Search Results
Conference Paper
Backward-looking interest-rate rules, interest-rate smoothing, and macroeconomic instability
The existing literature on the stabilizing properties of interest-rate feedback rules has stressed the perils of linking interest rates to forecasts of future inflation. Such rules have been found to give rise to aggregate fluctuations due to self-fulfilling expectations. In response to this concern, a growing literature has focused on the stabilizing properties of interest-rate rules whereby the central bank responds to a measure of past inflation. The consensus view that has emerged is that backward-looking rules contribute to protecting the economy from embarking on expectations-driven ...
Working Paper
Growth and investment across countries
This paper examines the channels through which country characteristics affect growth. We investigate whether "primitives," or rates of factor accumulation, are sufficient statistics for economic growth, and whether "ancillary variables," such as political instability, income distribution, and financial development, affect growth by influencing levels of investment in physical and human capital. Our results suggest that financial development is an important determinant of both total factor productivity growth and levels of investment. Political instability is also found to influence ...
Journal Article
How Persistent Are the Effects of Sentiment Shocks?
People?s feelings about the economy have been shown to be strongly connected to a state?s current economic health over short horizons. So, how well do such consumer sentiment measures coincide with economic growth over a longer period? Sentiment shocks are associated with large and statistically significant changes in state economic output over as long as a three-year horizon. While the sentiment shocks initially affect state consumption expenditures to a smaller degree, the impact tends to be more persistent, continuing as long as five years after the initial shock.
Conference Paper
The design of monetary and fiscal policy: a global perspective
We study the emergence of multiple equilibria in models with capital and bonds under various monetary and fiscal policies. We show that the presence of capital is indeed another independent source of local and global multiplicities, even under active policies that yield local determinacy. We also show how a very similar mechanism generates multiplicities in models with bonds and distortionary taxation. We then explore the design of monetary policies that avoid multiple equilibria. We show that interest rate policies that respond to the output gap, while potentially a source of significant ...
Conference Paper
Human capital and technology diffusion
This paper generalizes the Nelson-Phelps catch-up model of technology diffusion facilitated by levels of human capital. We allow for the possibility that the pattern of technology diffusion can be exponential, which would predict that nations would exhibit positive catch-up with the leader nation, or logistic, in which a country with a sufficiently small capital stock may exhibit slower total factor productivity growth than the leader nation. ; We derive a nonlinear specification for total factor productivity growth that nests these two specifications. We estimate this specification for a ...
Working Paper
Reestablishing the income-democracy nexus
A number of recent empirical studies have cast doubt on the "modernization theory" of democratization, which posits that increases in income are conducive to increases in democracy levels. This doubt stems mainly from the fact that while a strong positive correlation exists between income and democracy levels, the relationship disappears when one controls for country fixed effects. This raises the possibility that the correlation in the data reflects a third causal characteristic, such as institutional quality. In this paper, we reexamine the robustness of the income-democracy relationship. ...
Working Paper
Modernization and Discrete Measures of Democracy
We reassess the empirical evidence for a positive relationship between income and democracy, commonly known as the ?modernization hypothesis,? using discrete democracy measures. While discrete measures have been advocated in the literature, they pose estimation problems under fixed effects due to incidental parameter issues. We use two methods to address these issues, the bias-correction method of Fernandez-Val, which directly computes the marginal effects, and the parameterized Wooldridge method. Estimation under the Fernandez-Val method consistently indicates a statistically and ...
Working Paper
Moderate Inflation and the Deflation-Depression Link
In a recent paper, Atkeson and Kehoe (2004) demonstrated the lack of a robust empirical relationship between inflation and growth for a cross-section of countries with 19th and 20th century data, concluding that the historical evidence only provides weak support for the contention that deflation episodes are harmful to economic growth. In this paper, we revisit this relationship by allowing for inflation and growth to have a nonlinear specification dependent on inflation levels. In particular, we allow for the possibility that high inflation is negatively correlated with growth, while a ...
Working Paper
Human Capital and Technology Diffusion
This paper generalizes the Nelson-Phelps catch-up model of technology diffusion. We allow for the possibility that the pattern of technology diffusion can be exponential, which would predict that nations would exhibit positive catch-up with the leader nation, or logistic, in which a country with a sufficiently small capital stock may exhibit slower total factor productivity growth than the leader nation. ; We derive a nonlinear specification for total factor productivity growth that nests these two specifications. We estimate this specification for across-section of nations from 1960 through ...
Working Paper
Sentiments and Economic Activity: Evidence from U.S. States
Using data from the Michigan Survey, we find a strong relationship between expectations concerning national output growth and future state economic activity. This linkage suggests that sentiment influences aggregate demand. This relationship is robust to a battery of sensitivity tests. However, national sentiment is also positively related to past state economic activity. We therefore turn to instrumental variables, positing that agents in states with a higher share of congressmen from the political party of the sitting President will be more optimistic. This instrument is strong in the first ...