Search Results
Journal Article
Understanding the life-cycle of a manufacturing plant.
In the final article this quarter, Aubhik Khan wonders: What determines whether a manufacturing plant survives? Is it access to credit markets? Or does learning about plants' profitability over time determine survival? Should government policy play a role in helping plants survive? In "Understanding the Life-Cycle of a Manufacturing Plant," Khan discusses the collateral and learning views as two possible explanations for a typical plant's life-cycle. He concludes that although it remains unclear as to which explanation is more relevant, the two views have very different implications for ...
Working Paper
Growth and risk-sharing with private information
The author examines the impact of incomplete risk-sharing on growth and welfare. The source of market incompleteness in the economy is private information: a household's idiosyncratic productivity shock is not observable by others. Risk-sharing between households occurs through long-term contracts with intermediaries. The author finds that incomplete risk-sharing tends to reduce the rate of growth relative to the complete risk-sharing benchmark. Numerical examples indicate that the welfare cost and the growth effect of private information are small.
Working Paper
Idiosyncratic shocks and the role of nonconvexities in plant and aggregate investment dynamics.
We solve equilibrium models of lumpy investment wherein establishments face persistent shocks to common and plant-specific productivity. Nonconvex adjustment costs lead plants to pursue generalized (S,s) decision rules with respect to capital; as a result, their individual investments are lumpy. In partial equilibrium, this yields substantial skewness and kurtosis in aggregate investment, though with differences in plant-level productivity, these nonlinearities are far less pronounced. Moreover, nonconvex costs, like quadratic adjustment costs, greatly increase the persistence of aggregate ...
Report
Idiosyncratic shocks and the role of nonconvexities in plant and aggregate investment dynamics
We solve equilibrium models of lumpy investment wherein establishments face persistent shocks to common and plant-specific productivity. Nonconvex adjustment costs lead plants to pursue generalized (S, s) rules with respect to capital; thus, their investments are lumpy. In partial equilibrium, this yields substantial skewness and kurtosis in aggregate investment, though, with differences in plant-level productivity, these nonlinearities are far less pronounced. Moreover, nonconvex costs, like quadratic adjustment costs, increase the persistence of aggregate investment, yielding a better match ...
Journal Article
The finance and growth nexus
Does financial development lead to greater economic growth? Or does economic growth lead to more highly developed financial systems? In this article, Aubhik Khan presents some recent evidence that appears to support the first question: financial development may also have a significant impact on a nation's rate of economic growth.
Working Paper
Financial development and economic growth
The author develops a theory of financial development based on the costs associated with the provision of external finance. These costs are assumed to arise within an environment where informational asymmetries between borrowers and lenders are costly to resolve. When borrowing is limited, producers with access to financial intermediary loans obtain higher returns to investment than other producers. This creates incentives for others to undertake the technology adoption necessary to access investment loans. Over time, as increasing numbers of producers gain access to external finance, ...
Working Paper
Enduring relationships in an economy with capital
Journal Article
Accounting for cross-country differences in income per capita
Living standards, as measured by average income per person, vary widely across countries. Differences in income result in large disparities in spending on goods and services by people living in different economies. What makes some countries rich and others poor? Furthermore, what determines income per person in a country, and why are these factors unevenly allocated across the world? In "Accounting for Cross-Country Differences in Income Per Capita," Aubhik Khan outlines a framework for growth accounting to account for cross-country differences in income. The current consensus is that ...
Journal Article
The role of inventories in the business cycle
Changes in the stock of firms' inventories are an important component of the business cycle. In fact, discussion about the timing of a recovery following a recession often focuses on inventories. In "The Role of Inventories in the Business Cycle," Aubhik Khan surveys the facts about inventory investment over the business cycle, then discusses two leading theories that may explain these observations.
Working Paper
The pitfalls of monetary discretion
In a canonical staggered pricing model, monetary discretion leads to multiple private sector equilibria. The basis for multiplicity is a form of policy complementarity. Specifically, prices set in the current period embed expectations about future policy, and actual future policy responds to these same prices. For a range of values of the fundamental state variable ? a ratio of predetermined prices ? there is complementarity between actual and expected policy, and multiple equilibria occur. Moreover, this multiplicity is not associated with reputational considerations: it occurs in a ...