Volume 9, Issue 1

We introduce a fiscally independent central bank with balance sheet concerns in the new Keynesian model. The central bank is subject to a budget constraint and state-contingent transfers from the treasury are not allowed. This change renders the standard optimal monetary policy solution non implementable. In addition to facing a budget constraint, when the central bank targets real capital, optimal monetary policy is substantially different from the standard case. In response to a cost-push shock, variation in inflation decreases at the cost of increased output gap variation; there is incomplete stabilization of aggregate demand and money demand shocks; response to a cost-push shock under discretion is similar to that under commitment in the standard model; and the central bank tracks real money balances.

This paper investigates the implications of external indebtedness and international financial integration on the effects of foreign interest rate shocks in a small-open economy. The empirical component of the analysis quantifies the effects of U.S. interest rate shocks on the Turkish economy. The theoretical component constructs a business cycle model that can successfully match the empirical impulse response functions. The model is estimated on quarterly Turkish data. It is found that the relationship between financial integration and macroeconomic volatility due to foreign interest rate shocks depends on the level of outstanding external debt. Financial integration mitigates the economy's responses to foreign rate shocks for higher levels of external debt and it magnifies the responses for lower levels of external debt.

This paper examines the role of money when private information about the quality of the goods is present. In the private information environment, barter exchange for high-quality goods is rare since people have incentive to produce low-quality goods and attempt to cheat uninformed trading partners. This environment gives money a role in mitigating informational frictions. I consider two environments, one where traders can signal their quality of goods and one where they cannot, and two types of informational problems -- adverse selection and moral hazard -- in a search-theoretic framework. Both environments support the notion that money reduces the adverse selection problem and increases welfare. However, with moral hazard, money is less effective in overcoming informational frictions. Because low-quality goods producers can still consume as long as they hold money even when their products are recognized as low quality, agents have incentive to produce low-quality goods. I conduct several policy analyses, and find that the role of money is very sensitive to the inflation rate. While the Friedman rule is the optimal monetary policy in my environment, it cannot generate a first-best allocation unless traders are able to signal their quality of goods.

Sustained growth in both incomes and life spans are the hallmarks of modern development. Fluctuations around trend in the former, or business cycles, have been a traditional focus in macroeconomics, while similar cyclical patterns in mortality are also interesting and are now increasingly studied. In this paper, I assess the welfare implications of cyclical fluctuations in mortality using a new utility-theoretic model of preferences over uncertain length of life. Echoing the classic result of Lucas (1987) regarding business cycles, my findings suggest that short-term fluctuations in mortality are not very costly. While consumption fluctuations are relatively large, cyclical fluctuations in mortality are tiny compared to the much larger static uncertainty in length of life that derives from naturally rising mortality rates through age. Secular improvements in life expectancy and gains against static health inequalities appear to be much more important than cyclical mortality.

In June of 2004 the Fed began relentlessly tightening policy. They raised the Federal Funds Target (Target) from 1% to 5 1/4% in 1/4% increments at seventeen consecutive meetings. While short rates dutifully followed the Target up, long maturity rates actually fell. Alan Greenspan in 2005 Congressional testimony labeled the strange behavior of the spread between long rates and the Target a "conundrum." This paper examines the conundrum. We present robust empirical evidence that the increase in foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds explains at least half of the decline in long maturity rates. Foreign holdings of U.S. Treasury debt with a maturity over one year grew from 20% in 1994 to 57% in 2007.

The relationship between unanticipated inflation and output has been a classic issue in macroeconomics. This paper studies the effects of monetary uncertainty on output in a competitive search environment where there is asymmetric information about monetary shocks. In such an environment, sellers post prices that are contingent on the realization of the shock, and buyers then direct their search towards the most attractive price. The paper proposes a new mechanism for real output effects of monetary shocks: when the realization of the monetary shock is privately observed by buyers, to induce truth-telling behavior, sellers offer more output when the economy experiences a positive monetary shock; otherwise, buyers have an incentive to lie about the state of the world in order to pay low prices. This contrasts with the centralized Walrasian market environment, where nominal shocks by themselves have no real effects.

This paper introduces the rational inattention hypothesis (RI) -- that agents process information subject to finite channel constraints -- into a stochastic growth model with permanent technology shocks. We find that RI raises consumption volatility relative to output by introducing an endogenous demand shock. Furthermore, it is shown that incorporating RI can provide an additional internal propagation mechanism (measured by the impulse response function and the autocorrelation function of output growth) and generate higher variance of forecastable movements in output. However, we find that RI cannot resolve these puzzles in the RBC literature -- weak internal propagation and low variance of forecastable movements in output, even with what appears to be a very low capacity channel.

