Search Results
Working Paper
Heterogeneous firms, productivity and poverty traps
We present a model of endogenous total factor productivity which generates poverty traps. We obtain multiple steady-state equilibria for an arbitrarily small degree of increasing returns to scale. While the most productive firms operate across all the steady states, in a poverty trap less productive firms operate as well. This results in lower average firm productivity and lower total factor productivity. In our model a growth miracle is accompanied by a shift of employment from small to large firms, consistent with the empirical evidence. We calibrate our model and relate entry costs to the ...
Journal Article
Institutional causes of output volatility
The authors investigate the relationship between the quality of institutions and output volatility. Using instrumental variable regressions, they address whether higher entry barriers and lower property rights protection lead to higher volatility. They find that a 1-standard-deviation increase in entry costs increases the standard deviation of output growth by roughly 40 percent of its average value in the sample. In contrast, property rights protection has no statistically significant effect on volatility.
Journal Article
Cross - country productivity growth
Journal Article
Changing trends in the labor force: a survey
The composition of the American workforce has changed dramatically over the past half century as a result of both the emergence of married women as a substantial component of the labor force and an increase in the number of minority workers. The aging of the population has contributed to this change as well. In this paper, the authors review the evidence of changing labor force participation rates, estimate the trends in labor force participation over the past 50 years, and find that aggregate participation has stabilized after a period of persistent increases. Moreover, they examine the ...
Speech
Classic Policy Benchmarks for Economies with Substantial Inequality
St. Louis Fed President Jim Bullard participated on a policy panel during the Annual Conference of the Central Bank of Chile. The topic of the conference was “Heterogeneity in Macroeconomics: Implications for Monetary Policy.”During the panel discussion, Bullard presented "Classic Policy Benchmarks for Economies with Substantial Inequality." In the presentation, he outlined an argument that the contribution of a central bank to optimal macroeconomic policy may not be importantly altered by the presence of heterogeneous households. (He has presented previous versions of these slides at ...
Speech
Optimal Monetary Policy for the Masses: a presentation at the Swiss National Bank Research Conference 2018, Current Monetary Policy Challenges, Zurich, Switzerland
We study nominal GDP targeting as optimal monetary policy in a simple and stylized model with a credit market friction. The macroeconomy we study has considerable income inequality, which gives rise to a large private sector credit market. There is an important credit market friction because households participating in the credit market use non-state contingent nominal contracts (NSCNC). We extend previous results in this model by allowing for substantial intra-cohort heterogeneity. The heterogeneity is substantial enough that we can approach measured Gini coefficients for income, financial ...
Working Paper
Cross-country income convergence revisited
We reassess the convergence properties of the cross-country distribution of income and its determinants using the dataset constructed by Klenow and Rodriguez-Clare (2005) and our updated version of the same data. Consistent with the literature, the ergodic distribution of output per worker features separate convergence clubs. In contrast to previous findings, productivity display convergence in the long-run. The long-run distribution of human capital is multi-modal.