model with a free-entry endogenous market structure to evaluate the impact of industrial fundamentals on cross-industry differences of TFP growth and R&D intensity. Endogenous market structure in our model allows the firm’s market size to respond to the firm’s entry and exit which complements the models with an exogenous market structure in the previous literature. We find that surprisingly, an industry with a relatively high R&D productivity or appropriability exhibits “relatively” low in-house innovation growth and R&D intensity during transition. Moreoever, we examine the effects of R&D subsidies and patent breadth policies on industry differences by implementing both asymmetric and symmetric policy rules. We find that only asymmetric R&D subsidies have impacts on TFP growth and R&D intensity differences.

I build a model with bequests, financial frictions and corrupt bureaucrats to explain the link between corruption and inequality and its effects on productivity. Because of collateral requirements, profits are determined by wealth. If individual wealth is not publicly observed, taxation is regressive under corruption. When wealth inequality is high, corruption is more prevalent, creating persistent feedback between corruption and inequality. I calibrate the model and investigate the effect of corruption on inequality and TFP. Through regressive taxation, corruption induces wealth levels to inversely affect the productivity selection. This in turn has adverse effects on aggregate TFP.

This paper reconciles quantitative macroeconomic theory of the Finnish Great Depression and the empirical evidence. The main controversy is that the existing theoretical work assigns a larger role for the collapse of the trade with the Soviet Union than the empirical evidence would suggest. This paper argues that explaining the Finnish crisis warrants a model with involuntary unemployment, and that the collapse resulted mainly from increased financial constraints, not the Soviet trade collapse. While it has been argued and that a large Soviet-trade contribution would result from costly reallocation of resources away from the Soviet sector, and trade-induced income effects that hit the consumption in the domestic sector, this paper finds it hard to reconcile them with the actual evidence. The economic collapse was wide-spread, and the domestic sector collapse reflects decline in investment rather than consumption.

This paper revisits the empirical relationship between volatility and long-run growth, but the key contribution lies in decomposing growth volatility into its business-cycle and trend components. This volatility decomposition also accounts for enormous heterogeneity among countries in terms of their long-run growth trajectories. We identify a negative effect of trend volatility, which we refer to as long-run volatility, on growth, but no effect of business-cycle volatility. However, if long-run volatility is omitted, there would be a spurious (negative) effect of business-cycle volatility. Our results draw attention to a crucial question about different volatility measures and their implications in macroeconomic analyses.

Focusing on both hiring and firing margins, this paper revisits effects of fiscal stimulus on unemployment. We develop a DSGE model with search frictions where job separation is endogenously determined. The predictions of the model are in contrast with earlier studies that assume exogenous separation. Our model can capture the empirical pattern of responses of the job finding, separation, and unemployment rates to a government spending shock, obtained from a structural VAR model with the US data. However, our model fails to capture the response of vacancies and the volatility of unemployment. We discuss the roles of cyclical movements of matching efficiency and labor force participation to fix this model’s shortcoming.