A pairwise random meeting model with money is used to study the nominal yield on pure-discount, default-free securities that are issued by the government. There is one steady state with matured securities at par and, for some parameters, another with them at a discount. In the former, exogenous rejection of unmatured securities by the government is necessary and sufficient for such a steady state to display a positive nominal yield on unmatured securities. In the latter, the post-maturity discount on securities induces a deeper pre-maturity discount even if there is no exogenous rejection of unmatured securities.

Entrepreneurs bear substantial risk, but empirical evidence shows no sign of a positive premium. This paper develops a theory of endogenous entrepreneurial risk taking that explains why self-financed entrepreneurs may find it optimal to invest into risky projects offering no risk premium. The model has also a number of implications for firm dynamics supported by empirical evidence, such as a positive correlation between survival, size, and firm age.

In this paper we examine the evidence for two competing views of how monetary and financial disturbances influenced the real economy during the national banking era, 1880-1914. According to the monetarist view, monetary disturbances affected the real economy through changes on the liability side of the banking system's balance sheet independent of the composition of bank portfolios. According to the credit rationing view, equilibrium credit rationing in a world of asymmetric information can explain short-run fluctuations in real output. Using structural VARs we incorporate monetary variables in credit models and credit variables in monetarist models, with inconclusive results. To resolve this ambiguity, we invoke the institutional features of the national banking era. Most of the variation in bank loans is accounted for by loans secured by stock, which in turn reflect volatility in the stock market. When account is taken of the stock market, the influence of credit in the VAR model is greatly reduced, while the influence of money remains robust. The breakdown of the composition of bank loans into stock market loans (traded in open asset markets) and other business loans (a possible setting for credit rationing) reveals that other business loans remained remarkably stable over the business cycle.

The possibility of exact maximum likelihood estimation of many observation-driven models remains an open question. Often only approximate maximum likelihood estimation is attempted, because the unconditional density needed for exact estimation is not known in closed form. Using simulation and nonparametric density estimation techniques that facilitate empirical likelihood evaluation, we develop an exact maximum likelihood procedure. We provide an illustrative application to the estimation of ARCH models, in which we compare the sampling properties of the exact estimator to those of several competitors. We find that, especially in situations of small samples and high persistence, efficiency gains are obtained.

In this paper we study the relationship between wealth, income distribution and growth in a game-theoretic context in which property rights are not completely enforcable. We consider equilibrium paths of accumulation which yield players utilities that are at least as high as those that they could obtain by appropriating higher consumption at the present and suffering retaliation later on. We focus on those subgame perfect equilibria which are constrained Pareto-efficient (second best). In this set of equilibria we study how the level of wealth affects growth. In particular we consider cases which produce classical traps (with standard concave technologies): growth may not be possible from low levels of wealth because of incentive constraints while policies (sometimes even first-best policies) that lead to growth are sustainable as equilibria from high levels of wealth. We also study cases which we classify as the "Mancur Olson" type: first best policies are used at low levels of wealth along these constrained Pareto efficient equilibria, but first best policies are not sustainable at higher levels of wealth where growth slows down. We also consider the unequal weighting of players to ace the subgame perfect equiliria on the constrained Pareto frontier. We explore the relation between sustainable growth rates and the level of inequality in the distribution of income.

This paper presents a method to perform likelihood-based inference in nonlinear dynamic equilibrium economies. This type of models has become a standard tool in quantitative economics. However, existing literature has been forced so far to use moment procedures or linearization techniques to estimate these models. This situation is unsatisfactory: moment procedures suffer from strong small samples biases and linearization depends crucially on the shape of the true policy functions, possibly leading to erroneous answers. We propose the use of Sequential Monte Carlo methods to evaluate the likelihood function implied by the model. Then we can perform likelihood-based inference, either searching for a maximum (Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimation) or simulating the posterior using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm (Bayesian Estimation). We can also compare different models even if they are nonnested and misspecified. To perform classical model selection, we follow Vuong (1989) and use the Kullback-Leibler distance to build Likelihood Ratio Tests. To perform Bayesian model comparison, we build Bayes factors. As an application, we estimate the stochastic neoclassical growth model.

I show that a simple sticky price model based on Rotemberg (1982) is consistent with a variety of facts concerning the correlation of prices, hours and output. In particular, I show that it is consistent with a negative correlation between the detrended levels of output and prices when the Beveridge-Nelson method is used to detrend both the price and output data. Such a correlation, i.e.,a negative correlation between the predictable movements in output and the predictable movements in prices is present (and very strong) in U.S. data. Consistent with the model, this correlation is stronger than correlations between prices and hours of work. I also study the size of the predictable price movements that are associated with predictable output movements as well as the degree to which there are predictable movements in monetary aggregates associated with predictable movements in output. These facts are used to shed light on the degree to which the Federal Reserve has pursued a policy designed to stabilize expected inflation.

