Research Database

Recent developments in business cycle theory are reviewed. The principal finding is that the growth model, which was developed to account for the secular patterns in important economic aggregates, displays the business cycle phenomena once it incorporates the observed randomness in the rate of technological advance. The amplitudes and serial correlation properties of fluctuations in output and employment that the growth model predicts match those historically experienced in the United States. Further, the model continues to display the growth facts it was developed to explain.

This paper develops a forecasting procedure based on a Bayesian method for estimating vector autoregressions. We apply the procedure to 10 macroeconomic variables and show that it produces more accurate out-of-sample forecasts than univariate equations do. Although cross-variable responses are damped by the prior, our estimates capture considerable interaction among the variables.

We provide unconditional forecasts as of 1982:12 and 1983:3. We also describe how a model such as this can be used to make conditional projections and analyze policy alternatives. As an example, we analyze a Congressional Budget Office forecast made in 1982:12.

While no automatic casual interpretations arise from models like ours, such models provide a detailed characterization of the dynamic statistical interdependence of a set of economic variables. That information may help evaluate casual hypotheses without containing any such hypotheses.

Methods are presented for solving a certain class of rational expectations models, principally those that arise from dynamic games. The methods allow for numerical solution using spectral factorization algorithms and for estimation of these models using maximum likelihood techniques.

This paper considers a policy environment in which policy is not set by a single policymaker, but by a sequence of policymaking administrations. Administration turnover is determined by a simple random process. The consequences of administration turnover are traced through for two versions of a linear rational expectations model, and numerical simulations of various policy environments are presented.

The implications of a dynamic coalition production technology are explored. With this technology, coalitions produce the current period consumption good as well as coalition-specific capital which is embodied in young coalition members. The equilibrium allocation is efficient and displays constant growth rates, even though exogenous technological change is not a feature of the environment. Unlike the neoclassical growth model, policies which influence agents’ investment-consumption decisions affect not only the level of output, but also its constant growth rate. In addition to these growth entailments, the theory has equally important industrial organization implications. Specifically, in equilibrium there is no tendency for coalition (firm) size to regress to the mean or for the distribution of coalition sizes to become more disparate.

This paper provides a simple counterexample to the standard belief that in a world economy in which all countries are small, strategic interactions between policymakers are trivial and thus cooperative and noncooperative government policies coincide. It is well known that this holds for tariff policies. However, this paper demonstrates the result does not apply to government policies generally. Indeed, this paper presents a simple counterexample for the case of fiscal policy. In addition, the paper analyzes how optimally coordinated fiscal policies differ from noncooperative policies. It finds that, relative to optimally coordinated levels, noncooperative government spending can be too high or too low, depending on the sign of a transmission effect which captures the overall effect countries’ actions have on each other.

This paper presents a simple counterexample to the belief that international policy cooperation is desirable. It also explains circumstances under which such a counterexample is possible.

Optimal control theory can be combined with the probability structure of a vector autoregression to investigate the tradeoffs available to policymakers. Such an approach obtains results based on a minimal set of assumptions about the economy and the structure of policy actions. This paper takes this approach to analyze the potential effectiveness of countercyclical monetary policy.

'Structural unemployment' is said to occur in regions or 'sectors' of the economy as a consequence of technological changes. In this paper we present a model which provides an environment which gives rise to unemployment which could be labelled structural unemployment. There is exogenous technological change and vintage specific human capital. Unemployment arises as workers specialized in a particular technology within a vintage decide to search for a job within their vintage, so that their previously acquired special skills are used, instead of getting employed as unskilled workers in the newest vintage. As the rate of technological change increases, the incentives to reassign specialized workers to their same vintage, inccuring therefore in search costs, becomes less attractive, and in consequence the fraction of specialized workers doing search activities decreases. This provides some rationale for the negative correlation between rates of growth and unemployment observed in the data.