Research Database

This article contends that the various measures of the contribution of technology shocks to business cycles calculated using the real business cycle modeling method are not corroborated. The article focuses on a different and much simpler method for calculating the contribution of technology shocks, which takes account of facts concerning the productivity/labor input correlation and the variability of labor input relative to output. Under several standard assumptions, the method predicts that the contribution of technology shocks must be large (at least 78 percent), that the labor supply elasticity need not be large to explain the observed fluctuation in labor input, and that the contribution of technology shocks can be estimated fairly precisely. The method also estimates that the contribution of technology shocks could be lower than 78 percent under alternative assumptions.

This paper shows that globalization of securities markets exacerbates the volatility of capital flows by strengthening incentives for herding behavior. This is a prediction of a mean-variance portfolio optimization model with imperfect information, in which investors acquire country-specific expertise at a fixed cost and incur variable reputational costs. The model produces equilibria in which incentives to confirm rumors decrease with globalization. Simulations based on equity markets data and country credit ratings suggest that herd behavior can induce large capital outflows from emerging markets.

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.

This paper studies a version of the neoclassical growth model where heterogenous establishments are subject to partial irreversibilities in investment. Under such investment technology, the optimal decision rules of establishments are of the (S,s) variety. A novel contribution of the paper is the analysis of the general equilibrium dynamics arising from aggregate productivity shocks. This is a difficult task given the high dimensionality of the state vector, which includes the distribution of establishments across capital levels and idiosyncratic shocks. The paper overcomes this difficulty by developing a suitable computational approach. The model is used to study the importance of investment irreversibilities for macroeconomic dynamics. It is found that investment irreversibilities have no major implications for aggregate fluctuations, even though they are crucial for establishment level dynamics. This result contradicts previous conclusions in the literature which rely on partial equilibrium analysis.

We study economies where government currency and electronic money, drawn from interest bearing deposits in private financial intermediary institutions, are full substitutes. We analyze the impact of competition on policy outcomes under different assumptions regarding: the objectives of the central bank, the ability of the monetary authorities to commit to future policies, and the legal restrictions—in the form of reserve requirements—on financial intermediaries. Electronic money competition can discipline a revenue maximizing government and result in lower equilibrium inflation rates, even when there is imperfect commitment. The efficient Friedman rule policy, of zero nominal interest rates, is only implemented if the government maximizes households preferences, in which case, electronic money competition may either have no role, or weaken the incentive effects of the “reputational mechanism.” We also show how an independent choice of the reserve requirements can be an effective policy rule to enhance the disciplinary role of electronic money competition.

This essay briefly reviews the professional life and work of economist S. Rao Aiyagari, who died after a heart attack on May 20, 1997, at the age of 45. Aiyagari is described as “one of the ablest economists of his generation.” The essay is accompanied by a complete list of Aiyagari’s published work and reprints of three of his articles in the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review: “Deflating the Case for Zero Inflation” (Summer 1990), “On the Contribution of Technology Shocks to Business Cycles” (Winter 1994), and “Macroeconomics With Frictions” (Summer 1994).

We use a regime-switching model of real GNP growth to examine the duration dependence of business cycles. The model extends Hamilton (1989) and Durland and McCurdy (1994) and is estimated using both the postwar NIPA data and the secular data constructed by Balke-Gordon. We find that an expansion is more likely to end at a young age, that a contraction is more likely to end at an old age, that output growth slows over the course of an expansion, that a decline in output is mild at the beginning of a contraction, and that long expansions are followed by long contractions. This evidence taken together provides no support for the clustering of the whole-cycle around seven-to-ten year durations.

This essay, written around 1779, challenges the simple quantity theory of money. From the perspective of the paper money issued to pay for America’s Revolutionary War—bills of credit, or continentals—the essay rejects the idea that the value of money is determined by the number of pieces of paper issued. That idea ignores the fact that an individual nation is just a small part of the world economy. More relevant than quantity, the essay argues, are two other features: the date the government promises to exchange the pieces of paper for specie and the credibility of that promise.

This article describes the current state of economic theory intended to explain the unequal distribution of wealth among U.S. households. The models reviewed are heterogeneous agent versions of standard neoclassical growth models with uninsurable idiosyncratic shocks to earnings. The models endogenously generate differences in asset holdings as a result of the household's desire to smooth consumption while earnings fluctuate. Both of the dominant types of models—dynastic and life cycle models—reproduce the U.S. wealth distribution poorly. The article describes several features recently proposed as additions to the theory based on changes in earnings, including business ownership, higher rates of return on high asset levels, random capital gains, government programs to guarantee a minimum level of consumption, and changes in health and marital status. None of these features has been fully analyzed yet, but they all seem to have potential to move the models in the right direction.