Research Database

This paper argues that the reporting of facts in light of theory fosters the development of theory. Dynamic neoclassical macro theory guided the selection of facts to report. The hope is that these facts will foster the further development of this theory. A finding is that the price level is countercyclical in the post-Korean War period. This finding debunks the myths that the price level is procyclical, with the postwar period being no exception.

A version of the permanent income model is developed in which the bliss point of the agent is stochastic. The bliss point depends on realizations of the stochastic process generating labor income and a random shock. The model predicts consumption and labor income share a common trend and that a linear combination of current consumption, current labor income, and once lagged consumption is stationary. Empirically, consumption appears more serially correlated than the model is capable of supporting. Further, the volatility of consumption appears sensitive to time variation in real interest rates.

Financial planners typically advise people to shift investments away from stocks and toward bonds as they age. The planners commonly justify this advice in three ways. They argue that stocks are less risky over a young person’s long investment horizon, that stocks are often necessary for young people to meet large financial obligations (like college tuition for their children), and that younger people have more years of labor income ahead with which to recover from the potential losses associated with stock ownership. This article uses economic reasoning to evaluate these three different justifications. It finds that the first two arguments do not make economic sense. The last argument is valid—but only for people with labor income that is relatively uncorrelated with stock returns. If a person’s labor income is highly correlated with stock returns, then that investor is better off shifting investments toward stocks over time.

Does the magnitude of a trough in employment differ from the magnitude of a peak in employment, and is the time employment spends in rising from a trough to a peak longer than the time spends in falling from a peak to a trough? In this paper we measure the “asymmetry of magnitudes” and the “asymmetry of durations” of seven US postwar employment series. The series are detrended using the Hodrick-Prescott filter prior to the analysis. Appropriate measurements of the two types of asymmetry are the skewness of the detrended series and the skewness of the first differenced detrended series, respectively. Monte Carlo and bootstrapping procedures are used to evaluate the significance levels. Five out of seven series show negative skewnesses in levels as well as in first differences. The skewnesses of “magnitudes” and “durations” of US aggregate employment are significant, and yield –0.50 and –0.60 respectively.

In the second part of the paper a nonlinear AR model is derived from the theory of Hermitian type polynomials that have the potential to realize stochastic asymmetric self-sustained oscillations. In contrast with the standard linear AR model, the nonlinear AR model, fitted to the employment series, accurately generates the two types of asymmetry.

In this paper we use micro panel data to examine the effects of oil price shocks on employment and real wages, at the aggregate and industry levels. We also measure differences in the employment and wage responses for workers differentiated on the basis of skill level. We find that oil price increases result in a substantial decline in real wages for all workers, but raise the relative wage of skilled workers. The use of panel data econometric techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity is essential to uncover this result, which is completely hidden in OLS estimates. While the short-run effect of oil price increases on aggregate employment is negative, the long-run effect is negligible. We find that oil price shocks induce substantial changes in employment shares and relative wages across industries. However, we find little evidence that oil price shocks cause labor to flow into those sectors with relative wage increases.

This paper is a study of bank panics under the U.S. National Banking System in 1864–1913. During this period, bank deposits in the United States, like those in Great Britain and Canada, were not insured by the government. Unlike the United States, however, neither of those countries had any bank panics. The U.S. panics were caused essentially by two unique features of the U.S. banking system: prohibitions on bank branching and pyramiding of bank reserves. In the paper, a model which includes these features is constructed, and it is shown that bank panics can occur even though all agents are rational. In this model, bank panics can be eliminated by a combination of reserve requirements, central bank loans, and occasional restrictions on cash payments by banks. The conclusion is that to eliminate bank panics, deposit insurance is not necessary.

The effects of stochastic inflation on equity prices and the equity premium are studied in a pure-endowment asset-pricing model with a cash-in-advance constraint. Stochastic inflation affects the equity premium through two channels: the assessment of an inflation tax and the presence of an inflation premium. Real and monetary versions of the model are simulated and the comparative dynamic results corroborate the conclusion that inflation has quantitatively important effects.