This paper studies optimal monetary policy in an economy where firms rely heavily on external funds to finance operational costs. In the model, financial contracts are subject to agency problems and firms can possibly default on borrowed funds. Financial frictions have two separate effects on the model. First, they introduce an indirect cost channel to the monetary transmission mechanism. Second, they exacerbate the welfare costs of output gap fluctuations. The indirect cost channel implies that a given reduction in inflation can be achieved with a smaller output loss. This effect encourages the policy maker to emphasize inflation stabilization. At the same time, agency costs also make output gap fluctuations more costly in terms of economic welfare. This second effect encourages the policy maker to place more emphasis on output gap stabilization. Whether the optimal policy requires greater inflation stabilization or output gap stabilization depends on the balance of these two effects. Under a reasonable parametrization, the first effect dominates the second and the optimizing policy maker adopts a stricter anti-inflationary stance.

We construct a general equilibrium model in which credit is used as a medium of exchange, and banks participate in a settlement system to finalize their customers' transactions. We study the optimal settlement system design, and find that a trade-off arises endogenously within the model. A higher frequency of settlement and more costly intra-day borrowing policies limit the banks' accumulation of liabilities and promote conservative reserve management, hence limiting the risk of default should a bank fail for any reason. However, such policies also imply higher banking costs, less interest paid on deposits, and less capital allocated by banks to productive investments. After characterizing equilibrium and welfare, we parameterize the economy and analyze how the optimal settlement system policies depend on several features of the economy, including the risk of bank failure, the fragility of the settlement system, the volume of trade by banks' customers, and the rate of return on investments available to banks.

Strong evidence indicates that in most countries cities tend to develop sequentially, with the initially largest cities growing first. This paper presents a model of city growth that rationalizes this pattern. Increasing returns to scale constitute the force that favors agglomeration of resources in a city, and convex costs associated with the stock of installed capital represent the congestion force that limits city size. The key to generating sequential city growth is the assumption of irreversible investment in physical capital. As expected, the presence of a positive external effect of aggregate city capital on individual firms makes the competitive equilibrium inefficient.

Two key features of the postwar Japanese economy are the rapid economic growth during the 1960's and early 70's and the decline in labor supply during the rapid growth period. Taking the capital stock destruction and total factor productivity (TFP) as given, a standard neoclassical optimal growth model can account for the growth patterns of postwar Japanese capital stock, output, consumption, and investment. The decline in labor during the rapid growth period can be attributed to an income effect that occurs as household consumption rises above its subsistence level in this period.

The Schelling model of a “tipping point" in racial segregation, in which whites flee a neighborhood once a threshold of nonwhites is reached, is a canonical model of strategic interdependence. The idea of “tipping" explaining segregation is widely accepted in the academic literature and popular media. I use census tract data for metropolitan areas of the U.S. from 1970 to 2000 to test the predictions of the Schelling model and find that this particular model of strategic interaction largely fails the tests. There is more “white flight" out of neighborhoods with a high initial share of whites than out of more racially mixed neighborhoods.

This paper analyzes the rationale for delegating monetary policy to an inflation-averse central banker when there is a preference for robustness of optimal policy with respect to misspecifications of the underlying model of the economy. We use a simple New Keynesian model to show how the optimal output gap weight in the central bank's objective function depends on the degree of model uncertainty. In particular, we show numerically that the rationale for appointing a conservative central bank prevails even if the central bank is concerned about the robustness of policy with respect to model misspecifications. Moreover, we find that the central bank should put more relative weight on inflation stabilization if the degree of uncertainty increases. Interestingly, if the degree of uncertainty is large, monetary policy should be delegated to a conservative central banker even in the absence of shock persistence.

This paper analyzes the decreased volatility of U.S. macroeconomic variables starting in the 1980's in a model where monetary policy is affected by financial frictions. The model is estimated for postwar U.S. data with a break in 1981:3, allowing for changes in the policy rule, shock processes and financial frictions across subsamples. There is some evidence that changed monetary policy is more important to explain inflation stabilization, while "good luck" helps explain the increased stability in output. However, the results are most consistent with a decline in shock variances which was reinforced by a decrease in financial frictions, making the economy less vulnerable to shocks.

