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Growth and business cycles
We present a class of convex endogenous growth models and analyze their performance in terms of both growth and business cycle criteria. The models we study have close analogs in the real business cycle literature. We interpret the exogenous growth rate of productivity as an endogenous growth rate of human capital. This perspective allows us to compare the strengths of the two classes of models. ; To highlight the mechanism that gives endogenous growth models the ability to improve upon their exogenous growth relatives, we study models that are symmetric in terms of human and physical capital ...
Working Paper
The demand for youth: implications for the hours volatility puzzle
The employment and hours worked of young individuals fluctuate much more over the business cycle than those of prime-aged individuals. Understanding the mechanism underlying this observation is key to explaining the volatility of aggregate hours over the cycle. We argue that the joint behavior of age-specific hours and wages in the U.S. data point to differences in the cyclical characteristics of labor demand. To articulate this view, we consider a production technology displaying capital-experience complementarity. We estimate the key parameters governing the degree of complementarity and ...
Report
The young, the old, and the restless: demographics and business cycle volatility
We investigate the consequences of demographic change for business cycle analysis. We find that changes in the age composition of the labor force account for a significant fraction of the variation in business cycle volatility observed in the U.S. and other G7 economies. During the postwar period, these countries experienced dramatic demographic change, although details regarding extent and timing differ from place to place. Using panel-data methods, we exploit this variation to show that the age composition of the workforce has a large and statistically significant effect on cyclical ...
Report
Time consistent monetary policy with endogenous price rigidity
I characterize time consistent equilibrium in an economy with price rigidity and an optimizing> monetary authority operating under discretion. Firms have the option to increase their frequency> of price change, at a cost, in response to higher inflation. Previous studies, which assume a constant> degree of price rigidity across inflation regimes, find two time consistent equilibria ? one with low> inflation, the other with high inflation. In contrast, when price rigidity is endogenous, the high> inflation equilibrium ceases to exist. Hence, time consistent equilibrium is unique. This result> ...