Research Database

Herein, it is demonstrated that the competitive provision of fiat money is generically either inefficient or infeasible.

In a model which exhibits many monetarist properties it is shown that monetary and fiscal policies must be coordinated. The model is populated by overlapping generations of three-period lived agents who can hold fiat money, fiat bonds, and physical capital. A government produces a public good and issues both money and fiat bonds to finance permanent budget deficits. In this model both fiat money and fiat bonds can have value in equilibrium, and their co-existence can allow a more efficient financing of deficits than can a single debt instrument.

This paper considers a policy environment in which policy is not set by a single policymaker, but by a sequence of policymaking administrations. Administration turnover is determined by a simple random process. The consequences of administration turnover are traced through for two versions of a linear rational expectations model, and numerical simulations of various policy environments are presented.

This paper describes a technique for distributing quarterly time series across monthly values. The method generalizes an approach described by Fernandez (1981). The paper also presents results of a test of the accuracy of these two approaches and two standard procedures suggested by Chow and Lin (1971).

This paper presents a simple general equilibrium model of optimal taxation similar to that of Lucas and Stokey (1983), except that we let the government default on its debt. As a benchmark, we consider Ramsey equilibria in which the government can precommit its policies at the beginning of time. We then consider sustainable equilibria in which both government and private agent decision rules are required to be sequentially rational. We concentrate on trigger mechanisms which specify reversion to the finite horizon equilibrium after deviations by the government. The main result is that no Ramsey equilibrium with positive debt can be supported by such trigger mechanisms.

We propose a definition of involuntary unemployment which differs from that traditionally used in implicit labor contract theory. We say that a worker is involuntarily unemployed if the marginal wage implied by the optimal contract exceeds the marginal rate of substitution between leisure and consumption. We construct a model where risk-neutral firms have monopoly power and show that such monopoly power is necessary for involuntary unemployment to arise in the optimal contract. We numerically compute examples and show that such unemployment occurs for a wide range of parameter values.

This paper presents a frequency-domain technique for estimating distributed lag coefficients (the impulse-response function) when observations are randomly missed. The technique treats stationary processes with randomly missed observations as amplitude-modulated processes and estimates the transfer function accordingly. Estimates of the lag coefficients are obtained by taking the inverse transform of the estimated transfer function. Results with artificially created data show that the technique performs well even when the probability of an observation being missed is one-half and in some cases when the probability is as low as one-fifth. The approximate asymptotic variance of the estimator is also calculated in the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to begin a reevaluation of the Free Banking Era by developing and examining individual bank information on the population of banks which existed under the free banking laws in four states. This information allows us to determine the number of free banks which failed and to estimate the resulting losses to their note holders. While the new evidence suggests there were problems with free banking, it presents a serious challenge to the prevailing view that free banking led to financial chaos.

This paper describes and implements a procedure for estimating the timing interval in any linear econometric model. The procedure is applied to Taylor’s model of staggered contracts using annual averaged price and output data. The fit of the version of Taylor’s model with serially uncorrelated disturbances improves as the timing interval of the model is reduced.

The recurrent banking panics of the 19th century and the Great Depression of the 1930s are widely viewed as failures of our economic system. A simple version of Samuelson’s overlapping generations model is used to generate such failures of Walrasian equilibrium. The spontaneous “panics” generated involve a collapse of bank credit, causing in turn a drop in investment demand. The model suggests that both the recent technological advances in the intermediation industry and the current move towards deregulation of that industry are ominous developments.

We show that some classes of sterilized interventions have no effect on equilibrium prices and quantities. The proof does not require complete markets, Ricardian equivalence, monetary neutrality, or the law of one price. Moreover, regressions of exchange rates or interest differentials on variables measuring debt’s currency composition contain no information about the effectiveness of such interventions. Other interventions require changes in monetary and fiscal policy; their effects depend, generally, on the influence of these changes on the economy and not on the intervention alone. In short, sterilized intervention is not, as the portfolio balance approach indicates, an extra policy instrument.

