Research Database

The paper compares implications of three kinds of models of households’ consumption behavior: the basic permanent-income model, several models of liquidity-constrained households, and a model of an informationally-constrained efficient contract. These models are distinguished in terms of implications regarding the present discounted values of net trades to households at various levels of temporary income, and the households’ marginal rates of substitution. Martingale consumption is studied as an approximation to the predicted consumption process of the efficient-contract model.

We analyze economies with private information concerning the quality of commodities. Without private information there is a nonmonetary equilibrium with only high quality commodities produced, and money cannot improve welfare. With private information there can be equilibria with bad quality commodities produced, and sometimes only nonmonetary equilibrium is degenerate. The use of money can lead to active (i.e., nondegenerate) equilibria when no active nonmonetary equilibrium exists. Even when active nonmonetary equilibria exist, with private information money can increase welfare via its incentive effects: in monetary equilibrium, agents may adopt trading strategies that discourage production of low quality output.

This paper explores some macroeconomic implications of including household production in an otherwise standard real business cycle model. We calibrate the model based on microeconomic evidence and long run considerations, simulate it, and examine its statistical properties Our finding is that introducing home production significantly improves the quantitative performance of the standard model along several dimensions. It also implies a very different interpretation of the nature of aggregate fluctuations.

We document properties of business cycles in ten countries over the last hundred years, contrasting the behavior of real quantities with that of the price level and the stock of money. Although the magnitude of output fluctuations has varied across countries and periods, relations among variables have been remarkably uniform. Consumption has generally been about as variable as output, and investment substantially more variable, and both have been strongly procyclical. The trade balance has generally been countercyclical. The exception to this regularity is government purchases, which exhibit no systematic cyclical tendency. With respect to the size of output fluctuations, standard deviations are largest between the two world wars. In some countries (notably Australia and Canada) they are substantially larger prior to World War I than after World War II, but in others (notably Japan and the United Kingdom) there is little difference between these periods. Properties of price levels, in contrast, exhibit striking differences between periods. Inflation rates are more persistent after World War II than before, and price level fluctuations are typically procyclical before World War II, countercyclical afterward. We find no general tendency toward increased persistence in money growth rates, but find that fluctuations in money are less highly correlated with output in the postwar period.

A tax distorted real business cycle model is parameterized, calibrated, and solved numerically in an attempt to measure the size of Harberger Triangles relative to Okun Gaps. In particular, the model constructed is used to study, quantitatively, the impact of various distortional government tax and subsidy schemes. It is shown that the government can use tax policy to stabilize cyclical fluctuations, and this is done for the economy being studied. The benefits of implementing such a stabilization policy are calculated and compared with the size of the welfare gains realized from reducing various tax distortions.

Data augmentation and Gibbs sampling are two closely related, sampling-based approaches to the calculation of posterior moments. The fact that each produces a sample whose constituents are neither independent nor identically distributed complicates the assessment of convergence and numerical accuracy of the approximations to the expected value of functions of interest under the posterior. In this paper methods for spectral analysis are used to evaluate numerical accuracy formally and construct diagnostics for convergence. These methods are illustrated in the normal linear model with informative priors, and in the Tobit-censored regression model.

We document and attempt to explain the observation that automobile insurance premiums vary dramatically across local markets. We argue high premiums can be attributed to the large numbers of uninsured motorists in some cities, while at the same time, the uninsured motorists can be attributed to high premiums. We construct a simple noncooperative equilibrium model, where limited liability can generate inefficient equilibria with uninsured drivers and high, yet actuarially fair, premiums. For certain parameterizations, an optimal full insurance equilibrium and inefficient high price equilibria with uninsured drivers exist simultaneously, consistent with the observed price variability across seemingly similar cities.

This paper studies the quantitative properties of fiscal and monetary policy in business cycle models. In terms of fiscal policy, optimal labor tax rates are virtually constant and optimal capital income tax rates are close to zero on average. In terms of monetary policy, the Friedman rule is optimal—nominal interest rates are zero—and optimal monetary policy is activist in the sense that it responds to shocks to the economy.

This is a note on the analysis of inflation and taxation in Cooley and Hansen’s cash-in-advance economy described in their paper “The Welfare Costs of Moderate Inflations.” Basic issues concerning the costs and consequences of inflation are considered, their results are assessed, and some directions for extensions are suggested.

We ask whether a two-country real business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles. With this question in mind, we document a number of discrepancies between theory and data. The most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries. In the data, outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions. In the model we see the opposite.