During the period 1960-2000, the proportion of two-earner couples among married couples in the U.S. more than doubled, while tax laws underwent numerous changes, with major reforms taking place in the 1980's (flattening of the federal income tax schedule) and in the 1990's (major expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)). We investigate the impact of the actual tax reforms on married couples' participation through a model of heterogeneous households. Theoretically, we elucidate what aspects of the tax reforms are important for a family time allocation choice when the work choice is discrete. Quantitatively, we show that even in the 1980's, changes in tax laws account for only 8% of the increase in the proportion of two-earner couples, although this small average impact masks a much larger impact experienced by women with high earning husbands. Another important finding is that the Earned Income Tax Credit substantially discourages work participation among married couples with low-earning husbands. A notable contribution of this work is the accurate incorporation of the complex U.S. tax code into a model of heterogeneous households, which is done using TAXSIM, a tax calculator software.

This paper analyzes the impact of foreign aid on growth. It differs from the existing literature in at least two important ways. First, we differentiate between foreign aid as technical assistance and non-technical assistance, and demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that this distinction is important. Second, we test the hypothesis that the effectiveness of aid depends on its level of fragmentation. To preview our main results: non-technical assistance has no statistically significant impact on growth; but technical assistance has a positive and significant impact, except in countries where it is highly fragmented.

This paper exploits a notable institutional feature of salary payments in Japan, the bonus system, to examine whether households smooth consumption under large and regular income changes. Using high quality household-level data from the Japanese Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), our statistical tests show that the consumption seasonality of bonus receiving households is significantly affected by the bonus payments. Although our estimate of the marginal propensity to consume from bonus income is much smaller than that from smaller and less predictable end-of-year tax refunds, it is positive and significantly different from zero, which contrasts to earlier studies on large and regular income changes.

Under a large degree of extrinsic inflation persistence, there is a strong yet simple case for inflation targeting even if we are uncertain about many other dimensions of the economy. If inflation persistence is high and driven by extrinsic sources, even an excessively strict inflation-targeting regime is preferable to full policy discretion. Our result is entirely built on stabilization policy: long-run inflation rates are optimal under full policy discretion in our model. It is instead the medium-term dynamics of inflation expectations that render the policy response under discretion worse than inaction.

In this paper we show that results on the effects of fiscal shocks in Galí, López-Salido and Vallés (2007) rely on a high degree of price stickiness and a large percentage of financially constrained agents. Real rigidities in the form of habit persistence, fixed firm-specific capital and Kimball demand curves interact in interesting ways with nominal and financial rigidities and allow us to reproduce the same consumption multiplier as Galí et al. (2007) under only two and a half quarters of price stickiness, instead of four, and only 30 per cent of constrained agents instead of 50 per cent. Therefore, real rigidities are useful in the study of fiscal shocks in addition to monetary and productivity shocks as has been shown in the previous literature, though rule-of-thumb consumption remains too crude a mechanism for accounting for the hump-shaped response of consumption found in the data.

Since the mid-1980s firm level financial volatility has increased, while the U.S. economy has experienced a sharp decline in the volatility of GDP growth. Do firms adjust their capital structure in response to higher idiosyncratic risk? And if so, could that affect the performance of the aggregate economy? Using a dynamic general equilibrium model we show that in the presence of larger firm-specific risk, firms shift the composition of their balance sheets towards more self-financing and away from debt. In the presence of financial accelerator-like frictions, larger idiosyncratic risk translates into greater external financing costs, steering firms to borrow less to counteract larger premia. Model simulations suggest that larger idiosyncratic risk dampens the financial accelerator and can lead to a reduction in output volatility of up to 40 percent; and up to a 16 percent decline in firm leverage.

This paper extends existing search-theoretic models of monetary exchange, and uses the framework to explore the following applications. First, I show how to endogenize the supply of liquidity in a simple (one-country) model where commodity money can be created, say through mining and minting, and also consumed, say melted or shipped abroad for imported goods. Second, I develop an explicit multi-country version of the model that determines how liquidity is allocated across economies that share the same currency, such as the euro-zone. The implications of the analysis are similar on many dimensions to more traditional theories, such as Hume's price-specie flow theory, or Mundell's monetary theory of the current account. However, in the current framework the role for money has explicit microfoundations based on frictions in the trading process. At the same time, as compared to existing search-based models in monetary economics, especially those used to address international issues, the current framework is much more natural and also much more tractable.

