Research Database

This paper investigates the one-sector growth model where agents experience idiosyncratic endowment shocks and face a borrowing constraint. It is shown that a steady-state capital level lies strictly above the steady state in the model without shocks. In addition, the capital stock increases monotonically when it is sufficiently far below a steady state. However, near a steady state there can be interesting (nonmonotonic) economic dynamics.

We deduce properties of optimal monetary policies based on modern theory and standard empirical findings. In light of this analysis, we examine FOMC policy procedures and conclude that they put too much emphasis on short-term economic stabilization and too little emphasis on longer-term price stability. We propose a form of inflation targeting to address this problem.

Recent research in evaluating the effects of monetary policy is potentially tainted by the problem of time aggregation: that is, effects may be incorrectly estimated using quarterly data if the effects of policy occur rapidly. This study evaluates whether time aggregation is a serious problem in a simple vector autoregression. It shows time aggregation has little impact on evaluating the effect of monetary policy in a simple vector autoregression including total reserves, nonborrowed reserves, and the federal funds rate. This finding suggests that time aggregation is unlikely to be important in evaluating the effects of monetary policy in models including a goal variable, such as GDP growth.

This study primarily establishes two things: (1) that monopoly has been pervasive in the U.S. water transportation industry in both the 19th and 20th centuries and has led to prices above competitive levels and the adoption of inefficient technologies and (2) that the competition of railroads has greatly weakened this monopolistic tendency, leading to lower water transport prices and fewer inefficient technologies. The study establishes these points using standard economic theory and extensive historical U.S. data on the behavior of unions and shipping companies. These gains from competition have been ignored by researchers studying the contribution of railroads to U.S. economic growth. Researchers have assumed that if railroads had not been developed, the long-distance transportation industry would have been competitive. This study shows that it would not have been. The quantitative estimates of previous studies thus are likely to have significantly understated the gains from the development of railroads.

Inspired by the current European developments, we study equilibrium fiscal policy under alternative constitutional arrangements in a “federation” of countries. There are two levels of government: local and federal. Local policy redistributes across individuals and affects the probability of aggregate shocks, while federal policy shares international risk. Policies are chosen under majority rule. There is a moral hazard problem: federal risk-sharing can induce the local governments to enact policies that increase local risk. We investigate this incentive problem under alternative fiscal constitutions. In particular, we contrast a vertically ordered system like the EC with a horizontally ordered federal system like the US. These alternative arrangements are not neutral, in the sense that they create different incentives for policymakers and voters, and give rise to different political equilibria. A general conclusion is that, centralization of functions and power can be welfare improving under appropriate institutions. However, this conclusion only applies to the moral hazard problem and a federation where the countries are not too dissimilar.

There are two approaches to maximum likelihood (ML) estimation of the parameter of fractionally-integrated noise: approximate frequency-domain ML (Fox and Taqqwu, 1986) and exact time-domain ML (Solwell, 1990a). If the mean of the process is known, then a clear finite-sample mean-squared error (MSE) ranking of the estimators emerges: the exact time-domain estimator has smaller MSE. We show in this paper, however, that the finite-sample efficiency of approximate frequency-domain ML relative to exact time-domain ML rises dramatically when the mean result is unknown and instead must be estimated. The intuition for our result is straightforward: The frequency-domain ML estimator is invariant to the true but unknown mean of the process, while the time-domain ML estimator is not. Feasible time-domain estimation must therefore be based upon de-meaned data, but the long memory associated with fractional integration makes precise estimation of the mean difficult. We conclude that the frequency-domain estimator is an attractive and efficient alternative for situations in which large sample sizes render time-domain estimation impractical.

This article analyzes several proposals to build work incentives into the U.S. welfare system. It concludes that the most cost effective way to do that is to offer a work subsidy to all low-income single parents—in other words, to simply pay them for working in the labor market. This conclusion is based on a model of the labor force participation behavior of low-income single mothers that the author developed with Robert Moffitt. Among the proposals evaluated in the article, besides the work subsidy, are proposals to reduce the rate that welfare benefits are reduced when welfare recipients work, to provide wage subsidies to low-wage workers, to expand the earned income tax credit, and to subsidize the fixed costs of working.

A two-country Real Business Cycle (RBC) model is used to study the behavior of the United States trade balance. In this model, economic fluctuations are driven by productivity shocks and by variations in government purchases and in distorting taxes. The model is simulated using quarterly data on total factor productivity, government purchases, and the average tax rate in the seven major industrial countries during the period 1975–91. A version of the model that postulates complete international asset markets—as frequently assumed in the International RBC literature (see, e.g., Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland 1992)—fails to explain the observed behavior of the U.S. trade balance. In contrast, a version with incomplete asset markets, in which only debt contracts can be used for international capital flows, tracks the behavior of the U.S. trade balance fairly closely.

