Research Database

In this paper we construct a stochastic overlapping-generations general equilibrium model in which households are subject to aggregate shocks that affect both wages and asset prices. We use a calibrated version of the model to quantify how the welfare costs of severe recessions are distributed across different household age groups. The model predicts that younger cohorts fare better than older cohorts when the equilibrium decline in asset prices is large relative to the decline in wages, as observed in the data. Asset price declines hurt the old, who rely on asset sales to finance consumption, but benefit the young, who purchase assets at depressed prices. In our preferred calibration, asset prices decline more than twice as much as wages, consistent with the experience of the US economy in the Great Recession. A model recession is approximately welfare-neutral for households in the 20–29 age group, but translates into a large welfare loss of around 10% of lifetime consumption for households aged 70 and over.

No abstract available. Introduction: This paper considers the question, Does the limited liability associated with banking make it necessary for a government to regulate bank employee compensation? It attempts to shed light on this question by considering a mechanism design framework. In it, a single risk averse employee must be induced to search for good investment opportunities and turn down bad investment opportunities.

This paper uses a simple general equilibrium model in which agents use money holdings to self insure to address the classic question: What is the optimal rate of change of the money supply? The standard answer to this question, provided by Friedman, Bewley, Townsend, and others, is that this rate is negative. Because any revenues from seigniorage in our model are redistributed in lump-sum form to agents and this redistribution improves insurance possibilities, we find that the optimal rate is sometimes positive. We also discuss the measurement of welfare gains or losses from inflation and their quantitative significance.

The effects on ex ante optima of a lag in seeing monetary realizations are studied using a matching model of money. The main new ingredient in the model is meetings in which producers have more information than consumers. A consequence is that increases in the amount of money that occur with small enough probability can have negative impact effects on output, because it is optimal to shut down trade in such low probability meetings rather than have lower output when high probability realizations occur. The information lag also produces prices that do not respond much to current monetary realizations.

Drawing from confidential firm-level data of US manufacturing firms, we provide new evidence on the cyclicality of small and large firms. We show that the cyclicality of sales and investment declines with firm size. The effect is primarily driven by differences between the top 0.5% of firms and the rest. Moreover, we show that, due to the skewness of sales and investment, the higher cyclicality of small firms has a negligible influence on the behavior of aggregates. We argue that the size asymmetry is unlikely to be driven by financial frictions given 1) the absence of statistically significant differences in the behavior of production inputs or debt in recessions, 2) the survival of the size effect after directly controlling for proxies of financial strength, and 3) the predictions of a simple financial frictions model, in which unconstrained (large) firms contract more in recessions than constrained (small) firms.

We analyze the incentive for a government to default on its debts in a variant of the Lucas and Stokey (1983) model of optimal taxation. Optimal fiscal policy requires the use of debt to smooth tax distortions over time. Dynamic consistency requires that governments not have an incentive to default on the inherited debt. We consider policy and allocation rules which map the history of the economy into current decisions. A sustainable equilibrium is a sequence of history-contingent functions which satisfy sequential rationality for the government and for private agents. We characterize sustainable equilibrium outcomes when the horizon in finite. We show that, under plausible assumptions, the loss in welfare due to the absence of a commitment technology to honor debts is small.

A standard approach to estimating structural parameters in life-cycle models imposes sufficient assumptions on the data to identify the "age profile" of outcomes, then chooses model parameters so that the model's age profile matches this empirical age profile. I show that this approach is both incorrect and unnecessary: incorrect, because it generally produces inconsistent estimators of the structural parameters, and unnecessary, because consistent estimators can be obtained under weaker assumptions. I derive an estimation method that avoids the problems of the standard approach. I illustrate the method's benefits analytically in a simple model of consumption inequality and numerically by reestimating the classic life-cycle consumption model of Gourinchas and Parker (2002).

It is widely believed that an important factor underlying the rapid growth in China is increased foreign direct investment (FDI) and the transfer of foreign technology capital, which is accumulated know-how from investment in research and development (R&D), brands, and organizations that is not specific to a plant. In this paper, we study two channels through which FDI can contribute to upgrading of the stock of technology capital: knowledge spillovers and appropriation. Knowledge spillovers lead to new ideas that do not directly compete or devalue the foreign affiliate's stock. Appropriation, on the other hand, implies a redistribution of property rights over patents and trademarks; the gain to domestic companies comes at a loss to the multinational company (MNC). In this paper we build these sources of technology capital transfer into the framework developed by McGrattan and Prescott (2009, 2010) and introduce an endogenously-chosen intensity margin for operating technology capital in order to capture the trade-offs MNCs face when expanding their markets internationally. We first demonstrate that abstracting from technology capital transfers results in predicted bilateral FDI inflows to China that are grossly at odds with the data. We then use the bilateral inflows to parameterize the model with technology capital transfers and compute the global economic impact of Chinese policies that encouraged greater inflows of FDI and technology capital transfers. Microevidence on automobile patents is used to support our parameter choices and main findings.