Volume 21, Issue 1

I develop a general equilibrium model in which patent protection can increase or decrease the costs of sequential innovation, original innovation, and imitation. Depending on these relative effects, protection can in theory increase or decrease markups, imitation, innovation, growth, and aggregate productivity. I discipline the model using data from several different sources, and find that weakening protection in the U.S. would lead to no change in markups and imitation, no change in long-run growth, a significant increase in the number of firms, and an increase in aggregate productivity of 11%.

The paper examines the aggregate impact of misallocation measured using gaps in labor productivity across sectors. A simple model of resource allocation is used to quantify the effect in which the gaps arise due to distortions in the form of asymmetrical taxes on hiring labor across sectors. From a development accounting approach, the gains from eliminating distortions are meager and are not consequential in accounting for cross-country variation in incomes. Nevertheless, the gains for some countries rival the growth that they have accumulated over several years. Of the 87 countries in the sample, the changes in distortions over time exert a net negative impact in 45 countries instead of providing tailwinds to growth. Changes in distortions account for just under 5.6% of the total growth when aiding growth. In turn, the output drag represents 3.4% of the actual growth on average for the sub-sample in which distortions yield a net negative effect. The move towards allocative efficiency bears a positive association with the quality of institutions.

This study characterizes welfare-enhancing industrial policies in a two-sector-R&D economy that incorporates both vertical and horizontal innovation. It elaborates on current welfare analyses of two-sector-R&D economies along two lines. First, it explores the welfare properties of non-drastic innovations whereas current analyses are confined to drastic innovations. It is shown that while the endogenously chosen size of drastic innovations is insufficient compared to social optimum, the size of non-drastic innovations may be excessive compared with the welfare maximizing one. Second, it explores welfare-enhancing policies designed to restrict innovators’ market power, whereas current policy analyses focus on R&D and market-entry subsidies. The welfare-maximizing policies presented here combine proper limitations on innovators’ market power along with a corresponding production tax (or subsidy). The limitations over innovators’ market power are aimed to support the optimal innovation size, and the corresponding production tax is set to support the optimal product variety span.

This paper develops a simple model that provides a unified explanation for both an increase in below-top skewness and a much larger increase in within-top skewness of wage income distribution. It relies on a single mechanism based on the fixed costs of firm entry. A decrease in entry costs increases the variety of goods/tasks and thus the demand for higher-skilled workers who are more flexible in handling a variety of tasks, which increases both types of skewness. Differences in flexibility are modeled as differences in the fixed labor setup costs required to handle a given number of tasks. Our numerical experiments in a calibrated model show that a decrease in entry costs – entry deregulation – can be a quantitatively important source of both the increase in below-top skewness and the much larger increase in within-top skewness observed in the U.S. Moreover, the experiments imply that the observed differences in entry deregulation can cause significant differences in the top skewness across countries that have similar technological change. This can provide an answer to Piketty and Saez’s (2006) question: Why have top wages surged in English speaking countries in recent decades but not in continental Europe or Japan, which have gone through similar technological change?

This paper quantitatively examines which of the following three widely-used leaning-against-the-wind policies is effective in stabilizing aggregate fluctuations: i) a monetary policy that responds to the loan-to-GDP ratio, ii) a countercyclical LTV policy, and iii) a countercyclical capital requirement policy. In particular, we estimate a New Keynesian model with financial frictions using U.S. data and find that a monetary policy rule that responds positively to the loan-to-GDP ratio Amplifies the macroeconomic fluctuations while a countercyclical LTV policy has almost no effect. On the contrary, a countercyclical capital requirement policy is the most desirable in stabilizing GDP, inflation, and loans. However, the stabilization effect of the optimal countercyclical capital requirement policy is concentrated during periods in which financial shocks played a large role.

This paper explores the effects of a government tax policy in a growth model with economic transition and toxic housing bubbles applied to China. Such a policy combines taxing entrepreneurs with a one-time redistribution to workers in the same period. Under the tax policy, we find that the welfare improvement for workers is non-monotonic. In particular, there exists an optimal tax at which social welfare is maximized. Moreover, we consider the welfare effects of setting the tax at its optimum. We show that the tax policy can be welfare-enhancing, comparing to the case without active policies. The optimal tax may also yield a higher level of welfare than the case even without housing bubbles. In addition, our simple numerical exercise shows that the optimal tax rate is about 23%;, and social welfare is significantly improved with such a tax policy. Finally, we extend the benchmark economy to a multi-period setting and calibrate the model to China. Our results show that a 20%; tax rate can speed up economic transition and increase output growth. Between 1998 and 2012, aggregate consumption is 4.86%; higher under active tax policies.

