Research Database

We build a variation of the neoclassical growth model in which both wealth shocks (in the sense of wealth destruction) and financial shocks to households generate recessions. The model features three mild departures from the standard model: (1) adjustment costs make it difficult to expand the tradable goods sector by reallocating factors of production from nontradables to tradables; (2) there is a mild form of labor market frictions (Nash bargaining wage setting with Mortensen-Pissarides labor markets); (3) goods markets for nontradables require active search from households wherein increases in consumption expenditures increase measured productivity. These departures provide a novel quantitative theory to explain recessions like those in southern Europe without relying on technology shocks.

We analyze commitment to employment in an environment in which an infinitely lived firm faces a sequence of finitely lived workers who differ in their ability to produce output. A worker’s ability is initially unknown to both the worker and the firm. A worker’s effort affects the information on ability conveyed by his performance. We characterize equilibria and show that they display commitment to employment only when effort has a persistent but delayed impact on output. In this case, by providing insurance against early termination, commitment to employment encourages workers to exert effort, thus improving the firm’s ability to identify workers’ talent. The incentive value of commitment to retention helps explain the use of probationary appointments in environments in which there is uncertainty about individual ability.

This paper uses the information contained in the joint dynamics of individuals’ labor earnings and consumption-choice decisions to quantify both the amount of income risk that individuals face and the extent to which they have access to informal insurance against this risk. We accomplish this task by using indirect inference to estimate a structural consumption-savings model, in which individuals both learn about the nature of their income process and partly insure shocks via informal mechanisms. In this framework, we estimate (i) the degree of partial insurance, (ii) the extent of systematic differences in income growth rates, (iii) the precision with which individuals know their own income growth rates when they begin their working lives, (iv) the persistence of typical labor income shocks, (v) the tightness of borrowing constraints, and (vi) the amount of measurement error in the data. In implementing indirect inference, we find that an auxiliary model that approximates the true structural equations of the model (which are not estimable) works very well, with negligible small sample bias. The main substantive findings are that income shocks are not very persistent, systematic differences in income growth rates are large, individuals have substantial amounts of information about their income growth rates, and about one-half of income shocks are effectively smoothed via partial insurance. Putting these findings together, we argue that the amount of uninsurable lifetime income risk that individuals perceive is substantially smaller than what is typically assumed in calibrated macroeconomic models with incomplete markets.

This paper develops and structurally estimates a labor market model that integrates job assignment, learning, and human capital acquisition to account for the main patterns of careers in firms. A key innovation is that the model incorporates workers’ job mobility within and between firms, and the possibility that, through job assignment, firms affect the rate at which they acquire information about workers. The model is estimated using longitudinal administrative data on managers from one U.S. firm in a service industry (the data of Baker, Gibbs, and Holmström (1994a,b)) and fits the data remarkably well. The estimated model is used to assess both the direct effect of learning on wages and its indirect effect through its impact on the dynamics of job assignment. Consistent with the evidence in the literature on comparative advantage and learning, the estimated direct effect of learning on wages is found to be small. Unlike in previous work, by jointly estimating the dynamics of beliefs, jobs, and wages imposing all of the model restrictions, the impact of learning on job assignment can be uncovered and the indirect effect of learning on wages explicitly assessed. The key finding of the paper is that the indirect effect of learning on wages is substantial: overall learning accounts for one quarter of the cumulative wage growth on the job during the first seven years of tenure. Nearly all of the remaining growth is from human capital acquisition. A related novel finding is that the experimentation component of learning is a primary determinant of the timing of promotions and wage increases. Along with persistent uncertainty about ability, experimentation is responsible for substantially compressing wage growth at low tenures.

We study the importance of international trade in structural change. Our framework has both productivity and trade cost shocks, and allows for non-unitary income and substitution elasticities. We calibrate our model to investigate South Korea’s structural change between 1971 and 2005. We find that the shock processes, propagated through the model’s two main transmission mechanisms, non-homothetic preferences and the open economy, explain virtually all of the evolution of agriculture and services labor shares, and the rising part of the hump-shape in manufacturing. Counterfactual exercises show that the role of the open economy is quantitatively important for explaining South Korea’s structural change.

This paper describes recent modifications to the mixed-frequency model vector autoregression (MF-VAR) constructed by Schorfheide and Song (2012). The changes to the model are restricted solely to the set of variables included in the model; all other aspects of the model remain unchanged. Forecast evaluations are conducted to gauge the accuracy of the revised model to standard benchmarks and the original model.

