Research Database

This paper surveys recent issues in macroeconomics from the viewpoint of dynamic economic theory. The need to look beyond demand and supply curves and the insights that come from doing so are emphasized. Examples of issues in debt management and fiscal policy are analyzed.

This paper illustrates the application of observable index models to the problem of macroeconomic forecasting. In this context, a Bayesian prior is used to describe a class of models which impose the index structure with more or less weight. An out-of-sample forecasting experiment is used to measure the possible benefits of this approach. In addition, impulse response functions and the decomposition of forecast variance are analyzed to suggest a possible separation of real and nominal shocks into separate channels.

In this paper we propose and test a new explanation of bank behavior during the Free Banking Era, 1837–63. Arguing against the view that free bank failures were due to fraud, we claim that they were caused by exposure to term structure risk. Testing this new explanation with a new and extensive body of data, we find strong support for it: periods of falling bond prices correspond to the periods with most of the free bank failures. The new data do not support the view that fraud caused the failures.

Restrictions that general equilibrium theory place upon average returns are found to be strongly violated by the U.S. data in the 1889–1978 period. This result is robust to model specification and measurement problems. We conclude that equilibrium models which are not Arrow-Debreu economies are needed to rationalize the large average equity premium that prevailed during the last 90 years.

In a model which exhibits many monetarist properties it is shown that monetary and fiscal policies must be coordinated. The model is populated by overlapping generations of three-period lived agents who can hold fiat money, fiat bonds, and physical capital. A government produces a public good and issues both money and fiat bonds to finance permanent budget deficits. In this model both fiat money and fiat bonds can have value in equilibrium, and their co-existence can allow a more efficient financing of deficits than can a single debt instrument.

The purpose of this paper is to begin a reevaluation of the Free Banking Era by developing and examining individual bank information on the population of banks which existed under the free banking laws in four states. This information allows us to determine the number of free banks which failed and to estimate the resulting losses to their note holders. While the new evidence suggests there were problems with free banking, it presents a serious challenge to the prevailing view that free banking led to financial chaos.

We study the possible specialness of circulating as opposed to noncirculating private securities using models whose equilibria imply the existence of both. The models are pure exchange setups with spatial separation and with the potential for a variety of intertemporal trades. We find a sense in which unregulated circulating private securities are troublesome. It can happen that in order for an equilibrium to exist, the amounts of circulating debts issued at the same time in spatially and informationally separated markets have to satisfy restrictions not implied by individual maximization and market clearing in each market separately.

This note presents a model whose competitive equilibrium can be consistent with the observation that current labor market conditions affect the well-being of new entrants more than they do that of senior workers. The model uses the notion that new entrants are not around soon enough to participate in risk-sharing contingent on the shocks that determine the equilibrium marginal products of first-period employment. This timing notion is formalized using a stochastic overlapping generations model.

This paper comments on "The Real Bills Doctrine vs. the Quantity-Theory: a Reconsideration" by T. Sargent and N. Wallace. It argues that there exists a class of models similar to theirs that is (a) favorable to the quantity theory view of price stability, (b) supports the imposition of 100 percent reserve requirements, and (c) explains a long history of legal credit restrictions. In particular, lending restrictions stabilize price levels and result in Pareto improvements.

This paper considers a view commonly associated with the "quantity theory of money": that banks should face 100 percent reserve requirements. It argues first that the objectives of the quantity theorists' proposals were more than merely price level stability, and that in fact, price level stability was at most a secondary objective of their proposals. Second, it argues that these theorists had a world with distortions in mind with respect to their proposals. These are present in a special setting examined that (a) supports the imposition of 100 percent reserve requirements (on the basis of an unconstrained Pareto criterion), and (b) supports the view that these restrictions stabilize the price level and make its movements more "predictable."

A definition of a transactions medium is proposed. This is that a transactions medium permits the attainment of otherwise unattainable resource allocations. It is shown that by this definition money can be a transactions medium in a pure exchange, overlapping generations economy. It is also shown that money is a transaction medium only if there are informational asymmetries of a particular type. Finally, it is shown that the set of economies for which money is a transactions medium is not isolated, in a well-defined sense.

Antitrust regulators often attempt to prevent proposed corporate market-extension mergers or acquisitions by arguing that doing so will result in the proposer entering the market as an additional, smaller, independent competitor. In cases where this so-called doctrine of probable future competition is valid, regulators still need guidance in ranking the priority of cases to pursue. This paper modifies the approach of Dansby and Willig to compute measures of the gross benefits arising from valid regulation. Such measures relate the change in consumer plus producer surplus caused by regulation, to measures of market concentration, firm conduct assumptions, small firm profits, and market demand data.

A model of credit rationing based on asymmetrically informed borrowers and lenders is developed. In this context, sufficient conditions are derived for an appropriate government policy response to credit rationing to be a continuously open discount window. It is also demonstrated that such a policy can be deflationary, and that given a commitment to operate in this way, the monopoly issue of liabilities can Pareto dominate their competitive issuance.

A simple extension of the traditional analysis of human capital accumulation is considered in a general equilibrium context. When real wages are equated to marginal products in the presence of human capital investment, resulting equilibria are almost never efficient even by very weak criteria. This is true even though labor is not a quasi-fixed factor, and informational asymmetries are excluded from the model. It is shown that human capital investment generates externalities, and has associated with it a “free-rider problem.” This, in turn, explains the common practice of employers requiring minimum levels of human capital accumulation for some employees, and refusing to hire “overqualified” workers for other positions.

Using optimal control theory and a vector autoregressive representation of the relationship between money and interest rates one can derive a feedback control procedure which defines the best possible tradeoff between interest rate volatility and money supply fluctuations and which could be used to reduce both from their current levels.