Search Results
Working Paper
Land-price dynamics and macroeconomic fluctuations
We argue that positive comovements between land prices and business investment are a driving force behind the broad impact of land-price dynamics on the macroeconomy. We develop an economic mechanism that captures the comovements by incorporating two key features into a DSGE model: we introduce land as a collateral asset in firms' credit constraints, and we identify a shock that drives most of the observed fluctuations in land prices. Our estimates imply that these two features combine to generate an empirically important mechanism that amplifies and propagates macroeconomic fluctuations ...
Working Paper
Inflation Disagreement Weakens the Power of Monetary Policy
We present empirical evidence that household inflation disagreement weakens the power of forward guidance and conventional monetary policy shocks. The attenuation effect is stronger when inflation forecasts are positively skewed and it is not driven by endogenous responses of inflation disagreement to contemporaneous shocks. These empirical observations can be rationalized by a model featuring heterogeneous beliefs about the central banks' inflation target. An agent who perceives higher future inflation also perceives a lower real interest rate and thus borrows more to finance consumption, ...
Working Paper
Liquidity Premia, Price-Rent Dynamics, and Business Cycles
n the U.S. economy during the past 25 years, house prices exhibit fluctuations considerably larger than house rents, and these large fluctuations tend to move together with business cycles. We build a simple theoretical model to characterize these observations by showing the tight connection between price-rent fluctuation and the liquidity constraint faced by productive firms. After developing economic intuition for this result, we estimate a medium-scale dynamic general equilibrium model to assess the empirical importance of the role the price-rent fluctuation plays in the business cycle. ...
Working Paper
Discount Shock, Price-Rent Dynamics, and the Business Cycle
The price-rent ratio in commercial real estate is highly volatile, and its variation comoves with the business cycle. To account for these two facts, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model that explicitly introduces a rental market and incorporates the liquidity constraint on an individual firm's production as a key ingredient. Our estimation identifies the discount shock as the most important factor in driving price-rent dynamics and linking the dynamics in the real estate market to those in the real economy. We illustrate the importance of the liquidity premium and endogenous total ...
Working Paper
Do credit constraints amplify macroeconomic fluctuations?
Previous studies on financial frictions have been unable to establish the empirical significance of credit constraints in macroeconomic fluctuations. This paper argues that the muted impact of credit constraints stems from the absence of a mechanism to explain the observed persistent comovements between housing prices and business investment. We develop such a mechanism by incorporating two key features into a DSGE model: we identify shocks that shift the demand for collateral assets and we allow productive agents to be credit-constrained. A combination of these two features enables our model ...
Working Paper
Interest-Rate Liberalization and Capital Misallocations
We study the consequences of interest-rate liberalization in a two-sector general equilibrium model of China. The model captures a key feature of China's distorted financial system: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have greater incentive to expand production and easier access to credit than private firms. In this second-best environment, interest-rate liberalization can improve capital allocations within each sector, but can also exacerbate misallocations across sectors. Under calibrated parameters, the liberalization policy can reduce aggregate productivity and welfare unless other policy ...
Working Paper
A Theory of Housing Demand Shocks
Housing demand shocks in standard macroeconomic models are a primary source of house price fluctuations, but those models have difficulties in generating the observed large volatility of house prices relative to rents. We provide a microeconomic foundation for the reduced-form housing demand shocks with a tractable heterogenous-agent framework. In our model with heterogeneous beliefs, an expansion of credit supply raises housing demand of optimistic buyers and boosts house prices without affecting rents. A credit supply shock also leads to a positive correlation between house trading volumes ...
Working Paper
Uncertainty and sentiment-driven equilibria
We construct a model to capture the Keynesian idea that production and employment decisions are based on expectations of aggregate demand driven by sentiments and that realized demand follows from the production and employment decisions of firms. We cast the Keynesian idea into a simple model with imperfect information about aggregate demand and we characterize the rational expectations equilibria of this model. We find that the equilibrium is not unique despite the absence of any non-convexities or strategic complementarity in the model. In addition to multiple fundamental equilibria, there ...
Working Paper
Financial development and long-run volatility trends
Countries with more developed financial markets tend to have significantly lower aggregate volatility. This relationship is also highly non-linear starting from a low level of financial development the reduction in aggregate volatility is far more significant with respect to financial deepening than when the financial market is more developed. We build a fully-edged heterogeneous-agent model with an endogenous financial market of private credit and debt to rationalize these stylized facts. We show how financial development that promotes better credit allocations under more relaxed borrowing ...
Working Paper
Hayashi meets Kiyotaki and Moore: a theory of capital adjustment costs
Firm-level investment is lumpy and volatile but aggregate investment is much smoother and highly serially correlated. These different patterns of investment behavior have been viewed as indicating convex adjustment costs at the aggregate level but non-convex adjustment costs at the firm level. This paper shows that financial frictions in the form of collateralized borrowing at the firm level (Kiyotaki and Moore, 1997) can give rise to convex adjustment costs at the aggregate level yet at the same time generate lumpiness in plant-level investment. In particular, our model can (i) derive ...