We develop a model of equilibrium entry, trade, and price formation in over-the-counter (OTC) markets. Banks trade derivatives to share an aggregate risk subject to two trading frictions: they must pay a fixed entry cost, and they must limit the size of the positions taken by their traders because of risk-management concerns. Although all banks in our model are endowed with access to the same trading technology, some large banks endogenously arise as “dealers,” trading mainly to provide intermediation services, while medium sized banks endogenously participate as “customers” mainly to share risks. We use the model to address positive questions regarding the growth in OTC markets as trading frictions decline, and normative questions of how regulation of entry impacts welfare.

Building on the Merton (1974) and Leland (1994) structural models of credit risk, we develop a simple, transparent, and robust method for measuring the financial soundness of individual firms using data on their equity volatility. We use this method to retrace quantitatively the history of firms’ financial soundness during U.S. business cycles over most of the last century. We highlight three main findings. First, the three worst recessions between 1926 and 2012 coincided with insolvency crises, but other recessions did not. Second, fluctuations in asset volatility appear to drive variation in firms’ financial soundness. Finally, the financial soundness of financial firms largely resembles that of nonfinancial firms.

We develop a model in which, in order to provide managerial incentives, it is optimal to have costly bankruptcy. If benevolent governments can commit to their policies, it is optimal not to interfere with private contracts. Such policies are time inconsistent in the sense that, without commitment, governments have incentives to bail out firms by buying up the debt of distressed firms and renegotiating their contracts with managers. From an ex ante perspective, however, such bailouts are costly because they worsen incentives and thereby reduce welfare. We show that regulation in the form of limits on the debt-to-value ratio of firms mitigates the time-inconsistency problem by eliminating the incentives of governments to undertake bailouts. In terms of the cyclical properties of regulation, we show that regulation should be tightest in aggregate states in which resources lost to bankruptcy in the equilibrium without a government are largest.

We show how to use panel data on household consumption to directly estimate households’ risk preferences. Specifically, we measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages using a full risk-sharing model, which we then test allowing for this heterogeneity. There is substantial, statistically significant heterogeneity in estimated risk preferences. Full insurance cannot be rejected. As the risk sharing, as-if-complete-markets theory might predict, estimated risk preferences are unrelated to wealth or other characteristics. The heterogeneity matters for policy: Although the average household would benefit from eliminating village-level risk, less-risk-averse households who are paid to absorb that risk would be worse off by several percent of household consumption.

In this appendix I present details of the model and the empirical analysis, and results of counterfactual experiments omitted from the paper. In Section 1 I describe a simple example that illustrates how, even in the absence of human capital acquisition, productivity shocks, or separation shocks, the learning component of the model can naturally generate mobility between jobs within a firm and turnover between firms. I also include the proofs of Propositions 1 and 2 in the paper. In Section 2 I discuss model identification in detail, where, in particular, I prove that information in my data on the performance ratings of managers allows me to identify the learning process separately from the human capital process. In Section 3 I describe the original U.S. firm dataset of Baker, Gibbs, and Holmström (1994a,b), on which my work is based. In Section 4 I provide details about the estimation of the model, including the derivation of the likelihood function, a description of the numerical solution of the model, and a discussion of the results from a Monte Carlo exercise showing the identifiability of the model’s parameters in practice. There I also derive bounds on the informativeness of the jobs of the competitors of the firm in my data, based on the estimates of the parameters reported in the paper. Finally, in Section 5 I present estimation results based on a larger sample that includes entrants into the firm at levels higher than Level 1. Results of counterfactual experiments omitted from the paper are contained in Tables A.12–A.14.

We propose a methodology for studying changes in bilateral commodity trade due to goods not exported previously or exported only in small quantities. Using a panel of 1,900 country pairs, we find that increased trade of these “least-traded goods” is an important factor in trade growth. This extensive margin accounts for 10 percent of the growth in trade for NAFTA country pairs, for example, and 26 percent in trade between the United States and Chile, China, and Korea. Looking at country pairs with no major trade policy change or structural change, however, we find little change in the extensive margin.

This chapter is structured in three parts. The first part outlines the methodological steps, involving both theoretical and empirical work, for assessing whether an observed allocation of resources across countries is efficient. The second part applies the methodology to the long-run allocation of capital and consumption in a large cross section of countries. We find that countries that grow faster in the long run also tend to save more both domestically and internationally. These facts suggest that either the long-run allocation of resources across countries is inefficient, or that there is a systematic relation between fast growth and preference for delayed consumption. The third part applies the methodology to the allocation of resources across developed countries at the business cycle frequency. Here we discuss how evidence on international quantity comovement, exchange rates, asset prices, and international portfolio holdings can be used to assess efficiency. Overall, quantities and portfolios appear consistent with efficiency, while evidence from prices is difficult to interpret using standard models. The welfare costs associated with an inefficient allocation of resources over the business cycle can be significant if shocks to relative country permanent income are large. In those cases partial financial liberalization can lower welfare.