The other important result is that the equity premium in the real version of a model—a continuous state-space generalization of Mehra and Prescott (1985)—and the monetary model is very sensitive to the conditional variance of endowment growth. When the standard deviation of endowment growth is increased from 3.49 percent (the estimated value) to 5.59 percent, the real model can generate an equity premium of 2.8 percent in the range of the risk aversion parameters considered by Mehra and Prescott. The monetary model displays similar sensitivity and can generate an equity premium of 5.81 percent.

Purchasing power parity is one of the most important equilibrium conditions in international macroeconomics. Empirically, it is also one of the most hotly contested. Numerous recent studies, for example, have sought to determine the validity of purchasing power parity using data from the post-Bretton-Woods float and have reached different conclusions. We assert that most such studies are flawed for two reasons. First, the post-1973 data contain, by definition, only a very limited amount of the low-frequency information relevant for examination of long-run parity. Second, the dynamic econometric techniques used to model deviations from parity are typically quite crude with respect to the modeling of low-frequency dynamics. Both deficiencies are rectified in the present paper, with dramatic results. We construct a new dataset of sixteen real exchange rates covering more than a century of the classic gold standard period, and we study deviations from parity using long-memory models that allow for subtle forms of mean reversion. For each real exchange rate, we find that parity holds in the long run.

This article is a primer on the great depressions methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999, 2007) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002, 2007). We use growth accounting and simple dynamic general equilibrium models to study the depression that occurred in Finland in the early 1990s. We find that the sharp drop in real GDP over the period 1990–93 was driven by a combination of a drop in total factor productivity (TFP) during 1990–92 and of increases in taxes on labor and consumption and increases in government consumption during 1989–94, which drove down hours worked in Finland. We attempt to endogenize the drop in TFP in variants of the model with an investment sector and with terms-of-trade shocks but are unsuccessful.

The value of U.S. corporate equity in the first half of 2000 was close to 1.8 times U.S. gross national product (GNP). Some stock market analysts have argued that the market is overvalued at this level. We use a growth model with an explicit corporate sector and find that the market is correctly valued. In theory, the market value of equity plus debt liabilities should equal the value of productive assets plus debt assets. Since the net value of debt is currently low, the market value of equity should be approximately equal to the market value of productive assets. We find that the market value of productive assets, including both tangible and intangible assets and assets used outside the country by U.S. subsidiaries, is currently about 1.8 times GNP, the same as the market value of equity.

This paper presents new empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that positive money supply shocks drive short-term interest rates down. We then present a quantitative, general equilibrium model which is consistent with this hypothesis. The two key features of our model are that (i) money shocks have a heterogeneous impact on agents and (ii) ex post inflexibilities in production give rise to a very low short-run interest elasticity of money demand. Together, these imply that, in our model, a positive money supply shock generates a large drop in the interest rate comparable in magnitude to what we find in the data. In sharp contrast to sticky nominal wage models, our model implies that positive money supply shocks lead to increases in the real wage. We report evidence that this is consistent with the U.S. data. Finally, we show that our model can rationalize a version of the Real Bills Doctrine in which the monetary authority accommodates technology shocks, thereby smoothing interest rates.

We describe the postwar U.S. business cycle for the durable and nondurable goods producing sector. The business cycle is characterized by positive comovement of output, employment, and investment across the two sectors. We develop a two sector growth model to explain the observed pattern of comovements, and suggest that intermediate inputs produced by the nondurable goods sector for the durable goods sector play a crucial role.

Two observations have sometimes been viewed as evidence that the equilibrium allocations of intermediated credit markets are inefficient. First, low-income households' marginal propensity to consume is close to unity. Second, even high-income households seem to face nonprice constraints during recessions. This paper presents a model that possesses both of these features. (A recession is modeled as an economy in which the equilibrium level of investment is at its lowest possible level.) However, contrary to the conventional view, the equilibrium of this model is ex ante efficient. The model also sheds light on some historical episodes of credit restraint.