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Working Paper
Welfare effects of tax policy in open economies: stabilization and cooperation
This paper studies an international tax policy design problem by employing a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets. We investigate the possibility of welfare improving active tax policies, in particular capital and labor income tax, under the non-cooperative Nash equilibrium and the cooperative equilibrium. Unlike the conventional wisdom regarding stabilization policies, optimal tax policies in our economy are procyclical. Relative to the non-cooperative setting, international tax policy cooperation requires more active tax policies (about two times) and ...
Working Paper
Two pitfalls of linearization methods
This paper illustrates two types of pitfalls in using linearization methods. First, if constraints are linearized before deriving optimality conditions, the derived conditions are not correct up to first order. Second, even when the behavior of the economy is correct to the first order, applying this behavior to welfare implications may lead to incorrect results.
Working Paper
Calculating and using second order accurate solutions of discrete time dynamic equilibrium models
We describe an algorithm for calculating second order approximations to the solutions to nonlinear stochastic rational expectation models. The paper also explains methods for using such an approximate solution to generate forecasts, simulated time paths for the model, and evaluations of expected welfare differences across different versions of a model. The paper gives conditions for local validity of the approximation that allow for disturbance distributions with unbounded support and allow for non-stationarity of the solution process.
Working Paper
Patience, persistence and welfare costs of incomplete markets in open economies
In this paper, we investigate the welfare implications of alternative financial market structures in a two-country endowment economy model. In particular, we obtain an analytic expression for the expected lifetime utility of the representative household when sovereign bonds are the only internationally traded asset, and we compare this welfare level with that obtained under complete asset markets. The welfare cost of incomplete markets is negligible if agents are very patient and shocks are not very persistent, but this cost is dramatically larger if agents are relatively impatient and shocks ...