Volume 23, Issue 2

In this paper, we develop an overlapping generations model with endogenous fertility and calibrate it to the Swedish historical data in order to estimate the economic cost of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. The model identifies survivors from younger cohorts as main benefactors of the windfall bequests following the influenza mortality shock. We also show that the general equilibrium effects of the pandemic reveal themselves over the wage channel rather than the interest rate, fertility or labor supply channels. Finally, we demonstrate that the influenza mortality shock becomes persistent, driving the aggregate variables to lower steady states which costs the economy 1.819% of the output loss over the next century.

We quantify the aggregate costs of a discriminatory restriction against women in the access to business resources. To do so, we develop a general equilibrium model with an endogenous size distribution of production units, which are run by either female or male entrepreneurs. In this setting, we introduce a distortion that limits the amount of capital that women can use to run their businesses. We calibrate the model to match data from benchmark economies that exhibit relatively egalitarian labor market results between women and men, except in entrepreneurship. Our counterfactual analyses show that a gender-specific capital constraint causes an output loss between 14% and 28% and a fall in aggregate productivity between 12% and 20%. Furthermore, we show that most of the output loss is accounted for by a fall in total factor productivity. Lastly, we show that the aggregate cost of the distortion is mainly triggered by preventing the most skilled women from running bigger businesses, and not the exit of women from entrepreneurship.

We study the interaction between occasionally binding financial constraints in the traditional (retail) banking sector and banking panics in the shadow banking sector. Shadow banking panics occur when retail banks choose not to roll over their lending to shadow banks. Occasionally binding financial constraints of retail banks increase the likelihood of and amplify boom-bust dynamics around such shadow banking panics. The model can quantitatively match the dynamics of macroeconomic and financial variables around the US financial crisis. We quantify the impact of wholesale funding market interventions akin to those implemented by the Federal Reserve in 2008, finding that they reduced the fall in output by about half a percentage point. The timing of this intervention matters: an intervention before the banking panic would have been more effective and might even have avoided the panic.

I investigate whether wealth inequality hinders the discovery of novel technologies in a competitive screening model. Agents can engage in exploration, which may lead to the discovery of superior technologies, but it is likely to waste time with inferior ones. Talented agents are better at weeding out inferior technologies, but talent is unobservable by lenders. When agents are poor, this causes an adverse selection problem whereby exploration is pursued by untalented agents rather than by talented ones. As economies become wealthier, the misallocation problem of talented agents weakens. Higher inequality worsens this misallocation problem when the economy is wealthy, but can increase efficiency in poor economies.

This paper studies how adaptive learning affects the interactions between monetary policy, stock prices and the optimal degree of Rogoff conservatism in a New Keynesian DSGE model with non-Ricardian agents whose heterogeneous portfolios generate a financial wealth channel of monetary transmission. A positive intergenerational portfolio turnover in the stock market could improve the dual-mandate central bank’s intertemporal trade-off allowed by learning and implies a positive weight on financial stability in the social welfare criterion. For plausible learning gains and turnover rates, a rise in the turnover rate could lead the central bank to reduce the aggressiveness in its policy needed to manage private beliefs if the learning gain is high enough. Both the distortion due to learning and the central bank’s lack of concern for financial stability could lead the government to appoint a liberal central banker, i.e. less conservative than society. A rise in the turnover rate implies a higher (lower) degree of liberalism for low (high) learning gains.

Recent monetary policy analyses show the profound implications of progressive taxation for monetary policy. This paper investigates how progressive taxation on labor income changes the effect of model uncertainty by introducing robust control. We obtained the following results: (i) Higher progressive taxation decreases the effect of model uncertainty on the inflation rate, output gap, and interest rate. (ii) A sufficiently higher progressive taxation brings the economy into the determinate equilibrium even if the model uncertainty is strong. According to these results, we conclude that progressive taxation on labor income is effective in mitigating the effects of model uncertainty in terms of variance and equilibrium determinacy.

This paper estimates the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) with imperfect exchange rate pass-through (alternatively, deviations from the law of one price). Our results describe the nature of inflation dynamics and business cycles under imperfect pass-through, with importance of both domestic price rigidity and import price rigidity for the US and other four open economies. The estimates of structural parameters of the import price and domestic price rigidities are not same and affect inflation-output gap elasticity and inflation-law of one price gap elasticity. The results yield implications for the stabilisation of real activity (also domestic inflation) compared to the deviations from the law of one price.

