Search Results
Report
The heterogeneous state of modern macroeconomics: a reply to Solow
Robert Solow has criticized our 2006 Journal of Economic Perspectives essay describing ?Modern Macroeconomics in Practice.? Solow eloquently voices the commonly heard complaint that too much macroeconomic work today starts with a model with a single type of agent. We argue that modern macroeconomics may not end too far from where Solow prefers. He is also critical of how modern macroeconomists use data to construct models. Specifically, he seems to think that calibration is the only way that our models encounter data. To the contrary, we argue that modern macroeconomics uses a wide variety of ...
Working Paper
Sophisticated monetary policies
The Ramsey approach to policy analysis finds the best competitive equilibrium given a set of available instruments. This approach is silent about unique implementation, namely designing policies so that the associated competitive equilibrium is unique. This silence is particularly problematic in monetary policy environments where many ways of specifying policy lead to indeterminacy. We show that sophisticated policies which depend on the history of private actions and which can differ on and off the equilibrium path can uniquely implement any desired competitive equilibrium. A large ...
Report
A reconsideration of the problem of social cost: free riders and monopolists
We examine the validity of one version of the Coase Theorem: In any economy in which property rights are fully allocated, competition will lead to efficient allocations. This version of the theorem implies that the public goods problem can be solved by allocating property rights fully and letting markets do their work. We show that this mechanism is not likely to work well in economies with either pure public goods or global externalities. The reason is that the privatized economy turns out to be highly susceptible to strategic behavior in that the free-rider problem in public goods economies ...
Discussion Paper
Thoughts on the Federal Reserve System's exit strategy
How can banks and similar institutions design optimal compensation systems? Would such systems conflict with the goals of society? This paper considers a theoretical framework of how banks structure job contracts with their employees to explore three points: the structure of a socially optimal compensation system; the structure of a compensation system that is privately optimal, given the reality of government-guaranteed bank debt; and policy interventions that can lead from the second structure to the first. Analysis reveals a potential policy option: providing proper incentives to banks by ...
Report
Optimality of the Friedman rule in economies with distorting taxes
We find conditions for the Friedman rule to be optimal in three standard models of money. These conditions are homotheticity and separability assumptions on preferences similar to those in the public finance literature on optimal uniform commodity taxation. We show that there is no connection between our results and the result in the standard public finance literature that intermediate goods should not be taxed.
Journal Article
How severe is the time-inconsistency problem in monetary policy?
This study analyzes two monetary economies, a cash-credit good model and a limited-participation model. In these models, monetary policy is made by a benevolent policymaker who cannot commit to future policies. The study defines and analyzes Markov equilibrium in these economies and shows that there is no time-inconsistency problem for a wide range of parameter values.
Journal Article
Accounting for the Great Depression
Economists have offered many theories for the U.S. Great Depression, but no consensus has formed on the main forces behind it. Here we describe and demonstrate a simple methodology for determining which theories are the most promising. We show that a large class of models, including models with various frictions, are equivalent to a prototype growth model with time-varying efficiency, labor, and investment wedges that, at least on face value, look like time-varying productivity, labor taxes, and investment taxes. We use U.S. data to measure these wedges, feed them back into the prototype ...
Report
Sophisticated monetary policies
In standard approaches to monetary policy, interest rate rules often lead to indeterminacy. Sophisticated policies, which depend on the history of private actions and can differ on and off the equilibrium path, can eliminate indeterminacy and uniquely implement any desired competitive equilibrium. Two types of sophisticated policies illustrate our approach. Both use interest rates as the policy instrument along the equilibrium path. But when agents deviate from that path, the regime switches, in one example to money; in the other, to a hybrid rule. Both lead to unique implementation, while ...
Report
Are structural VARs with long-run restrictions useful in developing business cycle theory?
The central finding of the recent structural vector autoregression (SVAR) literature with a differenced specification of hours is that technology shocks lead to a fall in hours. Researchers have used this finding to argue that real business cycle models are unpromising. We subject this SVAR specification to a natural economic test and show that when applied to data from a multiple-shock business cycle model, the procedure incorrectly concludes that the model could not have generated the data as long as demand shocks play a nontrivial role. We also test another popular specification, which ...
Working Paper
Comparing alternative representations and alternative methodologies in business cycle accounting
We make two comparisons relevant for the business cycle accounting approach. We show that in theory representing the investment wedge as a tax on investment is equivalent to representing this wedge as a tax on capital income as long as the probability distributions over this wedge in the two representations are the same. In practice, convenience dictates differing probability distributions over this wedge in the two representations. Even so, the quantitative results under the two representations are essentially identical. We also compare our methodology, the CKM methodology, to an alternative ...