Search Results
Conference Paper
Predicting the effects of Federal Reserve policy in a sticky price model: an analytical approach
In this paper, I characterize equilibria for a sticky-price model in which Federal Reserve policy is an interest-rate rule similar to that described in Taylor (1993). For standard preferences and technologies used in the literature, the model predicts that the nominal interest rate is negatively serially correlated, and that shocks to interest rates imply a potentially large but short-lived response in output. Shocks to government spending and technology lead to persistent changes in output but the percentage change in output is predicted to be smaller than the percentage changes in spending ...
Journal Article
Productivity and the post-1990 U.S. economy
In this paper, the authors show that ignoring corporate intangible investments gives a distorted picture of the post-1990 U.S. economy. In particular, ignoring intangible investments in the late 1990s leads one to conclude that productivity growth was modest, corporate profits were low, and corporate investment was at moderate levels. In fact, the late 1990s was a boom period for productivity growth, corporate profits, and corporate investment.
Working Paper
What Do Survey Data Tell Us about US Businesses?
This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice. We compare survey responses of business owners with available data from administrative tax records, brokered private business sales, and publicly traded company filings and document problems due to nonrepresentative samples and measurement errors across several surveys, subsamples, and years. We find that the discrepancies are economically relevant for the statistics of interest. We investigate reasons for ...
Working Paper
What Do Survey Data Tell Us about US Businesses?
This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice. We compare survey responses of business owners with available data from administrative tax records, brokered private business sales, and publicly traded company filings and document problems due to nonrepresentative samples and measurement errors across all surveys, subsamples, and years. We find that the discrepancies are economically relevant for the statistics of interest. We investigate reasons for these ...
Discussion Paper
The macroeconomic effects of distortionary taxation
Discussion Paper
Taxing Wealth
Some have proposed wealth taxation as a means of reducing economic inequality, but such proposals are premature. While economic theory and data measurement have solid grounding when analyzing other forms of taxation, such as income or sales taxes, this is not the case for wealth Total estimates of the two most widely used measures of wealth, fixed assets and net worth, vary widely over the six decades for which data are available. Trend lines in these two wealth measures are rarely correlated. In addition, the relationship between the two?and explanation of why they differ so ...
Discussion Paper
Monetary Policy and Employment
In its ?Statement on Longer-Run Goals and Monetary Policy Strategy,? the Federal Open Market Committee (Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 2014) summarizes its two main objectives: to mitigate (i) deviations of inflation from its longer-run goal and (ii) deviations of employment from the Federal Open Market Committee?s assessment of its maximum level. In the case of employment, the statement acknowledges that ?the maximum level ... is largely determined by nonmonetary factors,? which is why the FOMC sets no fixed goal for the employment level. It instead depends on the Committee?s ...
Discussion Paper
The Costs of Quid Pro Quo
To gain access to its markets, the Chinese government sometimes requires high-technology foreign firms to transfer partial property rights to their technology. Because the Chinese market is large and potentially lucrative, major multinationals typically agree to this quid pro quo policy, often through joint ventures with Chinese firms. We use a quantitative macroeconomic model to analyze the effects of this policy on firm investment incentives, Chinese technology goals, and overall international technology and investment flows. We find that: ?China has a very strong incentive to use the ...
Discussion Paper
China’s Foreign Investment
Foreign investment into China has surged since the 1990s and become a topic of keen interest for both scholars and the media. While China has encouraged this investment with the goal of catching up technologically, close analysis reveals that only a small share of its foreign investment comes from the United States and other nations with the technology China seeks. Instead, inward foreign direct investment flows predominantly from Hong Kong and a few Caribbean nations. Two key factors behind this: China?s tax policy toward foreign investment and its ?industrial? policies to encourage ...
Journal Article
The CAPM debate
This article describes the academic debate about the usefulness of the capital asset pricing model (the CAPM) developed by Sharpe and Lintner. First the article describes the data the model is meant to explain?the historical average returns for various types of assets over long time periods. Then the article develops a version of the CAPM and describes how it measures the risk of investing in particular assets. Finally the article describes the results of competing studies of the model's validity. Included are studies that support the CAPM (Black; Black, Jensen, and Scholes; Fama and ...