This paper explores the macroeconomic impact of social unrest, using a novel index based on news reports. It shows that unrest has an adverse effect on economic activity, with GDP remaining on average 0.2 percent below the pre-unrest baseline six quarters after a one-standard deviation increase in the unrest index. Moreover, results are robust to instrumenting via regional unrest to address potential endogeneity concerns. Unrest “events”, captured by a large change in the unrest index, result in a more pronounced decline in GDP—a 1 percent reduction six quarters after the event—but impacts differ by type of event. The adverse impact of unrest on activity is mainly associated with sharp contractions in manufacturing and services, and consumption. However, it can be mitigated by strong institutions and by a country’s policy space (such as fiscal space and exchange rate flexibility).

This paper evaluates the roles of short- and long-term private and government interest rates and inside and outside money in the monetary transmission mechanism. With money and credit markets present, changes in monetary policy set off a chain of relative price and portfolio adjustments affecting output and prices. I study interest rate and money supply rules within this monetary transmission mechanism by estimating several Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) on a quarterly U.S. sample from 1960 to 2018. The best-fit MS-BVAR restricts MS to the impact and lag coefficients of the monetary policy and money demand regressions as well as to the stochastic volatilities (SVs) of the structural shocks. Estimates of this MS-BVAR yield evidence of a SV regime which coincides with NBER-dated recessions. This MS-BVAR also identifies a regime switch in the Fed’s interest rate rule and banks’ demand for outside money around the dot-com bust of 2000 and again from the 2007–2009 recession and financial crisis to the end of the sample. Counterfactual simulations show the 2007–2009 recession and financial crisis would have not been as deep and long-lasting if the fed funds rate had been as low as −8 % in 2009 and remained negative from 2010 through 2016.

Un-incorporated firms are usually found less productive than their incorporated counterparts. However, little is known about the misallocation conditional on firms’ incorporation status and their productivity. This paper investigates the resource misallocation across un-incorporated firms and gauges the consequent aggregate productivity loss in comparison with their incorporated counterparts. We examine the question by using firm-level survey data from Sri Lanka’s manufacturing sector for 2005–2017 that provide unique information about firms’ corporation status. Our findings suggest that misallocation is more severe in unincorporated firms than in incorporated ones, leading to extra 42 % aggregate TFP loss to the former. By comparing the sources of misallocation between the two types of firms, we find capital is more misallocated relative to output and there is a stronger positive correlation between firm-specific distortion and productivity across the unincorporated firms. Our findings suggest that the un-incorporated firms suffer additional productivity loss at the aggregate level due to misallocation.

Standard (S, s) models of lumpy investment allow us to match many aspects of the micro data, but it is well known that the implied interest rate sensitivity of investment is unrealistically large. In fact, the micro-level lumpiness in investment puts empirical discipline on the modeling of investment decisions, and this makes it hard to explain the monetary policy transmission mechanism.

This paper applies the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans (RCK) growth model to an open economy so that, when calibrated with standard parameter values that are commonly used in the small open economy macroeconomic literature, the time paths of the model variables and the speeds of convergence implied by the model conform with empirical evidence. Open-economy versions of the RCK growth model lead to several counterfactual conclusions including: infinite speeds of convergence for physical capital and output; and unbalanced consumption and asset growth. We avoid these undesired results by extending the baseline model with human capital, international credit constraints, and finite horizons. Given its finite-horizons feature, our model allows us to study the growth implications of changes in life expectancy from the perspective of an open economy, as most of the existing theoretical-quantitative literature that focus on the relationship assumes a closed economy. The model predicts that increased life expectancy has positive but diminishing marginal effect on long-run output per capita. We find that, between 1960 and 2018, improvements in average life expectancy at birth raised long-run output per capita in sub-Saharan Africa, the OECD region, and Canada by an estimated 57.49 %, 14.94 %, and 11.58 %, respectively. In addition, if average life expectancy at birth in sub-Saharan African countries converges from its current level to the level in their OECD counterparts, the region’s long-run output per capita will increase by an estimated 22.89 %.