This paper reconsiders the aliasing problem of identifying the parameters of a continuous time stochastic process from discrete time data. It analyzes the extent to which restricting attention to processes with rational spectral density matrices reduces the number of observationally equivalent models. It focuses on rational specifications of spectral density matrices since rational parameterizations are commonly employed in the analysis of the time series data.

Iterated contraction by dominance produces a generalized equilibrium. This solution to game theory is motivated, generated, analyzed, and compared to Nash equilibrium. One implication drawn is that a realized event in a social situation need not be uniquely determined by simple individual choices, even though the preference orderings implying those choices are the appropriate primitive.

This paper shows how the cross-equation restrictions delivered by the hypothesis of rational expectations can serve to solve the aliasing identification problem. It is shown how the rational expectations restrictions uniquely identify the parameters of a continuous time model from statistics of discrete time models.

A simple model of the process of learning in a diverse economy is presented. This model produces a stylized business cycle with shocks which precipitate the learning process. All agents have the same information, which implies that this business cycle cannot be reduced by improved information flow, counter to many models of output and employment fluctuation.

This paper analyzes the variability of output under money supply and exchange rate rules in an open economy in which the slope of the aggregate supply curve depends on the variances of aggregate demand and market-specific innovations. It demonstrates that results regarding the dominance of one rule over the other when the slope of the aggregate supply curve is constant are reversed when the slope of the aggregate supply curve depends on the variances of innovations and these variances are sufficiently large.

In a recent article, J. A. Kay has proposed a useful measure of the deadweight loss arising from a commodity tax system. The measure answers the question, How much more would the taxed consumer be willing to pay in a lump sum rather than as a commodity tax? Kay’s computation of the marginal deadweight loss does not yield the change in this measure for small changes in commodity tax rates, however. This note clarifies Kay’s otherwise excellent contribution, derives the measure for Cobb-Douglas utilities, and examines a useful property of it.

We study the possible specialness of circulating as opposed to noncirculating private securities using models whose equilibria imply the existence of both. The models are pure exchange setups with spatial separation and with the potential for a variety of intertemporal trades. We find a sense in which unregulated circulating private securities are troublesome. It can happen that in order for an equilibrium to exist, the amounts of circulating debts issued at the same time in spatially and informationally separated markets have to satisfy restrictions not implied by individual maximization and market clearing in each market separately.

In this paper I describe a “monetary” system in which backing is provided for the government’s liabilities by way of contingent resort to taxes. The system has some of the features of a commodity money system with a large seignorage spread between bid and ask prices. It is studied within the context of a one-good, pure exchange model of two-period-lived overlapping generations in which, aside from various uniform boundedness assumptions, considerable diversity is allowed both within and across generations. Two results are established: (i) the existence of at least one perfect foresight competitive equilibrium, and (ii) the Pareto optimality of any such equilibrium.

The inefficiency of fixed rate consumer price subsidies, relative to cash transfers, is one of the best-known propositions in welfare economics. It has also been used to show that matching grants are a more inefficient intergovernmental aid than are lump sum grants. Furthermore, the cost of fixed rate subsidies cannot be controlled without providing a “cap” beyond which amount no subsidy is received. This paper reports, both qualitatively and quantitatively, that a broad class of variable rate price subsidies also dominates fixed rate subsidies on both counts. The relative inefficiency of matching grants compared to the variable rate Federal General Revenue Sharing program is estimated.

This paper presents a simple general equilibrium model of optimal taxation in which both private agents and the government can default on their debt. As a benchmark we consider Ramsey equilibria in which the government can precommit to its policies at the beginning of time, but in which private agents can default. We then consider sustainable equilibria in which both government and private agent decision rules are required to be sequentially rational. We completely characterize the set of sustainable equilibria. In particular, we show that when there is sufficiently little discounting and government consumption fluctuates enough, the Ramsey allocations and policies (in which the government never defaults) can be supported by a sustainable equilibrium.

