Research Database

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.

A cash-in-advance model with sequential markets is constructed, where unanticipated monetary injections are nonneutral and can potentially produce large liquidity effects. However, if the monetary authority adheres to an optimal money rule, money should not respond to unanticipated shocks, so that a Friedman rule is suboptimal and the monetary authority does not exploit the liquidity effect. Quantitatively, the model can generate variability in money and nominal interest rates close to what is observed, and can produce data with no obvious evidence of the existence of liquidity effects.

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 incorporate the consumption-ability relationship of static "efficiency wage" models into a dynamic general equilibrium model. We show that for many aggregate land stocks, there is a continuum of unemployment rates which could persist indefinitely as part of a stationary equilibrium. For many of these aggregate land stocks, both unemployment and full employment are distrinct possibilities. Broadly speaking, more unemployment corresponds to more undernourishment and more inequality in land distribution. Thus our results suggest that the market mechanism is less efficacious than land reform in reducing unemployment and undernourishment.

This paper examines the effect of different education financing systems on the level and distribution of resources devoted to public education. We focus on California, which in the 1970's was transformed from a system of mixed local and state financing to one of effectively pure state finance and subsequently saw its funding of public education fall between ten and fifteen percent relative to the rest of the US. We show that a simple political economy model of public finance can account for the bulk of this drop. We find that while the distribution of spending became more equal, this was mainly at the cost of a large reduction in spending in the wealthier communities with little increase for the poorer districts. Our model implies that there is no simple trade-off between equity and resources; we show that if California had moved to the opposite extreme and abolished state aid altogether, funding for public education would also have dropped by almost ten percent.

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.

This paper analyzes how political stability depends on economic factors. Fluctuations in groups' economic capacities and in their abilities to engage in rent-seeking or predatory behavior create periodic incentives for those groups to renege on their social obligations. A constitution remains in force so long as no party wishes to defect to the noncooperative situation, and it is reinstituted as soon as each party finds it to its advantage to revert to cooperation. Partnerships of equals are easier to sustain than are arrangements in which one party is more powerful in some economic or noneconomic trait. In this sense, inequality is bad for social welfare. Surprisingly, perhaps, it is the rich, and not the poor segments of society who in our model pose the greater threat to the stability of the social order. Using cross-country data, we test and confirm the prediction that most constitutional disruptions should be accompanied by increases in income inequality.

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.

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.

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.

Handout for "Policy Concerning Water Markets": Using Water Better: A Market-Based Approach to California's Water Crisis, by Ronald H. Schmidt and Frederick Cannon. Published 1991 by Bay Area Economic Forum (Calif.), Association of Bay Area Governments, Bay Area Council (Calif.). Handout for "Environmental Issues and Ag Lending": Land Values and Environmental Regulation by Michael D. Boehlge, Philip M. Raup and Kent D. Olson. University of Minnesota Department of Agricutural and Applied Economics Staff Paper P91-3, January 1991.

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 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.

Technology change is modeled as the result of decisions of individuals and groups of individuals to adopt more advanced technologies. The structure is calibrated to the U.S. and postwar Japan growth experiences. Using this calibrated structure we explore how large the disparity in the effective tax rates on the returns to adopting technologies must be to account for the huge observed disparity in per capita income across countries. We find that this disparity is not implausibly large.

Cointegration tests are used to examine the basic long-term relation between population and the housing stock. There is some weak evidence of a long-run relation between the constant-cost value of the housing stock and population-driven demand. Much stronger evidence exists for a long-term relation between owner-occupied housing units and the adult population. We generally cannot reject that the number of housing units intended for owner-occupancy has adjusted in proportion to the population 25 years of age and older. Using these results and current population projections, we produce trend forecasts through the year 2010 for the owner-occupied housing stock and single-family housing starts in the U.S.

There are two striking aspects of the recovery from the Great Depression in the United States: the recovery was very weak and real wages in several sectors rose significantly above trend. These data contrast sharply with neoclassical theory, which predicts a strong recovery with low real wages. We evaluate whether New Deal cartelization policies designed to limit competition among firms and increase labor bargaining power can account for the persistence of the Depression. We develop a model of the intraindustry bargaining process between labor and firms that occurred with these policies, and embed that model within a multi-sector dynamic general equilibrium model. We find that New Deal cartelization policies are an important factor in accounting for the post-1933 Depression. We also find that the key depressing element of New Deal policies was not collusion per se, but rather the link between paying high wages and collusion.

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.

There were three important changes in the United States economy during the 1980s. First, from 1982-90, the decade featured the longest consecutive stretch of positive quarterly output growth in United States history. Second, wage inequality expanded greatly as the wages of highly skilled workers grew markedly faster than the wages of less skilled workers (Katz and Murphy (1992)). Finally, consumption inequality also expanded as the consumption of highly skilled workers grew faster than that of less skilled workers (Attanasio and Davis (1994)). This paper argues that these three aspects of the United States economic experience can be interpreted as being part of an efficient response to a macroeconomic shock given the existence of a particular technological impediment to full insurance. I examine the properties of efficient allocations of risk in an economic environment in which the outside enforcement of risksharing arrangements is infinitely costly. In these allocations, relative productivity movements have effects on both the current and future distribution of consumption across individuals. If preferences over consumption and leisure are nonhomothetic, these changes in the allocation of consumption will generate persistent cycles in aggregate output that do not occur in efficient allocations when enforcement is costless.