Motivated by structural instability in the energy price – macroeconomy nexus, this paper revisits Granger causality between unemployment and real input prices, the real prices of energy (crude oil) and capital (real interest rate). Time varying Granger causality is investigated through application of the Markov Switching Vector Autoregression of Psaradakis, Ravn, and Sola [Journal of Applied Econometrics, 20(5), 665-683 (2005)]. The results show that the real price of oil helps forecast unemployment in recessions only, while the real interest rate does so exclusively in expansions. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that oil prices have asymmetric effects on the economy. A further result is that oil, but not the real rate, is economically significant for unemployment in the long run solution of the model.

Financial markets and pay-as-you-go social security are two alternative ways to provide for retirement. The size of social security programs could therefore be partly determined by the level of financial frictions. I explore this possibility by using legal origin as a proxy for financial frictions that may hold back financial development. The empirical analysis yields two main results. First, legal origin-driven differences in financial frictions are an important determinant of social security; in particular, common law countries exhibit significantly smaller public pension programs. Second, two-stage estimates suggest that legal origin impacts on social security through financial market development.

A number of inflation targeting central banks operate under provisions that allow for increased flexibility when faced with large supply shocks. These so-called escape clauses, however, are usually hard to interpret and discretionary in nature. This paper argues that a practical and more viable option is to specify a hard edged target range. Within the range, the central bank enjoys complete independence. Should, however, a large supply shock force inflation outside the range, the government may overrule the bank unless it adjusts its policy to address the government's concerns. Such an arrangement has the advantage of being easily understood and non-discretionary. Furthermore, it is shown that the bandwidth of the target range is inversely related to the degree of flexibility of the inflation targeting regime and thus, provides an easy way for the central bank to communicate its preferences to the public. The paper also discusses various determinants of the optimal design of the target range.

Rational expectations models fail to explain the disconnect between the exchange rate and macroeconomic fundamentals. In line with survey evidence on the behaviour of foreign exchange traders, we introduce model misspecification and learning into a standard monetary model. Agents use simple forecasting rules based on a restricted information set. They learn about the parameters and performance of different models and can switch between forecasting rules. We compute the implied US-UK post-Bretton Woods exchange rate and show that the excess volatility of the exchange rate return can be reproduced with low values of the learning gain. Both assumptions, misspecification and learning, are necessary to generate this result. However, the implied correlations with the fundamentals are higher than in the data. Including more lags in the model tilts the balance of our findings slightly towards rational expectations and away from the learning hypothesis.

We compute the marginal product of capital (MPK) taking into account cross-country differences in the relative price of capital in a large panel including 95 countries over the period 1970-2000. Estimates of the price-uncorrected MPK suggest that the marginal product of capital is much larger in poor countries than in rich countries throughout the entire sample period. However, estimates of the price-corrected MPK suggest that differences in the marginal product of capital between rich and poor countries were significant in the 1970's, decreased substantially in the 1980's, and were negligible in the 1990's. In fact, the correlation between price-corrected MPK and GDP per worker is close to zero for most of the 1990's. Furthermore, we find that in both rich and poor countries the capital-output ratio is increasing over time, and while the relative price of capital is slightly decreasing in rich countries it is strongly increasing in poor countries. Counterfactual reallocations of capital that equalize its rate of return around the world would have yielded significant output gains in poor countries in the 1970's, but gains in the 1990's would have been negligible. These findings are robust to alternative rich/poor cut-offs. Our results suggest that international capital markets are largely integrated since the early 1990's.

Recently, Barsky et al. (2007) found that a sticky-price model does not generate sectoral co-movement and that the propagation mechanism is weak in response to monetary shocks if prices in the durable goods sector are significantly flexible, which raises a co-movement problem in sticky-price models. In this paper, we estimate sticky-price models with both durable and nondurable goods sectors in order to examine sectoral price stickiness and co-movement using actual data. The estimation results show that prices in both sectors are relatively sticky and the co-movement problem does not occur in the usual settings. We find, however, that the co-movement problem may occur when we introduce persistent price-markup shocks in a sticky-price model. We also estimate nominal rigidities models with sticky wages as well as sticky prices and find that sticky wages are helpful in explaining sectoral co-movement in addition to sticky prices.