Using optimal control theory and a vector autoregressive representation of the relationship between money and interest rates, one can derive a feedback control procedure which defines the best possible tradeoff between money supply fluctuations and interest rate volatility and which could be used to reduce both from their current levels.

Different conclusions about the effects of open market operations are reached even among economists using full employment and rational expectations models. I show that these differences can be attributed to different assumptions regarding the concept of the deficit that is held fixed for an open market operation, the diversity among agents, and the features generating money demand. With regard to those features, I argue that plausible ways of explaining the holding of low-return money preclude the kind of perfect credit markets needed to obtain Ricardian equivalence.

Monetary policy is analyzed within a model that ignores transaction costs and appeals solely to legal restrictions on private intermediation to explain the coexistence of currency and interest-bearing default-free bonds. The interaction between such legal restrictions and monetary policy is illustrated in versions of overlapping generations models that contain three assets: government-issued currency and bonds and real capital. It is shown that legal restrictions and the use of both currency and bonds permit the government to levy a discriminatory inflation tax and that such a tax may be better in terms of the Pareto criterion than a uniform inflation tax.

This paper describes the continuous time stochastic process for money and inflation under which Cagan’s adaptive expectations model is optimal. It then analyzes how data formed by sampling money and prices at discrete points in time would behave.

The implications of a dynamic coalition production technology are explored. With this technology, coalitions produce the current period consumption good as well as coalition-specific capital which is embodied in young coalition members. The equilibrium allocation is efficient and displays constant growth rates, even though exogenous technological change is not a feature of the environment. Unlike the neoclassical growth model, policies which influence agents’ investment-consumption decisions affect not only the level of output, but also its constant growth rate. In addition to these growth entailments, the theory has equally important industrial organization implications. Specifically, in equilibrium there is no tendency for coalition (firm) size to regress to the mean or for the distribution of coalition sizes to become more disparate.

Our suggestion consists of three postulates: assets are valued only in terms of their payoffs, perfect foresight, and complete and costless markets under laissez-faire. Together these postulates imply that the crucial anomaly, rate-of-return dominance of “money,” is to be explained by legal restrictions.

Our defense of these postulates is two-fold. First we compare them with existing alternative theories. Second, we provide an illustrative model which : (a) is consistent with the postulates, (b) implies rate-of-return dominance under suitable legal restrictions, and (c) addresses monetary policy questions with standard welfare economics and, in particular, rationalizes in terms of price discrimination a debt management policy that “tailors debt issues to the needs of the market.”

This paper considers whether short-period deterministic cycles can exist in a class of stationary overlapping generations models with long- (but finite-) lived agents. It shows that if agents discount the future positively, then as life spans get large, nonmonetary cycles will disappear. Further, neither constant monetary steady states nor stationary monetary cycles can exist. It also shows that if agents discount the future negatively, then there are robust examples in which constant monetary steady states as well as stationary monetary cycles (with undiminished amplitude) can occur no matter how long agents live.

A prediction formula for geometrically declining sums of future forcing variables is derived for models in which the forcing variables are generated by a vector autoregressive-moving average process. This formula is useful in deducing and characterizing cross-equation restrictions implied by linear rational expectations models.

This paper illustrates how to use instrumental variables procedures to estimate the parameters of a linear rational expectations model. These procedures are appropriate when disturbances are serially correlated and the instrumental variables are not exogenous.

This paper reviews selected studies in the theory of macroeconomic stabilization policy and summarizes their key findings. A simple model is constructed which includes all surveyed models as special cases. All solutions are derived and described step by step.

This paper studies an environment in which the investment opportunities of agents are private information and shows that financial intermediaries arise endogenously within that environment. It establishes that financial intermediaries are part of an efficient arrangement in the sense that they are needed to support the authors’ private information core allocations. These intermediaries, which are coalitions of agents, exhibit the following characteristics in equilibrium: they borrow from and lend to large groups of agents; they produce information about investment projects; and they issue claims that have different state contingent payoffs than claims issued by ultimate borrowers.

