Volume 6, Issue 2

This paper shows that counter-cyclical and counter-inflation monetary policy rules are crucial for monetary business cycle models to match the observed negative (or weak) correlation of the growth rate of money and output, inflation, and the interest rate at business cycle frequencies, which were reported as puzzling in Cooley and Hansen (1998) under the AR-1 money growth rate rule. The results are robust for both flexible and sticky price models. Regarding the relative performance of the realistic and/or estimated monetary policy rules in matching the comovement properties of money growth, the feedback interest rate setting rule on output and inflation, which is consistent with a simple VAR model, outperforms the policy rule suggested by Taylor (1993), the forward-looking monetary policy rule as in Clarida, Gali, and Gertler (2000), the feedback money growth rate rules on output and inflation, and the feedback money growth rate rules on productivity shocks.

In this paper, I show that Hicks neutral technical change is identified as the information of order sigma obtained if the distribution of factor prices is replaced by the distribution of factor efficiency parameters. Together with Solow's residual, the information method enables us to distinguish between the neutral and non neutral part of technical and organizational changes. An empirical evaluation of both methods is provided using Jorgenson's (2001) US data for the period 1948-1999. The main results of the paper are that i) both neutral and non neutral technical change have occurred in the US in the period 1948-1999 and ii) 3/4th of the productivity slowdown observed in the 70s and 80s is due to a deceleration in the contribution of non neutral technical changes.

It may be optimal from a welfare perspective to use R&D subsidies when the source of R&D distortions originates from the surplus appropriability problem and technological spillovers in the form of knowledge spillovers, creative destruction, and duplication externalities are absent. Hence, R&D subsidies may constitute the welfare maximizing policy even when subsidies directly targeted on monopoly pricing could be applied. The result holds when dynamic gains are important relative to static gains and when government spending is restricted, i.e., below the required effort for correcting completely for market failures. The argument is developed in a semi-endogenous growth model where the only distortion is monopoly pricing of intermediate goods.

From the demographic profile of the 1994-1998 International Adult Literacy Survey, we derive synthetic time series over the 1960–1995 period on the literacy level of labor market entrants. This information is then used as a measure of investment in education in a two-way error correction panel data analysis of cross-country growth for a set of 14 OECD countries. The analysis indicates that direct measures of human capital based on literacy scores contain more information about the relative growth of countries than measures based on years of schooling. The results show that, overall, human capital indicators based on literacy scores have a positive and significant effect on the transitory growth path and on the long-run levels of GDP per capita and labor productivity. Quantitatively, our results indicate that the skills associated with one extra year of schooling increase aggregate labor productivity by approximately 7 %, which is consistent with microeconomic evidence (Psacharopoulos, 1994). Moreover, we find that investment in the human capital of women is more important for growth than investment in the human capital of men and that increasing the average literacy skills over all individuals has a greater effect on growth than increasing the percentage of individuals that achieve high levels of literacy skills.

The federal funds rate is featured by frequent, small changes in the same direction and infrequent reversals. How to replicate the observed smooth behavior of the federal funds rate with a small scale macroeconomic model? This paper compares the descriptive performance of an empirical fully backward looking model with that of an empirical new-Keynesian hybrid framework. It turns out that the Fed’s monetary policy conduct can be very well described with a framework allowing for the presence of a small but positive fraction of forward looking agents in the IS curve. This element remarkably reduces the large interest rate smoothing weight otherwise needed to track the observed macroeconomic series.

Several European countries adopted inflation targeting as a monetary policy strategy during the 1990s. This article evaluates the impact of the establishment of this policy framework on the dynamics of inflation for three countries: United Kingdom, Spain and Finland. While smaller shocks triggered most of the decline in their high frequency inflation volatility, this is not always the case for their low frequency (trend) counterpart. Our results suggest that, in the case of the United Kingdom, the more aggressive monetary policy stance against inflation during the inflation targeting period was instrumental in the decline in trend inflation volatility.

Most households have most of their wealth in the form of housing. We analyze how this distributional feature shapes the political economy of housing taxation. We build a simple dynamic general equilibrium model where households vote over the tax treatment of housing and business capital. The model is calibrated so as to match the joint distribution of financial wealth and housing wealth among US households. The median voter has a large share of his wealth in the form of housing and most of his income is wage earnings. The key trade-off he faces is that lowering the tax burden on business capital while increasing the tax burden on housing leads to higher wages but also increases his own share of the overall tax burden.

In order to explore how credit ratings may affect financial markets, we analyze a global game model of debt roll-over in which heterogeneous investors act strategically. We find that the addition of the rating agency has a non-monotonic effect on the probability of default and the magnitude of the response of capital flows to changes in fundamentals. We also establish that introducing a rating agency can bring multiple equilibria to a market that otherwise would have a unique equilibrium.