This paper provides new evidence for cyclicality in the job-search effort of employed workers, on-the-job search (OJS) intensity, in the U.S. using American Time Use Survey and various cyclical indicators. We find that the probability of an employed worker to engage in OJS is statistically significantly countercyclical, while time spent on OJS of an employed job seeker is weakly countercyclical. The fear of job loss, employment uncertainty, and workers’ financial situations is crucial in the job search decision of employed individuals. The results imply that the precautionary motive might be the key driver of the countercyclicality in OJS intensity.

Neo-Fisherism, the theory that monetary authorities should expect inflation rates to be positively and causally related to their targeted nominal interest rates, is reviewed and empirically investigated. Using several different measures of interest rates and inflation we analyze US monthly data from January 1964 to April 2019. Granger causality tests are performed in search of a Neo-Fisherist impact of interest rates causally impacting inflation or the reverse. The full period is reviewed and is also divided into three sub-periods: the period before the Federal Reserve targeted federal funds rate at 25 basis points (labeled here as the effective lower bound, ELB), the ELB period, and the post-ELB period. Prior to the effective lower bound, we find evidence largely supporting the classical view of causality from inflation to interest rates, however the relationship is bidirectional depending on the measurement of inflation and interest rates. During the ELB, we find moderate evidence in support of Neo-Fisherism. In this period, federal funds rate Granger-cause changes in inflation as measured using the CPI and Core CPI. In contrast, during the effective lower bound period, the standard classical result holds when considering the Shadow federal funds rate. In the period following the effective lower bound, the standard relationship is found as well, in which inflation granger causes movements in the interest rates. Overall, the results regarding causality between interest rates and inflation largely support the classical view of causality but are dependent on data measurements and the observed time period.

We empirically revisit the crowding-in effect of government spending on private consumption based on rolling windows of U.S. data. Results show that in earlier samples government spending is increasingly crowding in private consumption; however, this relation is reverted in the latest periods. We propose a model embedding non-separable public and private consumption in the utility function and rule-of-thumb consumers to assess the sources of non-monotonic changes in the transmission of the shock. The iterative full information estimation of the model reveals that changes in the co-movement between private and public spending is primarily driven by the fluctuations in the elasticity of substitution between private and public consumption, the share of financially constrained consumers, and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution.

This paper studies how macroprudential policy tools applied to the housing market can complement the interest rate-based monetary policy in achieving one additional stabilization objective, defined as keeping either economic activity or credit at some exogenous (and possibly time-varying) levels. We show analytically in a canonical New Keynesian model with housing and collateral constraints that using the loan-to-value (LTV) ratio, tax on credit or tax on property as additional policy instruments does not resolve the inflation-output volatility tradeoff. Perfect targeting of inflation and credit with monetary and macroprudential policy is possible only if the role of housing debt in the economy is sufficiently small. The identified limits to the considered policies are related to their predominantly intertemporal impact on decisions made by financially constrained agents, making them poor complements to monetary policy, which also operates at an intertemporal margin. These limits can be overcome if macroprudential policy is instead designed such that it sufficiently redistributes income between savers and borrowers.

Central banks face uncertainty about the true location of the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. We model optimal discretionary monetary policy during a liquidity trap when the central bank designs policy that is robust with respect to the location of the ELB. If the central bank fears the worst-case location of the ELB, monetary conditions will be more expansionary in the period before the liquidity trap.

We present a two-country model featuring risky lending and cross-border interbank market frictions. We find that (i) the strength of the financial accelerator, when applied to banks operating under uncertainty in an interbank market, will critically depend on the economic and financial structure of the economy; (ii) adverse shocks to the real economy can be the source of banking crisis, causing an increase in interbank funding costs, aggravating the initial shock; and (iii) asset purchases and central bank long-term refinancing operations can be effective substitutes for, or supplements to, conventional monetary policy.

We employ a two-country overlapping-generations model to explore the international dimension of household portfolio choices induced by the asymmetric provision of government-run pensions. We study the resulting patterns of risk-sharing and the corresponding welfare effects on both home and foreign agents. Introducing the defined benefits pay-as-you-go system at home increases the welfare of all other agents at the expense of the home workers and improves the degree of intergenerational risk sharing abroad. Conversely, a defined contributions system leads to welfare losses of both home cohorts accompanied by gains abroad, but does increase the extent of intergenerational risk sharing at home.