The burden sharing of pollution abatement costs raises the issue of how the costs are supported by entities (regions or industries) of a country that decides to reduce pollution, e.g., in the Kyoto Protocol context. This paper explores this issue in the framework of a dynamic endogenous growth 2 sectors - 2 regions - 2 inputs Heckscher-Ohlin model of a small open economy with an international tradable permits market. Given an "emission-based grand-fathering" sharing rule, capital accumulation is more negatively affected by the environmental policy in the energy intensive sector if energy and capital are complementary. But the picture could be different in terms of total sectoral revenue, depending on the evolution of prices. Finally, we show that the impact of environmental policy at the regional level depends crucially on the evolution of regional specialization patterns.

This paper shows that convexity of the short-run Phillips curve is a source of positive inflation bias even when policymakers target the natural unemployment rate, that is when they operate with prudent discretion, and their loss function is symmetric. Optimal monetary policy also induces positive co-movement between average inflation, average unemployment and inflation variability---suggesting a new motive for inflation stabilization policy---and positively skewed unemployment distributions. The reduced form model is applied to the post-disinflation period (1986-2006) in developed countries and its properties are illustrated numerically for the United States.

This study conducts an investigation into the extent of cointegration between imports and exports and asymmetries in the adjustment of the U.S. current account over the study period 1960Q4-2007Q2. We find evidence in favor of cointegration through the application of the standard Johansen methodology. Employing the Trace test procedure recursively, two distinct regimes are identified according to whether or not imports and exports are cointegrated. We also consider the Breitung (2002) and Breitung and Taylor (2003) nonparametric cointegration test procedures that do not assume linear short-run dynamics. Further analysis of the asymmetric short-run dynamics reveals that adjustment towards long-run equilibrium is primarily driven by U.S. exports responding to current account deficits.

This paper documents the existence of a significant forecast error on crude oil futures. We interpret it as a risk premium, which, in part, could have been explained by means of a real-time U.S. business cycle indicator, such as the degree of capacity utilization in manufacturing. This result is robust to the specification of the estimating equation and to the considered business cycle indicator. An out-of-the-sample prediction exercise reveals that futures adjusted to take into account this time-varying component produce significantly better forecasts than those of unadjusted futures, of futures adjusted for the average forecast error and of the random walk, particularly at horizons of more than 6 months.

This paper analyses in a simple global games framework welfare effects stemming from different communication strategies of public agencies if strategies of agents are complementary to each other: communication can either be fully transparent, or the agency opaquely publishes only its overall assessment of the economy, or it keeps information completely secret. It is shown that private agents put more weight on their private information in the transparent case than in the case of opacity. Thus, in many cases, the appropriate measure against overreliance on public information is giving more details to the public instead of denying access to public information.

This paper investigates the source of historical fluctuations in annual UK labor productivity and employment data extending back to the 19th century. Long-run identifying restrictions are used to decompose shocks into technology shocks and other shocks. The UK results show more sample stability than similar historical results found for the U.S. in a companion paper. The short-run impact of technology shocks on labor is found to be negative both before and after WWII, regardless of the data generating process assumed for labor. This suggests that the technology-driven real business cycle hypothesis is strongly rejected for the UK. The decomposition also reveals important changes in the volatility of shocks over time.

We generalize the analysis of inflation bias with dynamic Phillips curves in three respects. First, we examine the discretionary (time consistent) solution in cases where the Phillips curve has both a backward-looking and forward-looking component. Second, we show that the commitment (time inconsistent) solution does not normally involve zero inflation and output at its natural rate. Instead, with a purely forward-looking Phillips curve and positive discounting, it will involve a dynamic path for inflation in which steady state inflation is below its target. In this sense, we obtain negative inflation bias. Third, we show that the timeless perspective policy has the same steady state as the commitment case, but without any short-term output gains.

This paper presents additional evidence on the international nature of the “Great Moderation:" the apparent structural decline in the variance of GDP growth first documented in the United States. We find evidence of a similar reduction in volatility in the other G-7 countries and Australia. However, the timing and nature of the moderation varies considerably across countries.We also assess whether and how business cycles have changed in the period since the Great Moderation. Our results suggest that in most of these countries, the major change in business cycles has been a noticeably slower rate of GDP growth in expansions. We find little evidence of milder recessions in the post-Moderation period. Although a lower variance of growth will result in longer expansions and rarer recessions, the evidence presented here suggests that recessions have been just as severe, on average, when they do occur.

