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Working Paper
Rethinking Detroit
We study the urban structure of the city of Detroit. Following several decades of decline, the city's current urban structure is clearly not optimal for its size, with a business district immediately surrounded by a ring of largely vacant neighborhoods. We propose a model with residential externalities that features multiple equilibria at the neighborhood level. In particular, developing a residential area requires the coordination of developers and residents, without which it may remain vacant even if its fundamentals are sound. We embed this mechanism in a quantitative spatial economics ...
Journal Article
Idiosyncratic Sectoral Growth, Balanced Growth, and Sectoral Linkages
We study the growth properties of an economy where different sectors are linked by way of intermediates and potentially grow at different rates. We characterize the economy's equilibrium balanced growth path, and derive an analytical expression that summarizes how TFP growth in a given sector affects value added growth in every other sector and, therefore, aggregate GDP growth. We show in a special case that a version of Hulten's (1978) theorem, whereby the effects of changes in sector-specific productivity on GDP are entirely captured by that sector's share in GDP, also holds in growth rates ...
Briefing
What Survey Measures of Inflation Expectations Tell Us
Throughout this period of high inflation, people have wondered when inflation will return to the FOMC's longer-run target of 2 percent. Many models and surveys on inflation expectations exist to help answer this question. In this Economic Brief, we explore the accuracy of these measures of inflation expectations and what information can be obtained from them. While we find these popular sources of inflation are historically inaccurate, they can still gather valuable information, such as people's confidence in the ability of the Fed to get inflation back to target.
Working Paper
Informality and rent-seeking bureaucracies in a model of long-run growth
This paper explores the links among growth, the informal economy, and rent-seeking bureaucracies. The presence of congestion associated with the enforcement of property right implies that informality can be useful. Whether bureaucratic rent-seeking is detrimental to growth then depends on how good a substitute informality is to production in the formal sector. In order to create profits which can be appropriated, rent-seeking bureaucrats limit entry into the formal economy. As a result, firms operate in the informal sector even when the cost of informality is high, in which case lower growth ...
Working Paper
Sectoral vs. aggregate shocks : a structural factor analysis of industrial production
This paper uses factor analytic methods to decompose industrial production (IP) into components arising from aggregate shocks and idiosyncratic sector-specific shocks. An approximate factor model finds that nearly all (90%) of the variability of quarterly growth rates in IP are associated with common factors. Because common factors may reflect sectoral shocks that have propagated by way of input-output linkages, we then use a multisector growth model to adjust for the effects of these linkages. In particular, we show that neoclassical multisector models, of the type first introduced by Long ...
Working Paper
Optimal public investment with and without government commitment
We analyze the problem of optimal public investment when government purchases of productive capital assets are financed through income taxes. Virtually all previous work in this literature has prescribed a share of public investment in GDP that is both constant and time consistent. This paper shows that this straightforward prescription derives from specific assumptions relating to preferences and technology. In a more general framework, the optimal policy is neither constant nor time consistent. With full commitment, a policymaker will typically choose a tax rate, or alternatively a share of ...
Journal Article
Semiparametric estimation of land price gradients using large data sets
The exact nature of land price gradients, the surface describing how land prices change with location, can be difficult to uncover. This is particularly true for cities with few vacant lots or in more rural regions where the number of land sales in a given area is limited. This article outlines a semiparametric method to construct the land price surface given a large set of residential property sales, and investigates properties of this surface in Richmond, Virginia, and three surrounding counties. Despite recent concentrations of housing in suburban areas, we find that Richmond remains ...
Working Paper
Inflation uncertainty and growth in a simple monetary model
This paper analyzes the effects of inflation variability on economic growth in a model where money is introduced via a cash-in-advance constraint. In this setting, we find that inflation adversely affects long-run growth, even when the cash-in-advance constraint applies only to consumption. At the same time, we find that inflation and growth are positively related in the short-run. In addition, variability tends to increase average growth through a precautionary savings motive. Since inflation and inflation variability tend to be highly correlated, this latter effect attenuates the negative ...
Journal Article
The Effects of Permanent and Transitory Shocks under Imperfect Information
We study an economic environment affected by shocks that may be either permanent or transitory in nature. Contrary to the standard perfect information setup, we assume that households cannot distinguish between the two types of shocks. We describe how to solve the model under this imperfect information assumption in the context of the one-sector neoclassical model. We show that the solution involves a recasting of the driving process in terms of estimates of the exogenous states and forecast errors made by households rather than the states themselves. Given observations on the driving ...
Working Paper
Productivity, employment, and inventories
Marshall made at least four contributions to the classical quantity theory. He endowed it with his Cambridge cash-balance money-supply-and-demand framework to explain how the nominal money supply relative to real money demand determines the price level. He combined it with the assumption of purchasing power parity to explain (i) the international distribution of world money under metallic standards and fixed exchange rates, and (ii) exchange rate determination under floating rates and inconvertible paper currencies. He paired it with the idea of money wage and/or interest rate stickiness in ...