Time consistent optimal plans are defined within the context of a simple, discrete time optimal control framework. Three possible sources of inconsistency are identified and discussed with reference to the literature.

Recent advances in duality theory have made it easier to discover relationships between asset prices and the portfolio choices based on them. But this approach to arbitrage-free securities markets has yet to be extended and applied to economies with transactions costs. This paper does so, within the context of a general state-preference model of securities markets. Several applications are developed to illustrate the nature of the theory and its potential to resolve a host of issues surrounding the effects of transactions costs on securities markets.

Optimal linear regulator methods are used to represent a class of models of endogenous equilibrium seasonality that has so far received little attention. Seasonal structure is built into these models in either of two equivalent ways: periodically varying the coefficient matrices of a formerly nonseasonal problem or embedding this periodic-coefficient problem in a higher-dimensional sparse system whose time-invariant matrices have a special pattern of zero blocks. The former structure is compact and convenient computationally; the latter can be used to apply familiar convergence results from the theory of time-invariant optimal regulator problems. The new class of seasonality models provides an equilibrium interpretation for empirical work involving periodically stationary time series.

Doan, Litterman, and Sims (DLS) have suggested using conditional forecasts to do policy analysis with Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) models. Their method seems to violate the Lucas critique, which implies that coefficients of a BVAR model will change when there is a change in policy rules. In this paper we construct a BVAR macro model and attempt to determine whether the Lucas critique is important quantitatively. We find evidence following two candidate policy rule changes of significant coefficient instability and of a deterioration in the performance of the DLS method.

We consider a production economy with a finite number of heterogeneous, infinitely lived consumers. We show that, if the economy is smooth enough, equilibria are locally unique for almost all endowments. We do so by converting the infinite-dimensional fixed point problem stated in terms of prices and commodities into a finite-dimensional Negishi problem involving individual weights in a social value function. By adding artificial fixed factors to utility and production functions, we can write the equilibrium conditions equating spending and income for each consumer entirely in terms of time-zero factor endowments and derivatives of the social value function.

This paper describes how to specify and estimate rational expectations models in which there are exact linear relationships among variables and expectations of variables that the econometrician observes.

The relative efficiency of alternative income tax systems is analyzed in a dynamic, general equilibrium model having an endogenous labor supply and imperfect risk sharing. This theoretical model allows different tax systems to be compared with respect to their labor distortion effects, their automatic income stability properties, and the welfare they provide on average to a representative consumer-laborer. The comparisons are done for the optimal tax parameters under each given tax system. Despite a role for income stabilization, the optimal income tax schedule turns out to be regressive.

This paper provides a simple counterexample to the standard belief that in a world economy in which all countries are small, strategic interactions between policymakers are trivial and thus cooperative and noncooperative government policies coincide. It is well known that this holds for tariff policies. However, this paper demonstrates the result does not apply to government policies generally. Indeed, this paper presents a simple counterexample for the case of fiscal policy. In addition, the paper analyzes how optimally coordinated fiscal policies differ from noncooperative policies. It finds that, relative to optimally coordinated levels, noncooperative government spending can be too high or too low, depending on the sign of a transmission effect which captures the overall effect countries’ actions have on each other.

This paper presents a simple counterexample to the belief that international policy cooperation is desirable. It also explains circumstances under which such a counterexample is possible.

A bivariate Granger-causality test on money and output finds statistically significant causality when data are measured in log levels, but not when they are measured in first differences of the logs. Which of these results is right? The answer to that question matters because a finding of no Granger-causality from money to output would substantially embarrass existing business cycle models in which money plays an important role [Eichenbaum and Singleton (1986)]. Monte Carlo simulation experiments indicate that, most probably, the first difference results reflect lack of power, whereas the level results reflect Granger-causality that is actually in the data.

This paper presents a simple counterexample to the belief that policy cooperation among benevolent governments is desirable. It also explains circumstances under which such counterexamples are possible and relates them to the literature on time inconsistency.