Research Database

In this paper we present a consistent estimator for a linear filter (distributed lag) when the independent variable is subject to observational error. Unlike the standard errors-in-variables estimator which uses instrumental variables, our estimator works directly with observed data. It is based on the Hilbert transform relationship between the phase and the log gain of a minimum phase-lag linear filter. The results of using our method to estimate a known filter and to estimate the relationship between consumption and income demonstrate that the method performs quite well even when the noise-to-signal ratio for the observed independent variable is large. We also develop a criterion for determining whether an estimated phase function is minimum phase-lag.

In this paper we develop a computable general equilibrium economy that models the banking sector explicitly. Banks intermediate between households and between the household sector and the government sector. Households borrow from banks to finance their purchases of houses and they lend to banks to save for retirement. Banks pool households’ savings and they purchase interest-bearing government debt and non-interest bearing reserves. We use this structure to answer two sets of questions: one normative in nature that evaluates the welfare costs of alternative monetary and tax policies, and one positive in nature that studies the real effects of following a procyclical interest-rate policy rule.

We look for the scale effects predicted by some theories of trade and growth based on the dynamic returns to scale that arise from learning by doing, investment in human capital, or development of new products. We find little empirical evidence of a relation between the growth rate of GDP per capita and the measures of scale implied by the theory. Restricting attention to the manufacturing sector, however, we find a significant relation between the growth rate of output per worker and the relevant scale variables. We also find that growth rates are significantly related to measures of intra-industry trade.

Several recent papers provide strong empirical support for the view that an expansionary monetary policy disturbance generates a persistent decrease in interest rates and a persistent increase in output and employment. Existing quantitative general equilibrium models, which allow for capital accumulation, are inconsistent with this view. There does exist a recently developed class of general equilibrium models which can rationalize the contemporaneous response of interest rates, output, and employment to a money supply shock. However, a key shortcoming of these models is that they cannot rationalize persistent liquidity effects. This paper discusses the basic frictions and mechanisms underlying this new class of models and investigates one avenue for generating persistence. We argue that once a simplified version of the model in Christiano and Eichenbaum (1991) is modified to allow for extremely small costs of adjusting sectoral flow of funds, positive money shocks generate long-lasting, quantitatively significant liquidity effects, as well as persistent increases in aggregate economic activity.

Following are the technical appendixes for “Banking in Computable Equilibrium Economies” by Javier Díaz-Giménez, Edward C. Prescott, Terry Fitzgerald, and Fernando Alvarez, in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 16 (1992), 533–59. Technical Appendix I, by Fernando Alvarez, describes the procedures used to construct the balance sheets reported in Tables 1 and 2 in page 536 and 537 of the paper. Technical Appendix II, by Terry Fitzgerald, describes the computational procedures used in this paper.

We present a 2-country model with heterogeneous agents in which changes in a country’s monetary policy affect real interest rates, relative prices of traded and nontraded goods and real exchange rates. Nontransitory real effects of monetary policy stem solely from a friction (country-specific reserve requirements) that generates separate demands for a country’s money and bonds. Without violating the classical assumptions of individual rationality and flexible prices, the model’s implications seem qualitatively in accord with the U.S. experience of the 1980s: a monetary policy tightening leading to a rise in the real interest rate and to an initial rise in the real value of the dollar which is subsequently reversed. In the model a monetary policy change leads to different welfare effects for agents born at different times, living in different countries, or participating on different sides of a market. The welfare of some agents can be affected more by relative price changes than by real interest rate changes.

The question of the existence and uniqueness of a stationary equilibrium for distorted versions of the standard neoclassical growth model is addressed in this paper. The conditions presented guaranteeing the existence and uniqueness of nontrivial equilibrium for the class of economies under study are simple and intuitively appealing, while the existence and uniqueness proof developed is elementary. Examples are presented illustrating that economies with distortional taxation, endogenous growth with externalities, and monopolistic competition can all fit into the framework developed.

