Research Database

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 analyzes the effects of money injections on interest rates and exchange rates in a model in which agents must pay a Baumol-Tobin style fixed cost to exchange bonds and money. Asset markets are endogenously segmented because this fixed cost leads agents to trade bonds and money only infrequently. When the government injects money through an open market operation, only those agents that are currently trading absorb these injections. Through their impact on these agents’ consumption, these money injections affect real interest rates and real exchange rates. We show that the model generates the observed negative relation between expected inflation and real interest rates. With moderate amounts of segmentation, the model also generates other observed features of the data: persistent liquidity effects in interest rates and volatile and persistent exchange rates. A standard model with no fixed costs can produce none of these features.

In high-tech industries, one important method of diffusion is through employee mobility: many of the entering firms are started by employees from incumbent firms using some of their former employers’ technological know-how. This paper explores the effect of incorporating this mechanism in a general industry framework by allowing employees to imitate their employers’ know-how. The equilibrium is Pareto optimal since the employees “pay” for the possibility of learning their employers’ know-how. The model’s implications are consistent with data from the rigid disk drive industry. These implications concern the effects of know-how on firm formation and survival.

Will an industry with no antitrust policy converge to monopoly, competition or somewhere in between? We analyze this question using a dynamic dominant firm model with rational agents, endogenous mergers and constant returns to scale production. We find that perfect competition and monopoly are always steady states of this model and that there may be other steady states with a dominant firm and a fringe co-existing. Mergers are likely only when supply is inelastic or demand is elastic, suggesting that the ability of a dominant firm to raise price through monopolization is limited. Additionally, as the discount rate increases, it becomes harder to monopolize the industry, because the dominant firm cannot commit to not raising prices in the future.

This paper quantitatively evaluates the hypothesis that deflation can account for much of the Great Depression (1929–33). We examine two popular explanations of the Depression: (1) The “high wage” story, according to which deflation, combined with imperfectly flexible wages, raised real wages and reduced employment and output. (2) The “bank failure” story, according to which deflationary money shocks contributed to bank failures and to a reduction in the efficiency of financial intermediation, which in turn reduced lending and output. We evaluate these stories using general equilibrium business cycle models, and find that wage shocks and banking shocks account for a small fraction of the Great Depression. We also find that some other predictions of the theories are at variance with the data.

We present a class of convex endogenous growth models and analyze their performance in terms of both growth and business cycle criteria. The models we study have close analogs in the real business cycle literature. We interpret the exogenous growth rate of productivity as an endogenous growth rate of human capital. This perspective allows us to compare the strengths of the two classes of models.

To highlight the mechanism that gives endogenous growth models the ability to improve upon their exogenous growth relatives, we study models that are symmetric in terms of human and physical capital formation—our two engines of growth. More precisely, we analyze models in which the technology used to produce human capital is identical to the technologies used to produce consumption and investment goods and in which the technology shocks in the two sectors are perfectly correlated.

In this paper, I provide a possible explanation of why nominally risk-free bonds are essential in monetary economies. I argue that the role of nominal bonds is to serve as record-keeping devices in intertemporal exchanges of money. I show that bonds can only serve this role if they are illiquid (costly to exchange for goods). Finally, I show that in economies in which nominal bonds are essential, welfare and nominal interest rates are both positively associated with the supply of illiquid bonds (if that supply is small).

What determines the relationship between pollution and growth? Are the forces that explain the behavior over time of these quantities potentially useful to understand more generally the relationship between policies and growth? In this paper, we make a first attempt to analyze the equilibrium behavior of two quantities—the level of pollution and the level of income—in a setting in which societies choose, via voting, how much to regulate pollution. Our major finding is that, consistent with the evidence, the relationship between pollution and growth need not be monotone and that the precise equilibrium nature of the relationship between the two variables depends on whether individuals vote over effluent charges or directly restrict the choice of technology. Moreover, our analysis of the pollution problem suggests that, more generally, endogenous policy choices should be taken seriously as potential sources of heterogeneity when studying cross country differences in economic performance.

Market booms are often followed by dramatic falls. To explain this requires an asymmetry in the underlying shocks. A straightforward model of technological progress generates asymmetries that are also the source of growth cycles. Assuming a representative consumer, we show that the stock market generally rises, punctuated by occasional dramatic falls. With high risk aversion, bad news causes dramatic increases in prices. Bad news does not correspond to a contraction of existing production possibilities, but to a slowdown in their rate of expansion. This economy provides a model of endogenous growth cycles in which recoveries and recessions are dictated by the adoption of innovations.