This paper presents a model of growth through technical progress. The nature and scope of what is learned is derived from a set of axioms, and optimal search behavior by agents is then analyzed. Agents can search intensively or extensively. Intensive search explores a technology in greater depth, while extensive search yields new technologies. Agents alternate between these two modes of search. The economy grows forever and the growth rate is bounded away from zero. The growth rate is on average higher during periods of intensive search than during periods of extensive search. Epochs of higher growth are initiated by discoveries that call for further intensive exploration. This mechanism is reminiscent of the process described by Schumpeter as causing long-wave business cycles. Serial correlation properties of output and growth stem from the presence of intensive rather than extensive search. The two key parameters are technological opportunity and the cost of the extensive search.

In a world with two similar, developed economies, economic integration can cause a permanent increase in the worldwide rate of growth. Starting from a position of isolations, closer integration can be achieved by increasing trade in goods or by increasing flows of ideas. We consider two models with different specifications of the research and development sector that is the source of growth. Either form of integration can increase the long-run rate of growth if it encourages the worldwide exploitation of increasing returns to scale in the research and development sector.

This paper is interested in the small sample properties of the indirect inference procedure which has been previously studied only from an asymptotic point of view. First, we highlight the fact that the Andrews (1993) median-bias correction procedure for the autoregressive parameter of an AR(1) process is closely related to indirect inference; we prove that the counterpart of the median-bias correction for indirect inference estimator is an exact bias correction in the sense of a generalized mean. Next, assuming that the auxiliary estimator admits an Edgeworth expansion, we prove that indirect inference operates automatically a second order bias correction. The latter is a well known property of the Bootstrap estimator; we therefore provide a precise comparison between these two simulation based estimators.

This paper considers the unobserved endowment economy of Green (1987) with a restriction that agents can walk away from insurance contracts at the beginning of any period and contract with another insurer (one-sided commitment). An equilibrium is derived characterized by a unique, market determined insurance contract with the property that agents never want to walk away from it. I show that trade (or insurance) still occurs and that a non-degenerate long-ran distribution of consumption exists.

Inspired by the current European developments, we study equilibrium fiscal policy under alternative constitutional arrangements in a "federation" of countries. There are two levels of government: local and federal. Local policy redistributes across individuals and affects the probability of aggregate shocks, while federal policy shares international risk. Policies are chosen under majority rule. There is a moral hazard problem: federal risk-sharing can induce the local governments to enact policies that increase local risk. We investigate this incentive problem under alternative fiscal constitutions. In particular, we contrast a vertically ordered system like the EC with a horizontally ordered federal system like the US. These alternative arrangements are not neutral, in the sense that they create different incentives for policymakers and voters, and give rise to different political equilibria. A general conclusion is that, centralization of functions and power can be welfare improving under appropriate institutions. However, this conclusion only applies to the moral hazard problem and a federation where the countries are not too dissimilar.

We examine price formation in a simple static model with asymmetric information, a countable number of risk neutral traders and without noise traders. Prices can exhibit excess volatility (the variance of prices exceeds the variance of dividends), even in such a simple model. More generally, we show that for an open set of parameter values no equilibrium has prices which turn out to equal the value of dividends state by state, while for another open set of parameter values there exist equilibria such that equilibrium prices equal the value of dividends state by state. When information collection is endogenous and costly, expected prices exhibit a "V-shape" as a function of the cost of information: They are maximized when information is either costless so that everyone acquires it, or else is so costly that no one chooses to acquire it. Prices are depressed if information is cheap enough so that some agents become informed, while others do not. If the model is altered so that information is useful in making productive decisions, then the V-shape is altered, reducing the attractiveness of prohibitively high costs.

We report estimates of the dynamic effects of a technology shock, and then use these to estimate the parameters of a dynamic general equilibrium model with money. We find: (i) a positive technology shock drives up hours worked, consumption, investment and output; (ii) the positive response of hours worked reflects that the Fed has in practice accommodated technology shocks; (iii) model parameter values and functional forms that match the response of macroeconomic variables to monetary policy shocks also work well for technology shocks; (iv) while technology shocks account for a large fraction of the lower frequency component of economic fluctuations, they account for only a small part of the business cycle component of fluctuations.

