Research Database

This paper analyses how the wage and employment decisions of females are affected by past workforce participation and hours supplied. Our estimation methods exploit the fact that, when markets are complete, the Lagrange multiplier for an agent’s lifetime budget constraint always enters multiplicatively with the prices of (contingent claims to) consumption and leisure. Depending on the properties of the equilibrium price process, it is thus possible to predict the behavior of a wealthy agent by observing that of a poorer person living in a more prosperous world. This provides the key to estimating, nonparametrically, the expectations that enter the calculus of equilibrium decisionmaking, and ultimately the structural parameters which characterize preferences.

There are two major differences between Japan and the United States in the way saving is calculated in their national accounts. First, depreciation in Japanese national accounts is based on historical costs, which leads to an understatement of true depreciation and hence an overstatement of net saving. Second, government capital formation is not included in U.S. saving. This article adjusts the official Japanese saving numbers by evaluating depreciation at replacement costs and excluding government capital formation from saving. Doing so significantly reduces the apparent gap between the national saving rates of the two countries. Since 1970 Japan's national saving rate has been declining to the stationary U.S. rate. This trend, however, has been reversed in recent years. In contrast, Japan's wealth-to-income ratio (excluding land), after declining in the late 1950s, has been rising toward the U.S. ratio and has reached the U.S. level in 1987.

We use a regime-switching model of real GNP growth to examine the duration dependence of business cycles. The model extends Hamilton (1989) and Durland and McCurdy (1994) and is estimated using both the postwar NIPA data and the secular data constructed by Balke-Gordon. We find that an expansion is more likely to end at a young age, that a contraction is more likely to end at an old age, that output growth slows over the course of an expansion, that a decline in output is mild at the beginning of a contraction, and that long expansions are followed by long contractions. This evidence taken together provides no support for the clustering of the whole-cycle around seven-to-ten year durations.

Three key features of the employment process in the U.S. economy are that job creation is procyclical, job destruction is countercyclical, and job creation is less volatile than job destruction. These features are also found at the sectoral (goods and services) level. The paper develops, calibrates, and simulates a two sector general equilibrium model including both aggregate and sectoral shocks. The behavior of the model economy mimics the job creation and destruction facts. Sectoral shocks play a significant role in determining the aggregate level of nonemployment.

This essay argues that monetary theories should not contain an undefined object labeled money. Among existing theories that do not satisfy that dictum are models which assume that real balances are arguments of utility or production functions and models which assume cash-in-advance constraints. A main weakness of theories that do not satisfy the dictum is that they cannot address questions about which objects constitute money. Theories that do satisfy the dictum are those which specify assets by their physical properties and which permit the assets’ role in exchange to be endogenous. The essay briefly describes one such theory, a random matching model with assets that differ according to whether they throw off real dividends.