This paper estimates a standard version of the New Keynesian monetary (NKM) model under alternative specifications of the monetary policy rule using U.S. and Eurozone data. The estimation procedure implemented is a classical method based on the indirect inference principle. An unrestricted VAR is considered as the auxiliary model. On the one hand, the estimation method proposed overcomes some of the shortcomings of using a structural VAR as the auxiliary model in order to identify the impulse response that defines the minimum distance estimator implemented in the literature. On the other hand, by following a classical approach we can further assess the estimation results found in recent papers that follow a maximum-likelihood Bayesian approach. The estimation results show that some structural parameter estimates are quite sensitive to the specification of monetary policy. Moreover, the estimation results in the U.S. show that the fit of the NKM under an optimal monetary plan is much worse than the fit of the NKM model assuming a forward-looking Taylor rule. We also find, in contrast to the literature, evidence of indeterminacy under the best fitting monetary policy rule under the Greenspan era. In contrast to the U.S. case,in the Eurozone the best fit is obtained assuming a backward-looking Taylor rule and determinacy holds, but the improvement is rather small with respect to assuming either a forward-looking Taylor rule or an optimal plan.

We introduce fertility choice into an R&D-based semi-endogenous growth model so that the economy's long-run growth rate is again fully endogenously determined. The ultimate growth engine is located in the population equation of the model ("people reproduce in proportion to their number"), and R&D carries population growth forward to GDP growth. We indicate the problems stemming from the fact that in the considered class of models, population size ought to enter the utility functional multiplicatively. In particular, we show that second order optimality conditions need not hold and flow utility is required to be positive (levels of utility matter). A simplified "Barro–Becker–Jones" model which we put forward, reconciles these problems, yields a stable long-run fertility rate and thus an asymptotic BGP, and is open to further generalizations.

Search models with wage posting and match-specific heterogeneity generate wage dispersion. Given K values for the match-specific variable, it is known that there are K reservation wages that could be posted, but generically never more than two actually are posted in equilibrium. What is unknown is when we get two wages, and which of the reservation wages are actually posted. For an example with K = 3, we show equilibrium is unique, may have one wage or two, and when there are two, the equilibrium can display any combination of posted reservation wages, depending on parameters. We also show how wages, profits and unemployment depend on productivity.

We develop a general equilibrium monetary model of endogenous specialization and international trade to examine the degree of specialization and trade volume under alternative monetary systems, a multiple currency system with a flexible exchange rate and a common currency system. Where demand shocks are important, we demonstrate an increase in specialization, trade and welfare under the common currency relative to flexible exchange rates. The weaker the substitution between exports and imports or the greater the risk aversion, the stronger are these effects. Where supply shocks are important, the effects on specialization and trade are smaller and ambiguous in direction, though the welfare effects are comparable to those for demand shocks. Broadly speaking, the model's results are qualitatively consistent with the empirical results of Rose (2000), which finds an increase in trade due to the adoption of a common currency.

Ross Levine and David Renelt’s (LR) paper [1992] investigate the “robustness” of the relationship between growth, investment, and variables of interest using Leamer’s [1985] Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA). LR claim that few economic variables have a robust relationship with either long-run cross-country growth rates or investment’s share of GDP. As something resembling an extension of McAleer et al. [1985] and Hoover and Perez [2004], we use a battery of statistical tests to search for models that may be less subject to specification error. We conclude that there are alternative models based on LR that have better statistical properties as well as give rather different results.

We construct an overlapping generations model to study the effect of capital controls on human capital investments and the incidence of redistributive taxation in a growing economy. We argue that the conventional wisdom linking higher capital controls to lower growth is reproduced only when an economy is sufficiently developed. For under-developed countries, higher capital controls are beneficial for human capital as well as domestic physical capital accumulation suggesting that the conventional wisdom does not apply. In an augmented version of the model, we show that a modern sector characterized by positive levels of investment in education may not exist unless capital controls are sufficiently high. Higher capital controls make it feasible for a modern sector to exist by lowering the threshold income level required by workers to invest in human capital. Our results are consistent with recent evidence suggesting that capital account liberalization positively affects growth only after a country has achieved a certain threshold level of absorptive capacities.

Using levels of democratic development as a proxy for economic development, and using a 2SLS GMM dynamic panel estimation methodology, we investigate the degree and direction of dissemination in the volatility of economic growth. Our findings indicate two essential points. First, there are differences along the democratic continuum of the ability of a country’s economic growth volatility to affect other countries. Thus, an economic recession for example in one country, does not affect all countries equally across regime type. Second, growth volatility is not simply a North-South phenomenon, but a South-South phenomenon as well. In fact, the empirical patterns found here call into question the usefulness of relying on even these simple, dichotomous views of the world.