This paper studies efficient insurance arrangements in village economies when there is complete information but limited commitment. Commitment is limited because only limited penalties can be imposed on households which renege on their promises. Any efficient insurance arrangement must therefore take into account the fact that households will renege if the benefits from doing so outweigh the costs. We study a general model which admits aggregate and idiosyncratic risk as well as serial correlation of incomes. It is shown that in the case of two households and no storage the efficient insurance arrangement is characterized by a simple updating rule. An example illustrates the similarity of the efficient arrangement to a simple debt contract with occasional debt forgiveness. The model is then extended to multiple households and a simple storage technology. We use data from the ICRISAT survey of three villages in southern India to test the theory against three alternative models: autarky, full insurance, and a static model of limited commitment due to Coate and Ravallion (1993). Overall, the model we develop does a significantly better job of explaining the data than does any of these alternatives.

This paper analyzes the political economy of growth as an issue of intergenerational distribution. The first part of the paper develops a model of endogenous growth via human capital accumulation in an overlapping generations setting. Equilibrium growth is inefficient due to the presence of an intergenerational externality. We characterize the set of Pareto efficient paths for physical and human capital accumulation, and find that there is a continuum of efficient growth rate-interest rate combinations. The preferred combination for an infinitely-lived planner will depend on the social discount rate. Competitive equilibrium with subsidized or mandated human capital accumulation may give rise to a Pareto efficient steady state, though for some parameters efficiency requires some intergenerational redistribution. We then argue that a social planner or government with an infinite horizon is incongruous in an OG model when the agents all have finite horizons. Hence the second part of the paper addresses the question of how a government whose decisionmakers reflect the finite horizons of their constituents would choose policies that affect physical and human capital accumulation. Specifically we assume that each government maximizes a weighted sum of utilities of those currently alive. Each period the government selects a policy that takes into account the effect (through state variables) on subsequent policy decisions (and hence on the welfare of the current young generation). Numerical methods involving polynomial approximations are used to compute equilibria under specific parametric assumptions. Equilibrium growth rates turn out to be substantially below efficient rates.

Briefly reviews the potential consequences of electronic money for the management of the government's balance sheet through open market operations and for the regulations governing the public and private issue of payment instruments.

This paper presents a model in which a country's average propensity to save tends to rise endogenously over time. The paper uses a two-sector neoclassical framework to model the transition from agriculture to manufacturing which typically accompanies economic development. Key assumptions are that only the agricultural sector uses land and a simple version of Engel's law. When a country's income per capita is low, agricultural consumption is important; consequently, land is valuable and capital gains on it may account for most wealth accumulation, making the NIPA APS appear low. If exogenous technological progress raises incomes over time, Engel's law shifts demand to manufactured goods. Then land's importance in portfolios relative to reproducible capital diminishes and the measured average propensity to save can rise.

We describe a stochastic economic environment in which the mix of money and trade credit used as means of payment is endogenous. The economy has an infinite horizon, spatial separation and a credit-related transaction cost, but no capital. We find that the equilibrium prices of arbitrary contingent claims to future currency differ from those from one-good cash-in-advance models. This anomaly is directly related to the endogeneity of the mix of media of exchange used. In particular, nominal interest rates affect the risk-free real rate of return. The model also has implications for some long-standing issues in monetary policy and for time series analysis using money and trade credit.

This paper investigates the optimal tax structure in an overlapping generations model in which individuals face idiosyncratic income risk, borrowing constraints and lifetime uncertainty. The calibrated model economy produces some quantitative results that differ significantly from the findings of the previous research. The main finding in this imperfect insurance setup is that moving away from capital income taxation toward higher labor income taxation yields a (steady-state) welfare benefit of 1% of aggregate consumption compared with the 6% figure Lucas (1990) finds in an infinite-horizon, complete markets model. This is because replacing the tax on capital income with a higher tax on labor income redistributes resources away from the young working years during which borrowing constraints are more likely to bind. Furthermore, when the individuals have access to a private annuity market to insure against uncertain lifetimes, it becomes optimal to tax capital. When a consumption tax is made available, it is optimal to switch to consumption taxation. The welfare benefit from implementing this optimal plan is on the order of 1.5-3.2% of GNP.

A number of theoretical models of technology adoption have been proposed that emphasize technological switching, loss of expertise and subsequent technology-specific learning. These models imply that measured productivity may initially fall and then later rise after the adoption of a new technology. This paper investigates whether or not this implication is a feature of plant-level data from the Colombian manufacturing sector. We regress measures of productivity growth at the plant level on a plant-specific measure of technology adoption and its lagged values. We find that...

