Research Database

We develop a model which accounts for the observed equity premium and average risk-free rate, without implying counterfactually high risk aversion. The model also does well in accounting for business-cycle phenomena. With respect to the conventional measures of business-cycle volatility and comovement with output, the model does roughly as well as the standard business-cycle model. On two other dimensions, the model’s business-cycle implications are actually improved. Its enhanced internal propagation allows it to account for the fact that there is positive persistence in output growth, and the model also provides a resolution to the “excess sensitivity puzzle” for consumption and income. Two key features of the model are habit persistence preferences and a multisector technology with limited intersectoral mobility of factors of production.

In this paper we estimate and test a conditional version of the international CAPM. By using a parsimonious parameterization recently proposed by Ding and Engle (1994), we allow risk premia, betas, and correlations to vary through time and test the cross-section restrictions of the model using a relatively large number of assets. One advantage of our test is is that it does not require the market weights to be observed in each period. In support of the international CAPM, we find that world-wide risk is priced whereas country-specific risk is not. Further, we find that the price of world risk is time-varying and has a strong January seasonal. When the price of risk is allowed to vary, a January dummy and the world dividend yield are driven out as independently priced factors. However, contrary to the prediction of the model, differences in risk premia across countries are explained not only by world-wide risk, but also by a constant country-specific factor. The estimated correlations reveal three main facts, cross-country correlations vary through time; they have been affected only to a limited extent by the process of liberalization of the last decade; they tend to increase during severe bear markets in the U.S. However, international correlations are smaller than correlations among U.S. assets. Therefore, investors gain from global diversification, even with contagious bear markets.

Economic development is typically accompanied by a very pronounced migration of labor from rural to urban employment. This migration, in turn, is often associated with large scale urban underemployment. Both factors appear to play a very prominent role in the process of development. We consider a model in which rural-urban migration and urban underemployment are integrated into an otherwise conventional neoclassical growth model. Unemployment arises not from any exogenous rigidities, but from an adverse selection problem in labor markets. We demonstrate that, in the most natural case, rural-urban migration—and its associated underemployment—can be a source of multiple, asymptotically stable steady state equilibria, and hence of development traps. They also easily give rise to an indeterminacy of perfect foresight equilibrium, as well as to the existence of a large set of periodic equilibria displaying undamped oscillation. Many such equilibria display long periods of uninterrupted growth and rural-urban migration, punctuated by brief but severe recessions associated with net migration from urban to rural employment. Such equilibria are argued to be broadly consistent with historical U.S. experience.

We study the general equilibrium effects of social insurance on the transition in a model in which the process of moving workers from matches in the state sector to new matches in the private sector takes time and involves uncertainty. As to be expected, adding social insurance to an economy without any improves welfare. Contrary to standard intuition, however, adding social insurance may slow transition. We show that this result depends crucially on general equilibrium interactions of interest rates and savings under alternative market structures.

I argue that Farmer and Guo's one-sector real business cycle model with indeterminacy and sunspots fails empirically and that its failure is inherent in the logic of the model taken together with some simple labor market facts.

An interpretation of government policy regarding what it accepts in transactions is embedded in a version of the Kiyotaki-Wright model of media of exchange. In an example with two goods and one fiat money, the policies consistent with fiat money being the unique medium of exchange are identified. These uniqueness policies have the government favoring fiat money in its transactions. Benefits and costs accompany any such policy. The benefit is that a worse nonmonetary equilibrium is eliminated; the cost is that a better monetary equilibrium is also eliminated.

We examine deviations from trend of net exports and other components of GNP for the United States and attempt to build models consistent with their behavior. The most striking fact is that net exports have consistently been countercyclical. We show, first, that dynamic pure-exchange models can only produce a negative correlation between net exports and GNP if the variance of consumption exceeds that of output. In the United Slates it does not, so this class of models cannot explain observed comovements between output and trade. We then examine government spending and nontraded goods as potential remedies, but show that their behavior is either inconsistent with the data or can be made consistent with any pattern of comovements. The most promising model introduces production and capital formation. Fluctuations are driven by country-specific productivity shocks, in which high productivity domestically leads to high domestic investment and a deficit in the balance of trade. This theory also receives support from the large negative covariance between net exports and investment in American data.

An intuitively natural consistency condition for contingent plans is necessary and sufficient for a contingent plan to be rationalized by maximization of conditional expected utility. One alternative theory of choice under uncertainty, the weighted-utility theory developed by Chew Soo Hong (1983) does not entail that contingent plans will generally satisfy this condition. Another alternative theory, the minimax theory as formulated by Savage (1972), does entail the consistency condition (at least for singleton-valued plans).

Much economic activity takes place within the home. Unfortunately, it is difficult to assess the cyclical properties of home production because the available data are too sporadic. Under the assumption that each observation of historical U.S. data on consumption, investment, and hours worked is consistent with optimal behavior on the part of a representative agent, we construct quarterly data on three variables that would otherwise be unobservable at a quarterly frequency: hours worked in the home sector, hours spent in leisure, and the consumption of goods produced in the home sector. Three results emerge: leisure is highly countercyclical while nonmarket hours are acyclical; there has been a large decrease in hours spent in home production since the 1970s; fluctuations in market output are a good measure of fluctuations in individual utility as long as home consumption and market consumption are either extreme complements or extreme substitutes in the production of utility. The sensitivity of results to the parametric assumptions is examined.