Women are well represented in some academic fields but notably underrepresented in others, including many STEM fields. Motivated by studies that show collaboration is more attractive to women than men, we investigate whether female participation across academic fields is related to how collaborative those fields are. Using panel data for 30 academic fields from 1975 to 2014, we find that one additional author on the average paper published in a field is associated with an increase of 2.5 percentage points in the female share of PhD recipients. This estimate implies that about 30 percent of the observed rise in female share during our sample period can be attributed to increased collaboration.

We incorporate nominal wage contracts and government into a quantitative general equilibrium framework. Thus, our model includes three types of shocks: a fiscal shock, a monetary shock, and a technology shock. We show that it is possible in this type of environment to generate a low correlation between hours worked and the return to working, a moderately negative correlation between output and aggregate prices and a moderately positive correlation between the real wage rate and output. In sharp contrast with RBC models with indivisible labor, wage contracts magnify mainly the effect of monetary shocks on the volatility of hours worked. An attractive feature of the contracting model is that it avoids a trade-off that RBC models have to face in their predictive capacity when additional features are incorporated to them.

This article describes some facts about financial inequality in the United States that a good theory of inequality must be able to explain. These include the facts that labor earnings, income, and wealth are all unequally distributed among U.S. households, but the distributions are significantly different. Wealth is much more concentrated than the other two. Wealth is positively correlated with earnings and income, but not strongly. The movement of households up and down the economic scale is greater when measured by income than by earnings or wealth. Differences across the three variables remain when the data are disaggregated by age, employment status, educational level, and marital status of the heads of U.S. households. Each of these classifications also has significant differences across households. All the facts are based on data taken from the 1992 Survey of Consumer Finances and the 1984–85 and 1989–90 Panel Study of Income Dynamics.

We present a simple theory of the quality of elected officials. Quality has (at least) two dimensions: competence and honesty. Voters prefer competent and honest policymakers, so high-quality citizens have a greater chance of being elected to office. But low-quality citizens have a “comparative advantage” in pursuing elective office, because their market wages are lower than the market wages of high-quality citizens (competence), and/or because they reap higher returns from holding office (honesty). In the political equilibrium, the average quality of the elected body depends on the structure of rewards from holding public office. Under the assumption that the rewards from office are increasing in the average quality of office holders there can be multiple equilibria in quality. Under the assumption that incumbent policymakers set the rewards for future policymakers there can be path dependence in quality.

This paper begins with the observation that the volatility of factor input growth is insufficient to explain the volatility in the growth rate of output, and explores the empirical plausibility of the hypothesis that this fact is due to the presence of productive externalities and increasing returns to scale. We construct a quantitative equilibrium macroeconomic model which incorporates these features, and allows for demand shocks operating at the level of the consumer. We employ the method of Hall (1986) and Parkin (1988) to measure these demand shocks, and use these measured disturbances to conduct stochastic simulations of the model. We find that the model with increasing returns, when driven by measured demand shocks, generates time series which replicate the basic stylized facts of U.S. business cycles, although with lower amplitude. However, in the absence of increasing returns the measured demand shocks do not produce a characteristic business cycle response. When preference shocks are combined with productivity shocks, we find that both the increasing returns and the constant returns models correctly predict a weak correlation between hours and wages, while the predictions of the increasing returns model provide the better overall match with the data.

This paper studies the empirical performance of stochastic volatility models for twenty years of weekly exchange rate data. We concentrate on the effects of the distribution of the exchange rate innovations for parameter estimates and for estimates of the latent volatility series. We approximate the density of the log of exchange rate innovations by a mixture of normals. The major findings of the paper are that: (1) explicitly incorporating fat-tailed innovations increases the estimates of the persistence of volatility dynamics; (ii) estimates of the latent volatility series depend strongly on the estimation technique; (iii) the estimation error of the volatility time series is so large that finance applications to option pricing should be interpreted with care. We reach these conclusions using three different estimation techniques: quasi maximum likelihood, simulated EM, and a Bayesian procedure based on the Gibbs sampler.

This paper examines the response of sectoral real wages and location probabilities to oil price shocks using U.S. micro-panel data (the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men). The goal is to determine whether the observed response patterns are consistent with so-called “sectoral shift” theories of unemployment. These theories predict that shocks that change sectoral relative wages should increase unemployment in the short run and lead to labor reallocation in the long run. Consistent with these predictions, the oil price changes of the 1970s resulted in substantial movements in industry relative wages and significant reallocation of labor across industries, while both oil price increases and decreases resulted in short run increases in unemployment. However, equilibrium sectoral models imply that real shocks that change relative wages across sectors should induce flows of labor into those sectors where relative wages rise. In fact, real oil price shocks are found to have substantially reduced respondents’ location probability in the construction industry, which had a wage increase relative to all large industries. The industry with the greatest increase in employment share was services, which had among the greatest wage declines. These are clear contradictions of the predictions of equilibrium sectoral models. Nevertheless, a more general class of models where both relative wage movements and quantity constraints generate labor flows appears to be quite consistent with the data.