The current tool of choice for analyzing the impact of a potential North American Free Trade Agreement on the economies of Canada, Mexico, and the United States is the static applied general equilibrium model. Although this type of model can do a good job in analyzing, and even in predicting, the impact of trade liberalization or tax reform on relative prices and resource allocation over a short time horizon, it does not attempt to capture the impact of government policy on growth rates. For this we need a dynamic model. This paper outlines some of the issues that confront a researcher interested in building a dynamic general equilibrium model to assess the potential economic impact of a NAFTA, including the impact on growth rates. Simple calculations based on preliminary empirical work indicate that the dynamic benefits of increased openness could dwarf the static benefits found by more conventional applied general equilibrium models.

The paper considers a model in which private foreign investors make direct long-lived capital investments in a small developing country that is subject to stochastic shocks to production. Depending upon the preferences of the host country, we find that expropriation can occur because of either desperation or opportunism. We show that under reasonable assumptions, increased investment makes expropriation less likely to occur and that the level of investment chosen by atomistic foreign investors may be nonoptimal.

This paper investigates the macroeconomic and welfare effects of a particular public finance decision. That decision was to use debt rather than current taxation to finance deposit insurance payments related to the savings and loan debacle. We find that this decision could have significantly raised real interest rates and affected welfare. The analysis is conducted in a dynamic, open-economy, monetary general equilibrium model in which parameters are set based on empirical observations.

Earlier researchers have found either no relation or a positive relation between the conditional expected return and the conditional variance of the monthly excess return on stocks when they used the standard GARCH-M model. This is in contrast to the negative relation found when other approaches were used to model conditional variance. We show that the difference in the estimated relation arises because the standard GARCH-M model is misspecified. When the standard model is modified allow for (i) the presence for seasonal patterns in volatility, (ii) positive and negative innovations to returns to having different impacts on conditional volatility, and (iii) nominal interest rates to affect conditional variance, we once again find support for a negative relation. Using the modified GARCH-M model, we also show that there is little evidence to support the traditional view that conditional volatility is highly persistent. Also, positive unanticipated returns result in a downward revision of the conditional volatility whereas negative unanticipated returns result in an upward revision of conditional volatility of a similar magnitude. Hence the time series properties of the monthly excess return on stocks appear to be substantially different from that of the daily excess return on stocks.

I consider two theories of the determination of political institutions. One of these theories stresses effects of changes in the balance of military power between the ruler and subjects on the distribution of property rights which the political system enforces. The other theory emphasizes the effect of changing informational constraints which require institutional changes to be made in order to maintain efficiency. I examine how each of these theories would apply to explaining the development of parliamentary government in thirteenth-century England. My general conclusion is that both theories are required to understand fully the process by which liberal political institutions emerge.

In this paper we explain why markets in noncontingent debt securities might be a stable form of market organization for intermediation to households. Efficient-contract allocation might be supported by these markets because households' relationships with their intermediaries do not exactly parallel the explicit form of the noncontingent contracts that they explicitly sign with one another. Also we show that the efficient-contract model can be distinguished from alternative models within the time-series framework that has been widely used to study households' consumption patterns.

This paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of cyclical fluctuations in marginal tax rates. It finds that systematically including tax variables in a standard real business cycle model substantially improves the model's ability to reproduce basic facts about postwar U.S. business cycle fluctuations. In particular, modeling fluctuations in personal and corporate income tax rates increases the model's predicted relative variability of hours and decreases its predicted correlation between hours and average productivity. Fluctuations in tax rates produce large substitution effects that alter the leisure/labor supply decision.

This paper examines the extent to which the equity premium puzzle can be resolved by taking account of the fact that stockholders bear a disproportionate share of output uncertainty. We do this in the context of a non-Walrasian RBC model where risk reallocation is justified by borrowing restrictions. The risk shifting mechanism we propose has the same effect as would arise from a substantial increase in the risk aversion parameter of the representative agent. As with more standard RBC models, it remains that our model is unable to replicate key financial statistics. In particular, the observation that the equity return is more variable than national product cannot be accounted for under standard technology assumptions.

