Research Database

It is often argued that with a positively skewed income distribution (median less than mean) a majority voting over proportional tax rates would result in higher tax rates than those that maximize average welfare, and will accordingly reduce aggregate savings. We reexamine this view in a capital accumulation model, in which distorting redistributive taxes provide insurance against idiosyncratic shocks, and income distributions evolve endogenously. We find small differences of either sign between the tax rates set by a majority voting and a utilitarian government, for reasonable parametric specifications. We show how these differences reflect a greater responsiveness of a utilitarian government to the average need for the insurance provided by the tax-redistribution scheme. These conclusions remain true despite the fact that the model simulations produce positively skewed distributions of total income across agents.

When the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds, monetary policy cannot provide appropriate stimulus. We show that, in the standard New Keynesian model, tax policy can deliver such stimulus at no cost and in a time-consistent manner. There is no need to use inefficient policies such as wasteful public spending or future commitments to low interest rates.

In 1950 Mexico entered an economic takeoff and grew rapidly for more than 30 years. Growth stopped during the crises of 1982–1995, despite major reforms, including liberalization of foreign trade and investment. Since then growth has been modest. We analyze the economic history of Mexico 1877–2010. We conclude that the growth 1950–1981 was driven by urbanization, industrialization, and education and that Mexico would have grown even more rapidly if trade and investment had been liberalized sooner. If Mexico is to resume rapid growth — so that it can approach U.S. levels of income — it needs further reforms.

We evaluate reforms to the U.S. tax system in a dynamic setup with heterogeneous married and single households, and with an operative extensive margin in labor supply. We restrict our model with observations on gender and skill premia, labor force participation of married females across skill groups, and the structure of marital sorting. We study four revenue-neutral tax reforms: a proportional consumption tax, a proportional income tax, a progressive consumption tax, and a reform in which married individuals file taxes separately. Our findings indicate that tax reforms are accompanied by large and differential effects on labor supply: while hours per-worker display small increases, total hours and female labor force participation increase substantially. Married females account for more than 50% of the changes in hours associated to reforms, and their importance increases sharply for values of the intertemporal labor supply elasticity on the low side of empirical estimates. Tax reforms in a standard version of the model result in output gains that are up to 15% lower than in our benchmark economy.

Technical details and specific data sources are provided for “Facts and Myths about the Financial Crisis of 2008” by V. V. Chari, Lawrence Christiano, and Patrick J. Kehoe.

This paper presents a completely worked example applying the frequency domain estimation strategy proposed by Hansen and Sargent [1980, 1981a]. A bivariate, high order continuous time autoregressive moving average model is estimated subject to the restrictions implied by the rational expectations model of the term structure of interest rates. The estimation strategy takes into account the fact that one of the data series are point-in-time observations, while the other are time averaged. Alternative strategies are considered for taking into account nonstationarity in the data. Computing times reported in the paper demonstrate that estimation using the techniques of Hansen and Sargent is inexpensive.

Although employment at individual firms tends to be highly non-stationary, the employment size distribution of all firms in the United States appears to be stationary. It closely resembles a Pareto distribution. There is a lot of entry and exit, mostly of small firms. This paper surveys general equilibrium models that can be used to interpret these facts and explores the role of innovation by new and incumbent firms in determining aggregate growth. The existence of a balanced growth path with a stationary employment size distribution depends crucially on assumptions made about the cost of entry. Some type of labor must be an essential input in setting up new firms.

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 analyze the optimal design of monetary rules. We suppose there is an agreed upon social welfare function that depends on the randomly fluctuating state of the economy and that the monetary authority has private information about that state. We suppose the government can constrain the policies of the monetary authority by legislating a rule. In general, well-designed rules trade-off the need to constrain policymakers from the standard time consistency problem arising from the temptation for unexpected inflation with the desire to give them flexibility to react to their private information. Surprisingly, we show that for a wide variety of circumstances the optimal rule gives the monetary authority no flexibility. This rule can be interpreted as a strict inflation targeting rule where the target is a prespecified function of publicly observed data. In this sense, optimal monetary policy is transparent.

In empirical studies of the CAPM, it is commonly assumed that (a) the return to the value weighted portfolio of all stocks is a reasonable proxy for the return on the market portfolio of all assets in the economy, and (b) betas of assets remain constant over time. Under these assumptions, Fama and French (1992) find that the relation between average return and beta is flat. We argue that these two auxiliary assumptions are not reasonable. We demonstrate that when these assumptions are relaxed, the empirical support for the CAPM is surprisingly strong. When human capital is also included in measuring wealth, the CAPM is able to explain 28 percent of the cross sectional variation in average returns in the 100 portfolios studied by Fama and French. When, in addition, betas are allowed to vary over the business cycle, the CAPM is able to explain 57 percent. More important, relative size does not explain what is left unexplained after taking sampling errors into account.