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Series:Working Papers  Bank:Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis 

Working Paper
Economies of density versus natural advantage: crop choice on the back forty

We estimate the factors determining specialization of crop choice at the level of individual fields, distinguishing between the role of natural advantage (soil characteristics) and economies of density (scale economies achieved when farmers plant neighboring fields with the same crop). Using rich geographic data from North Dakota, including new data on crop choice collected by satellite, we estimate the analog of a social interactions econometric model for the planting decisions on neighboring fields. We find that planting decisions on a field are heavily dependent on the soil characteristics ...
Working Papers , Paper 668

Working Paper
Fiscal Stimulus under Sovereign Risk

The excess procyclicality of fiscal policy is commonly viewed as a central malaise in emerging economies. We document that procyclicality is more pervasive in countries with higher sovereign risk and provide a model of optimal fiscal policy with nominal rigidities and endogenous sovereign default that can account for this empirical pattern. Financing a fiscal stimulus is costly for risky countries and can render countercyclical policies undesirable, even in the presence of large Keynesian stabilization gains. We also show that imposing austerity can backfire by exacerbating the exposure to ...
Working Papers , Paper 762

Working Paper
International Reserves and Rollover Risk

We study the optimal accumulation of international reserves in a quantitative model of sovereign default with long-term debt and a risk-free asset. Keeping higher levels of reserves provides a hedge against rollover risk, but this is costly because using reserves to pay down debt allows the government to reduce sovereign spreads. Our model, parameterized to mimic salient features of a typical emerging economy, can account for a significant fraction of the holdings of international reserves, and the larger accumulation of both debt and reserves in periods of low spreads and high income. We ...
Working Papers , Paper 735

Working Paper
The Pass-Through of Sovereign Risk

This paper examines the macroeconomic implications of sovereign credit risk in a business cycle model where banks are exposed to domestic government debt. The news of a future sovereign default hampers financial intermediation. First, it tightens the funding constraints of banks, reducing their available resources to finance firms (liquidity channel). Second, it generates a precautionary motive for banks to deleverage (risk channel). I estimate the model using Italian data, finding that i) sovereign credit risk was recessionary and that ii) the risk channel was sizable. I then use the model ...
Working Papers , Paper 722

Working Paper
Slow Convergence in Economies with Organization Capital

Most firms begin very small, and large firms are the result of typically decades of persistent growth. This growth can be understood as the result of some form of capital accumulation-organization capital. In the US, the distribution of firm size k has a right tail only slightly thinner than 1/k. This means that most capital accumulation must be accounted for by incumbent firms. This paper describes a range of circumstances in which this implies aggregate convergence rates that are only about half of what they are in the standard Cass-Koopmans economy. Through the lens of the models described ...
Working Papers , Paper 748

Working Paper
Understanding the long-run decline in interstate migration

We analyze the secular decline in interstate migration in the United States between 1991 and 2011. Gross flows of people across states are about 10 times larger than net flows, yet have declined by around 50 percent over the past 20 years. We show that micro data rule out many popular explanations for this decline, including aging of the population, the rise of two-earner households, other compositional changes, regional changes, and the rise in real incomes. We argue instead that the fall in migration is due to a decline in the geographic specificity of occupations and an increase in ...
Working Papers , Paper 697

Working Paper
An Assignment Model of Knowledge Diffusion and Income Inequality

Randomness in individual discovery tends to spread out productivities in a population, while learning from others keeps productivities together. In combination, these two mechanisms for knowledge accumulation give rise to long-term growth and persistent income inequality. This paper considers a world in which those with more useful knowledge can teach those with less useful knowledge, with competitive markets assigning students to teachers. In equilibrium, students who are able to learn quickly are assigned to teachers with the most productive knowledge. The long-run growth rate of this ...
Working Papers , Paper 715

Working Paper
Trade Dynamics in the Market for Federal Funds

We develop a model of the market for federal funds that explicitly accounts for its two distinctive features: banks have to search for a suitable counterparty, and once they meet, both parties negotiate the size of the loan and the repayment. The theory is used to answer a number of positive and normative questions: What are the determinants of the fed funds rate? How does the market reallocate funds? Is the market able to achieve an efficient reallocation of funds? We also use the model for theoretical and quantitative analyses of policy issues facing modern central banks.
Working Papers , Paper 710

Working Paper
Two Illustrations of the Quantity Theory of Money Reloaded

In this paper, we review the relationship between inflation rates, nominal interest rates, and rates of growth of monetary aggregates for a large group of OECD countries. We conclude that the low-frequency behavior of these series maintains a close relationship, as predicted by standard quantity theory models. In an estimated model, we show those relationships to be relatively invariant to alternative frictions that can deliver very different high-frequency dynamics. We argue that these relationships are useful for policy design aimed at controlling inflation.
Working Papers , Paper 774

Working Paper
Measurement with minimal theory

A central debate in applied macroeconomics is whether statistical tools that use minimal identifying assumptions are useful for isolating promising models within a broad class. In this paper, I compare three statistical models - a vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA) model, an unrestricted state space model, and a restricted state space model - that are all consistent with the same prototype business cycle model. The business cycle model is a prototype in the sense that many models, with various frictions and shocks, are observationally equivalent to it. The statistical models I ...
Working Papers , Paper 643

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