I investigate the effect of wealth on consumption in a new dataset with financial and housing wealth from 16 countries. The baseline estimation method based on the sluggishness of consumption growth implies that the eventual (long-run) marginal propensity to consume out of total wealth is 5 cents (averaged across countries). While the wealth effects are quite strong--between 4 and 6 cents--in countries with more developed mortgage markets and in market-based, Anglo-Saxon and non euro area economies, consumption only barely reacts to wealth elsewhere. The effect of housing wealth is somewhat smaller than that of financial wealth for most countries, but not for the U.S. and the UK. The housing wealth effect has risen substantially after 1988 as it has become easier to borrow against housing wealth.

This paper revisits the dynamic optimal taxation results of Jones, Manuelli, and Rossi (1993, 1997). They use a growth model with human capital and find that optimal taxes on both capital income and labor income converge to zero in steady state. For one of the models under consideration, I show that the representative household's problem does not have an interior solution. This raises concerns since these corners are inconsistent with aggregate data. Interiority is restored if preferences are modified so that human capital augments the value of leisure time. With this change, the optimal tax problem is analyzed and, reassuringly, the Jones, Manuelli, and Rossi results are confirmed: neither capital income nor labor income should be taxed in steady state.

We investigate the controversial issue whether unemployment is related to productivity growth in the long run, using U.S. data in a framework of infrequent mean shifts. Univariate tests find (endogenously dated) shifts in 1974, 1986, and 1996. System co-breaking techniques indicate that the shifts are common features, and the implied long-run link between the two variables is negative. Therefore the secular decline of unemployment since the mid 1990's indeed seems related to higher average productivity growth. The initial and final regimes are essentially equal, which would be compatible with explanations of the productivity slowdown that point to historical learning costs of information technology adoption.

Recent theoretical research has studied extensively the link between wage setting and monetary policymaking in unionized economies. This paper addresses the question of the role of monetary uncertainty from both a theoretical and empirical point of view. Our analysis is based on a simple model that derives the influence of monetary uncertainty on unionized wage setting. We construct an indicator of monetary policy uncertainty and test our model with data for the G5 countries. The central finding is that monetary policy uncertainty has a negative impact on nominal wage growth in countries where wage setting is relatively centralized.

This paper compares the macroeconomic implications of overtime taxation and wage and employment subsidies in a dynamic general equilibrium model in which hours and bodies are imperfect substitutes due to team work and externality-based commuting costs. To obtain reliable estimates, I calibrate the model to the substitutability between the workweek and employment using business cycle information. I find that subsidizing employment can achieve the same employment increase as taxing overtime but at a lower cost in terms of output, productivity, wages and welfare. The wage subsidy that achieves the same employment increase turns out to be very costly from a fiscal point of view

This paper offers an alternative way, based on the logistic population growth hypothesis, to produce transitional dynamics in the standard AK framework with an exogenous savings rate. In the model the growth rate of the aggregate stock of capital is independent of the evolution of population and always constant, whereas the growth rate of population, though independent of the law of motion of capital, varies over time. Hence, non monotonicity in the per-capita capital level and growth rate can be observed.

We analyze how the provision of an explicit numerical inflation target provides a focal point for agents' expectations when information is imperfect. Communicating a target and a tolerance band around it provides a clear framework with which to evaluate monetary policy outcomes. We show how inflation targeting exploits the self-reinforcing loop between success and credibility to help the Central Bank endure large and long lasting shocks. Last, we derive the optimal band width around the target, which exploits the benefits of providing a focal point while maximizing the probability of success.

In recent research on financial crises, large exogenous shocks to total factor productivity (TFP) are used as the driving force accounting for large output falls. TFP fell 3% after the Korean 1997 financial crisis. We find evidence that the large fall in TFP is mostly due to a sectoral reallocation of labor from the more productive manufacturing and construction sectors to the less productive wholesale trade sector, the public sector and agriculture. We construct a two-sector model that accounts for the labor reallocation. The model has a consumption sector and an investment sector. Firms face sector-specific working capital constraints, which we calibrate with data from financial statements. The rise in interest rates makes inputs more costly. The model accounts for 42% of the TFP fall. The model also accounts for 53% of the fall in GDP. It is broadly consistent with the post-crisis behavior of the Korean economy.

We propose that the formation of beliefs be treated as statistical hypothesis tests, and label such beliefs inferential expectations. If a belief is overturned through the build-up of evidence, we assume agents switch to the rational expectation. Thus, if the test size is unity, agents hold rational expectations. We solve a Dornbusch-style model of exchange rates under rational expectations and inferential expectations. Under the latter we prove that the regression tests of Uncovered Interest Parity and the rational expectations version of the term structure display a downward bias. The model also explains delayed overshooting and sharp changes in exchange rates.