Research Database

This paper studies an environment in which the investment opportunities of agents are private information and shows that financial intermediaries arise endogenously within that environment. It establishes that financial intermediaries are part of an efficient arrangement in the sense that they are needed to support the authors’ private information core allocations. These intermediaries, which are coalitions of agents, exhibit the following characteristics in equilibrium: they borrow from and lend to large groups of agents; they produce information about investment projects; and they issue claims that have different state contingent payoffs than claims issued by ultimate borrowers.

When credit markets to finance investment in human capital are missing, the competitive equilibrium allocation is inefficient. When generations overlap, this failure can be mitigated by properly designed social arrangements. We show that public financing of education and public pensions can be designed to implement an intergenerational transfer scheme supporting the complete market allocation. Neither the public financing of education nor the pension scheme we consider resemble standard ones. In our mechanism, via the public education system, the young borrow from the middle aged to invest in human capital. They pay back the debt via a social security tax, the proceedings of which finance pension payments. When the complete market allocation is achieved, the rate of return implicit in this borrowing-lending scheme should equal the market rate of return.

The marginal cost of plant capacity, measured by the price of equity, is significantly procyclical. Yet, the price of a major intermediate input into expanding plant capacity, investment goods, is countercyclical. The ratio of these prices is Tobin's q. Following convention, we interpret the fact that Tobin's q differs from unity at all, as reflecting that there are diminishing returns to expanding plant capacity by installing investment goods ("adjustment costs"). However, the phenomenon that interests us is not just that Tobin's q differs from unity, but also that its numerator and denominator have such different cyclical properties. We interpret the sign switch in their covariation with output as reflecting the interaction of our adjustment cost specification with the operation of two shocks: one which affects the demand for equity and another which shifts the technology for producing investment goods. The adjustment costs cause the two prices to respond differently to these two shocks, and this is why it is possible to choose the shock variances to reproduce the sign switch. These model features are incorporated into a modified version of a model analyzed in Boldrin, Christiano and Fisher (1995). That model incorporates assumptions designed to help account for the observed mean return on risk free and risky assets. We find that the various modifications not only account for the sign switch, but they also continue to account for the salient features of mean asset returns. We turn to the business cycle implications of our model. The model does as well as standard models with respect to conventional business cycle measures of volatility and comovement with output, and on one dimension the model significantly dominates standard models. The factors that help it account for prices and rates of return on assets also help it account for the fact that employment across a broad range of sectors moves together over the cycle.

Businesses hold large quantities of cash reserves, which have average returns well below their investments in tangible capital. Businesses do this because these monetary assets provide services. One implication is that money services is a factor of production in capital theoretic valuation equilibrium models. Our aggregate production function is consistent with both the classical demand for money function relationship and with extended periods of near zero short-term nominal interest rates. In our model economy, there is a 100 percent reserve requirement on all demand deposits. Demand deposits are legal tender. We find (i) money services in the production function necessitates revisions in the national accounts; (ii) monetary and fiscal policy cannot be completely separated; (iii) for a given policy, equilibrium is either unique or does not exist; and (iv) Friedman’s monetary satiation is not optimal. We make quantitative comparisons between interest rate targeting regimes and between inflation rate targeting regimes. The best inflation rate target was 2 percent.

This is a note on the analysis of inflation and taxation in Cooley and Hansen’s cash-in-advance economy described in their paper “The Welfare Costs of Moderate Inflations.” Basic issues concerning the costs and consequences of inflation are considered, their results are assessed, and some directions for extensions are suggested.

Time consistent optimal plans are defined within the context of a simple, discrete time optimal control framework. Three possible sources of inconsistency are identified and discussed with reference to the literature.

Recent advances in duality theory have made it easier to discover relationships between asset prices and the portfolio choices based on them. But this approach to arbitrage-free securities markets has yet to be extended and applied to economies with transactions costs. This paper does so, within the context of a general state-preference model of securities markets. Several applications are developed to illustrate the nature of the theory and its potential to resolve a host of issues surrounding the effects of transactions costs on securities markets.

This online appendix accompanies Staff Report 620: Star Wars at Central Banks.

Supplemental data and code for replication.

We ask whether a two-country real business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles. With this question in mind, we document a number of discrepancies between theory and data. The most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries. In the data, outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions. In the model we see the opposite.

We investigate the consequences of demographic change for business cycle analysis. We find that changes in the age composition of the labor force account for a significant fraction of the variation in business cycle volatility observed in the U.S. and other G7 economies. During the postwar period, these countries experienced dramatic demographic change, although details regarding extent and timing differ from place to place. Using panel-data methods, we exploit this variation to show that the age composition of the workforce has a large and statistically significant effect on cyclical volatility. We conclude by relating these findings to the recent decline in U.S. business cycle volatility. Using both simple accounting exercises and a quantitative general equilibrium model, we find that demographic change accounts for a significant part of this moderation.