This paper studies the maturity composition and the term structure of interest rate spreads of government debt in emerging markets. In the data, when interest rate spreads rise, debt maturity shortens and the spread on short-term bonds rises more than the spread on long-term bonds. To account for this pattern, we build a dynamic model of international borrowing with endogenous default and multiple maturities of debt. Long-term debt provides a hedge against future fluctuations in interest rate spreads, while short-term debt is more effective at providing incentives to repay. The trade-off between these hedging and incentive benefits is quantitatively important for understanding the maturity structure in emerging markets. When calibrated to data from Brazil, the model accounts for the dynamics in the maturity of debt issuances and its comovement with the level of spreads across maturities.

In order to analyze careers both within and across firms, this paper proposes a matching model of the labor market that extends existing models of job assignment and learning about workers’ abilities. The model accounts for worker mobility across jobs and firms, for varying degrees of generality of ability, and for the possibility that firms affect the information they acquire about workers through job assignment. I characterize equilibrium assignment and wages, and show how, depending on how abilities and jobs are distributed across firms, equilibrium gives rise to widely varying patterns of job mobility within firms and turnover across firms, even if matching would be perfectly assortative in the absence of uncertainty. The implied job and wage dynamics display features that are consistent with a broad set of empirical findings on careers in firms and the labor market. In particular, workers can experience gradual promotions and wage increases following successful performance but few or no demotions when employed by the same firm. The model also produces turnover across firms and occupations after both successful and unsuccessful experiences, leading to wage increases or decreases following a firm or occupation change. Overall, the results in this paper provide a unified framework in which to interpret the dynamics of jobs and wages in firms and the labor market.

The rise in within-group consumption inequality in response to the increase in within-group income inequality over the last three decades in the U.S. is puzzling to expected-utility-based incomplete market models. The two-sided lack of commitment models exhibit too little consumption inequality while the standard incomplete markets models tend to predict too much consumption inequality. We show that a model with two-sided lack of commitment and chance attitudes, as emphasized by prospect theory, can explain the relationship and can avoid the systematic bias of the expected utility models. The chance attitudes, such as optimism and pessimism, imply that the households attribute a higher weight to high and low outcomes compared to their objective probabilities. For realistic values of risk aversion and of chance attitudes, the incentives for households to share the idiosyncratic risk decrease. The latter effect endogenously amplifies the increase in consumption inequality relative to the expected utility model, thereby improving the fit to the data.

We analyze optimal policy in a simple small open economy model with price setting frictions. In particular, we study the optimal response of the nominal exchange rate following a terms of trade shock. We depart from the New Keynesian literature in that we explicitly model interna-tionally traded commodities as intermediate inputs in the production of local final goods and assume that the small open economy takes this price as given. This modification not only is in line with the long-standing tradition of small open economy models, but also changes the optimal movements in the exchange rate. In contrast with the recent small open economy New Keynesian literature, our model is able to reproduce the comovement between the nominal exchange rate and the price of exports, as it has been documented in the commodity currencies literature. Although we show there are preferences for which price stability is optimal even without flexible fiscal instruments, our model suggests that more attention should be given to the coordination between monetary and fiscal policy (taxes) in small open economies that are heavily dependent on exports of commodities. The model we propose is a useful framework in which to study fear of floating.

In this paper, we study the role of education as insurance against a bad marriage. Historically, due to disparities in earning power and education across genders, married women often found themselves in an economically vulnerable position, and had to suffer one of two fates in a bad marriage: either they get divorced (assuming it is available) and struggle as low-income single mothers, or they remain trapped in the marriage. In both cases, education can provide a route to emancipation for women. To investigate this idea, we build and estimate an equilibrium search model with education, marriage/divorce/remarriage, and household labor supply decisions. A key feature of the model is that women bear a larger share of the divorce burden, mainly because they are more closely tied to their children relative to men. Our focus on education is motivated by the fact that divorce laws typically allow spouses to keep the future returns from their human capital upon divorce (unlike their physical assets), making education a good insurance against divorce risk. However, as women further their education, the earnings gap between spouses shrinks, leading to more unstable marriages and, in turn, further increasing demand for education. The framework generates powerful amplification mechanisms, which lead to a large rise in divorce rates and a decline in marriage rates (similar to those observed in the US data) from relatively modest exogenous driving forces. Further, in the model, women overtake men in college attainment during the 1990s, a feature of the data that has proved challenging to explain. Our counterfactual experiments indicate that the divorce law reform of the 1970s played an important role in all of these trends, explaining more than one-quarter of college attainment rate of women post-1970s and one-half of the rise in labor supply for married women.

We use a model of optimal portfolio choice to measure heterogeneity in risk aversion among households in Thai villages. There is substantial heterogeneity in risk preferences, positively correlated in most villages with alternative estimates based on a full risk-sharing model.