Volume 6, Issue 3

We extend and test two models of asset pricing that feature status-seeking through accumulation of not only financial and real assets but also human capital. We use weak-identification robust tests to confront these models with U.S. aggregate data. Contrary to previous results, we find that the spirit of capitalism hypothesis, modeled as either direct preference for wealth or pursuit of relative wealth status, is rejected. Therefore, adding status motive alone to an otherwise standard model may not be sufficient to resolve the equity premium puzzle.

Factor-augmented VARs (FAVARs) have combined standard VARs with factor analysis to exploit large data sets in the study of monetary policy. FAVARs enjoy a number of advantages over VARs: they allow a better identification of the monetary policy shock; they avoid the use of a single variable to proxy theoretical constructs; they allow researchers to compute impulse responses for hundreds of variables. Their shortcoming, however, is that the factors are not identified and lack an economic interpretation.This paper seeks to provide an interpretation to the factors. We propose a novel Structural Factor-Augmented VAR (SFAVAR) model, where the factors have a clear meaning: Real Activity factor, Inflation factor, Financial Market factor, Credit factor, Expectations factor, and so forth. The paper employs a Bayesian approach to jointly estimate the factors and the dynamic model. This framework is then used to study the effects of monetary policy on a wide range of macroeconomic variables.

The U.S. trade deficit with China exceeded $200 billion in 2005. Many blame these imbalances on the value of the renminbi. This paper investigates how an appreciation of the RMB would affect the U.S. trade balance with China. Johansen MLE and dynamic OLS results indicate that the long run real exchange rate coefficients for nominal exports and imports between China and the U.S. equal approximately unity, implying that the true price elasticities of demand are higher. In addition, many believe that a Chinese revaluation will lead to a generalized appreciation of Asian currencies that could substantially impact China's processed exports. Thus an appreciation of the renminbi would help to rebalance trade between China and the U.S.

Multi-product firms dominate production activity in the global economy. There is widespread evidence showing that large corporations improve their efficiency by increasing the scale of their operations; this objective can be realized either by consistently investing in R&D or by expanding the product range. In this paper, we explore the implications of this fact by embedding multi-product firms in a General Equilibrium model of endogenous growth. We analyze an economy with oligopolistic firms that carry out in-house R&D programs in order to achieve cost-reducing innovations. Market structure is endogenous in the model and is jointly determined by the number of firms and the number of product varieties per firm. Both economies of scope and scale characterize the economic environment. We show that the market equilibrium involves too many firms (too much inter-firm diversity) and too few products per firm (too little intra-firm diversity); moreover, we find out that the total number of products and productivity growth are inefficiently low under laissez-faire. The nature of these distortions is discussed in detail.

I study money creation in versions of the Trejos-Wright (1995) and Shi (1995) models with indivisible money and individual holdings bounded at two units. I work with the same class of policies as in Deviatov and Wallace (2001), who study money creation in that model. However, I consider an alternative notion of implementability - the ex ante pairwise core. I compute a set of numerical examples to determine whether money creation is beneficial. I find beneficial effects of money creation if individuals are sufficiently risk averse (obtain sufficiently high utility gains from trade) and impatient.

An unresolved question concerning stochastic depreciation shocks is whether they have to be unrealistically large to have any useful role in a dynamic general equilibrium model economy, as Ambler and Paquet (1994) first suggested. We first consider implied depreciation rates from sectoral data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. These depreciation rates vary across time solely due to compositional changes within each sector. Hence, they tend to understate the range of fluctuation that would hold if the economic shelf life of capital varied endogenously as in Cooley et al. (1997). We find, however, that if depreciation rates follow a Markov switching process, a low variance of the depreciation rate is sufficient to allow a model economy to match the low correlation between hours worked and productivity observed in the data. White noise and autoregressive depreciation shocks, in contrast, require a counterfactually large variance in the depreciation rate to reduce the hours-productivity correlation. We also illustrate the level effects implied by nonlinear decision rules in simulations of dynamic general equilibrium models that include Markov switching parameters. Linear decision rules, in contrast, imply certainty equivalence and ignore the aversion that agents have to the skewed shock distributions that characterize Markov switching.

In this paper we measure the welfare cost of fluctuations in a simple representative agent economy with nonclearing markets. The market friction we consider involves price rigidities and a voluntary exchange rationing scheme. These features are incorporated into an otherwise standard neoclassical growth model. We show that the frictions we introduce make the losses from fluctuations four times bigger than in a frictionless environment.

This paper explores the relationship between environmental protection and international capital movements, when tax policy is endogenous (through voting). A two-period general equilibrium model of a small open economy is specified to compare the effects of two different constitutions (commitment or no commitment in tax policy), as well as income inequality. Under the commitment regime, the equilibrium is characterised by a lower labour tax, higher environmental tax and less capital locating abroad than in the no-commitment equilibrium. Furthermore, given the degree of commitment, more equal societies are characterised by tougher environmental policy and less capital locating abroad.