We construct a model of the product cycle featuring endogenous innovation and endogenous technology transfer. Competitive entrepreneurs in the North expend resources to bring out new products whenever expected present discounted value of future oligopoly profits exceeds current product development costs. Each Northern oligopolist continuously faces the risk that its product will be copied by a Southern imitator, at which time its profit stream will come to an end. In the South, competitive entrepreneurs may devote resources to learning the production processes that have been developed in the North. There too, costs (of reverse engineering) must be covered by a stream of operating profits. We study the determinants of the long-run rate of growth of the world economy, and the long-run rate of technological diffusion. We also provide an analysis of the effects of exogenous events and of public policy on relative wage rates in the two regions.

This paper develops the Kiyotaki-Wright model of monetary general equilibrium in which trade is bilateral and enforced by requiring that transactions be quid pro quo, and studies which goods are chosen, and under what conditions, as media of exchange. We prove the existence of a rational expectations equilibrium in which agents' expectations concerning trading opportunities are realized in the present and all future periods. We also show that, exceptional cases aside, no rational expectations barter equilibrium exists; that an equilibrium generally supports multiple money goods; and that a fiat money (i.e., a good that is produced, has minimum storage costs, but is not consumed) cannot be traded in rational expectations equilibrium.

This paper develops a dynamic model of general imperfect competition by embedding the Shapley-Shubik model of market games into an overlapping generations framework. Existence of an open market equilibrium where there is trading at each post is demonstrated when there are an arbitrary (finite) number of commodities in each period and an arbitrary (finite) number of consumers in each generation. The open market equilibria are fully characterized when there is a single consumption good in each period and it is shown that stationary open market equilibria exist if endowments are not Pareto optimal. Two examples are also given. The first calculates the stationary equilibrium in an economy, and the second shows that the on replicating the economy the stationary equilibria converge to the unique non-autarky stationary equilibrium in the corresponding Walrasian overlapping generations economy. Preliminary on-going work indicates the possibility of cycles and other fluctuations even in the log-linear economy.

We explain how a long period of slow pre-industrial development triggers an Industrial Revolution that leads to modern balanced growth. Development in the preindustrial period is driven by increasing returns to specialization made possible by a growing population. Increasing access to specialized intermediate goods eventually makes fundamental technological innovation possible. Innovation initiates the Industrial Revolution, after which productivity grows endogenously regardless of population growth. Industrialization reconciles the crucial role of population early on with its weak relation to per capita product in developed economies. Faster population growth speeds early development, though if it results from a highly productive primitive technology, the consequences for development are ambiguous.

Traditional theories of asset pricing assume there is complete market participation so all investors participate in all markets. In this case changes in preferences typically have only a small effect on asset prices and are not an important determinant of asset price volatility. However, there is considerable empirical evidence that most investors participate in a limited number of markets. We show that limited market participation can amplify the effect of changes in preferences so that an arbitrarily small degree of aggregate uncertainty in preferences can cause a large degree of price volatility. We also show that in addition to this equilibrium with limited participation and volatile asset prices, there may exist a Pareto-preferred equilibrium with complete participation and less volatility.

We consider a model of international sovereign debt where repayment is enforced because defaulting nations lose their reputation and consequently, are excluded from international capital markets. Underlying the analysis of reputation is the hypothesis that borrowing countries have different, unobservable, attitudes towards the future. Some regimes are relatively myopic, while others are willing to make sacrifices to preserve their access to debt markets. Nations' preferences, while unobservable, are not fixed but evolve over time according to a Markov process. We make two main points. First we argue that in models of sovereign debt the length of the punishment interval that follows a default should be based on economic factors rather than being chosen arbitrarily. In our model, the length of the most natural punishment interval depends primarily on the preference parameters. Second, we point out that there is a more direct way for governments to regain their reputation. By offering to partially repay loans in default, a government can signal its reliability. This type of signaling can cause punishment interval equilibria to break down. We examine the historical record on lending resumption to argue that in almost all cases, some kind of partial repayment was made.

This paper reports some empirical evidence on the relation between the expected real interest rate and monetary aggregates in postwar U.S. data. We find some evidence against the hypothesis, implied by the Real Business Cycle model of Litterman and Weiss (1985), that the expected real interest rate follows a univariate autoregressive process, not Granger-caused by monetary aggregates. Our findings, however, are consistent with a more general bivariate model--suggested by what Barro (1987, Chapter 5) refers to as "the basic market-clearing model"--in which the real rate depends on its own lagged values and on lagged output. Taking this bivariate model as our null hypothesis, we find no evidence that money-stock changes have a significant liquidity effect on the expected real interest rate.