We develop a theory of general equilibrium with endogenous debt limits in the form of individual rationality constraints similar to those in the dynamic consistency literature. If an agent defaults on a contract, he can be excluded from future contingent claims markets trading and can have his assets seized. He cannot be excluded from spot markets trading, however, and he has some private endowments that cannot be seized. All information is publicly held and common knowledge, and there is a complete set of contingent claims markets. Since there is complete information, an agent cannot enter into a contract in which he would have an incentive to default in some state. In general there is only partial insurance: variations in consumption may be imperfectly correlated across agents; interest rates may be lower than they would be without constraints; and equilibria may be Pareto ranked.

Using the well-known dynamic fiscal policy framework pioneered by Auerbach and Kotlikoff, we examine the efficiency and welfare implications of shifting from a linear marginal tax rate structure to a discrete rate structure characterized by two regions of flat tax rates of 15 and 28 percent. For a wide range of parameter values, we find that there is no sequence of lump-sum transfers that the (model) government can feasibly implement to make the shift from the linear to the discrete structure Pareto-improving. We conclude that the worldwide trend toward replacing rate structures having many small steps between tax rates with structures characterized by just a few large jumps is not easily accounted for by efficiency arguments. In the process of our analysis, we introduce a simple algorithm for solving dynamic fiscal policy models that include “kinks” in individual budget surfaces due to discrete tax codes. In addition to providing a relatively straightforward way of extending Auerbach-Kotlikoff-type models to this class of problems, our approach has the side benefit of facilitating the interpretation of our results.

This paper investigates interest rate determination and evolutions of nominal and real variables in alternative monetary, general equilibrium models. Three approaches to characterizing monetary transactions services are utilized: a cash-in-advance approach, in which agents face cash constraints on goods purchases; a transaction-cost approach, in which goods are sacrificed in transactions; and a shopping-time approach, in which leisure is sacrificed in transactions. Models which employ these approaches are used to examine liquidity effects of monetary innovations on interest rates and real activity.

The standard real business cycle model fails to adequately account for two facts found in the U.S. data: the fact that hours worked fluctuate considerably more than productivity and the fact that the correlation between hours worked and productivity is close to zero. In this paper, in a unified framework, the authors describe and analyze four extensions of the standard model, by introducing nonseparable leisure, indivisible labor, government spending, and household production.

This paper develops a dynamic continuous-time model in which international risk sharing can yield substantial welfare gains through its positive effect on expected consumption growth. The mechanism linking global diversification to growth is an attendant world portfolio shift from safe, but low-yield, capital into riskier, high-yield capital. The presence of these two types of capital is meant to capture the idea that growth depends on the availability of an ever-increasing array of specialized, hence inherently risky, production inputs. A partial calibration exercise based on Penn World Table consumption data implies steady-state welfare gains from global financial integration that for some regions amount to several times initial wealth.

The U.S. Treasury could raise more revenue if it changed the way it auctions its debt. Under the current procedure, all bidders whose competitive bids for Treasury securities are accepted pay the prices they bid; different winning bidders, that is, pay different prices. Instead, economic theory says, all winning bidders should all pay the same price—that of the highest bid not accepted, or the price that just clears the market. This procedural change would increase the revenue that Treasury auctions raise primarily because it would decrease the amount of resources that bidders would spend collecting information about what other bidders are likely to do. It would also reduce the incentives for traders to attempt to manipulate the securities market.

