Research Database

Our thesis is that poor countries are poor because they employ arrangements for which the equilibrium outcomes are characterized by inferior technologies being used, and being used inefficiently. In this paper, we analyze the consequences of one such arrangement. In each industry, the arrangement enables a coalition of factor suppliers to be the monopoly seller of its input services to all firms using a particular production process. We find that the inefficiencies associated with this monopoly arrangement can be large. Whereas other studies have found that inefficiencies induced by monopoly are at most a few percent of output, we find that eliminating this monopoly arrangement could well increase output by roughly a factor of 3 without any increase in inputs.

Between the sixties and the late eighties the percentages of low-saving single-parent households and people living alone have grown dramatically at the expense of high-saving married households, while the household saving rate has declined equally dramatically. A preliminary analysis of population composition and savings by household type seems to indicate that about half of the decline in savings is due to demographic change. We construct a model with agents changing marital status, but where the saving behavior of the households can adjust to the properties of the demographic process. We find that the demographic changes that reduce the number of married households (mainly higher divorce and higher illegitimacy) induce all household types to save more and that the effect on the aggregate saving rate is minuscule. We conclude that the drop in savings since the sixties is not due to changes in household composition.

This paper generalizes the normal probit model of dichotomous choice by introducing mixtures of normals distributions for the disturbance term. By mixing on both the mean and variance parameters and by increasing the number of distributions in the mixture these models effectively remove the normality assumption and are much closer to semiparametric models. When a Bayesian approach is taken, there is an exact finite-sample distribution theory for the choice probability conditional on the covariates. The paper uses artificial data to show how posterior odds ratios can discriminate between normal and nonnormal distributions in probit models. The method is also applied to female labor force participation decisions in a sample with 1,555 observations from the PSID. In this application, Bayes factors strongly favor mixture of normals probit models over the conventional probit model, and the most favored models have mixtures of four normal distributions for the disturbance term.

This paper evaluates the argument that differences in physical and intangible capital can account for the large international income differences that characterize the world economy today. The finding is that they cannot. Savings rate differences are of minor importance. What is all-important is total factor productivity. In addition, the paper presents industry evidence that total factor productivities differ across countries and time for reasons other than differences in the publicly available stock of technical knowledge. These findings lead me to conclude a theory of TFP is needed. This theory must account for differences in TFP that arise for reasons other than growth in the stock of technical knowledge.

We develop a model of commodity money and use it to analyze the following two questions motivated by issues in monetary history: What are the conditions under which Gresham’s Law holds? And, what are the mechanics of a debasement (lowering the metallic content of coins)? The model contains light and heavy coins, imperfect information, and prices determined via bilateral bargaining. There are equilibria with neither, both, or only one type of coin in circulation. When both circulate, coins may trade by weight or by tale. We discuss the extent to which Gresham’s Law holds in the various cases. Following a debasement, the quantity of reminting depends on the incentives offered by the sovereign. Equilibria exist with positive seigniorage and a mixture of old and new coins in circulation.

We find that the welfare gains to being at the optimum quantity of debt rather than the current U.S. level are small, and, therefore, concerns regarding the high level of debt in the U.S. economy may be misplaced. This finding is based on a model of a large number of infinitely-lived households whose saving behavior is influenced by precautionary saving motives and borrowing constraints. This model incorporates a different role for government debt than is found in standard models, and it captures different cost-benefit trade-offs. On the benefit side, government debt enhances the liquidity of households by providing an additional means of smoothing consumption and by effectively loosening borrowing constraints. On the cost side, the implied taxes have adverse wealth distribution and incentive effects. In addition, government debt crowds out capital via higher interest rates and lowers per capita consumption.

In this paper, I estimate the impact on aggregate labor productivity of having government, rather than private industry, produce investment goods. This policy was pursued to varying degrees by Egypt, India, Turkey, among others. The policy has a large impact because there is both a direct effect (on the production function in the investment sector) and a secondary effect (on the economywide capital stock per worker). I estimate that this policy alone accounted for about one-third of Egypt's aggregate labor productivity gap with the United States during the 1960s.

Energy use is inelastic in time-series data, but elastic in international cross-section data. Two models of energy use reproduce these elasticities: a putty-putty model with adjustment costs developed by Pindyck and Rotemberg (1983) and a putty-clay model. In the Pindyck-Rotemberg model, capital and energy are highly complementary in both the short run and the long run. In the putty-clay model, capital and energy are complementary in the short run, but substitutable in the long run. We highlight the differences in the cross-section implications of the models by considering the effect of an energy tax on output in both models. In the putty-putty model, an energy tax that doubles the price of energy leads to a fall in output in the long run of 33%. In contrast, the same tax in the putty-clay model leads to a fall in output of only 5.3%.

The notion of skilled-biased technological change is often held responsible for the recent behavior of the U.S. skill premium, or the ratio between the wages of skilled and unskilled labor. This paper develops a framework for understanding this notion in terms of observable variables and uses the framework to evaluate the fraction of the skill premium's variation that is caused by changes in observables. A version of the neoclassical growth model is used in which the key feature of aggregate technology is capital-skill complementarity: the elasticity of substitution is higher between capital equipment and unskilled labor than between capital equipment and skilled labor. With this feature, changes in observables can account for nearly all the variation in the skill premium over the last 30 years. This finding suggests that increased wage inequality results from economic growth driven by new, efficient technologies embodied in capital equipment.

It is well documented that on average, stock prices drop by less than the value of the dividend on ex-dividend days. This has commonly been attributed to the effect of tax clienteles. We use data from the Hong Kong stock market where neither dividends nor capital gains are taxed. As in the U.S.A. the average stock price drop is less than the value of the dividend; specifically, in Hong Kong the average dividend was HK $0.12 and the average price drop was HK $0.06. We are able to account for this both theoretically and empirically through market microstructure based arguments.