Inspired by the current European developments, we study equilibrium fiscal policy under alternative constitutional arrangements in a “federation” of countries. There are two levels of government: local and federal. Local policy redistributes across individuals and affects the probability of aggregate shocks, while federal policy shares international risk. Policies are chosen under majority rule. There is a moral hazard problem: federal risk-sharing can induce the local governments to enact policies that increase local risk. We investigate this incentive problem under alternative fiscal constitutions. In particular, we contrast a vertically ordered system like the EC with a horizontally ordered federal system like the US. These alternative arrangements are not neutral, in the sense that they create different incentives for policymakers and voters, and give rise to different political equilibria. A general conclusion is that, centralization of functions and power can be welfare improving under appropriate institutions. However, this conclusion only applies to the moral hazard problem and a federation where the countries are not too dissimilar.

This paper documents several advantages associated with using state level consumption data to examine consumption behavior and especially to estimate the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution (IES). In contrast to the results of Hall (1988) and Campbell and Mankiw (1989), we provide substantial evidence indicating that the IES is significantly different from zero and probably close to one. Since the overidentifying restrictions of the standard Euler equation are generally rejected, we use these data to explore the nature of these rejections and evaluate an alternative specification of consumer behavior proposed by Campbell and Mankiw (1987, 1989, 1990). We take special care of examining the robustness of our results with respect to problems caused by the mismeasurement of the interest rate. In particular, we identify a common time component in expected consumption growth across states which, under the specifications of the theory, should reflect real interest rate movements. We find that the common time component closely matches the expected real return on Treasury bills as should be expected if the IES is different from zero and if the T-bill rate is an appropriate measure of interest rates.

We provide a new interpretation of the statistical relation between the trade balance and the terms of trade. This relation includes the J-curve, the tendency for trade balances to be negatively correlated with contemporaneous movements in the terms of trade, positively correlated with lagged movements. We document this property in international data and show that it arises, as well, in a two-country stochastic growth model. In the model trade dynamics result, in large part, from fluctuations in investment. A favorable productivity shock in the domestic economy leads to an increase in domestic output, a decrease in its relative price, and a rise in the terms of trade. The increase in domestic productivity also leads to a temporary investment boom. This boom results in an initial trade deficit, followed by future surpluses, and thus a J-curve. We also use the model to provide a new perspective on earlier theories of trade and price dynamics.

This paper takes up Bayesian inference in a general trend stationary model for macroeconomic time series with independent Student-t disturbances. The model is linear in the data, but nonlinear in parameters. An informative but nonconjugate family of prior distributions for the parameters is introduced, indexed by a single parameter which can be readily elicited. The main technical contribution is the construction of posterior moments, densities, and odds ratios using a six-step Gibbs sampler. Mappings from the index parameter of the family of prior distribution to posterior moments, densities, and odds ratios are developed for several of the Nelson-Plosser time series. These mappings show that the posterior distribution is not even approximately Gaussian, and indicate the sensitivity of the posterior odds ratio in favor of difference stationarity to the choice of the prior distribution.

For at least the next two years, the U.S. economy will grow more slowly than it has on average since World War II. This is the forecast of a Bayesian vector autoregression model developed and used by researchers at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank. The model's previous forecast—of a very weak start to the 1991–92 recovery—was remarkably accurate. Both forecasts are supported by evidence on long-term problems among consumers, in the commercial real estate industry, and at all levels of government. These problems will most likely constrain economic growth for years, although short spurts of strength could appear anytime, due to unpredictable special factors.

We argue that changes in the life insurance industry have created a nontrivial moral hazard. We document the industry's shift from sales of life insurance to sales of mainly rate-of-return oriented investments like single premium deferred annuities (SPDAs) and guaranteed investment contracts (GICs). We describe the system of explicit and implicit guarantees that state governments and the industry provide to SPDA and GIC investors. We argue that these guarantees create moral hazards that have contributed to insurance company failures and misallocation of resources. We summarize reformers' proposals to enhance both the explicit guarantees and the regulation of insurance companies and argue that maintaining the degree of regulatory tightness required for such proposals to succeed will be difficult. We suggest an alternative: eliminate guarantees of SPDAs, GICs, and similar products (and possibly promote full disclosure practices and earmarked investments like variable annuities).