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Author:Wen, Yi 

Working Paper
Durable good inventories and the volatility of production: explaining the less volatile U.S. economy

This paper provides a simple dynamic optimization model of durable goods inventories. Closed-form solutions are derived in a general equilibrium environment with imperfect information and serially correlated shocks. The model is then applied to scrutinize some popular conjectures regarding the causes of the volatility reduction of GDP since 1984.
Working Papers , Paper 2005-047

Working Paper
Speculative bubbles and financial crisis

Why are asset prices so much more volatile and so often detached from their fundamentals? Why does the burst of financial bubbles depress the real economy? This paper addresses these questions by constructing an infinite-horizon heterogeneous-agent general-equilibrium model with speculative bubbles. We show that agents are willing to invest in asset bubbles even though they have positive probability to burst. We prove that any storable goods, regardless of their intrinsic values, may give birth to bubbles with market prices far exceeding their fundamental values. We also show that perceived ...
Working Papers , Paper 2009-029

Working Paper
Saving and growth under borrowing constraints explaining the \"high saving rate\" puzzle

Empirical evidence suggests that fast-growing economies tend to have not only high saving rates but also low interest rates. This evidence is difficult to reconcile with standard explanations about the positive linkages between saving and growth. These explanations rely either on high saving to explain high growth or on high growth to explain high saving; but in either case, they must imply and depend on high interest rates to induce high saving rates. Hence, the real puzzle is why households would save excessively to finance firms? investment when the interest rate on their savings is so ...
Working Papers , Paper 2009-045

Working Paper
Liquidity demand and welfare in a heterogeneous-agent economy

This paper provides an analytically tractable general-equilibrium model of money demand with micro-foundations. The model is based on the incomplete-market model of Bewley (1980) where money serves as a store of value and provides liquidity to smooth consumption. The model is applied to study the effects of monetary policies. It is shown that heterogeneous liquidity demand can lead to sluggish movements in aggregate prices and positive responses from aggregate output to transitory money injections. However, permanent money growth can be extremely costly: With log utility function and an ...
Working Papers , Paper 2010-009

Working Paper
Measuring interest rates as determined by thrift and productivity

This paper investigates the behavior of short-term real and nominal rates of interest by combining consumption-based and production-based models into a single general equilibrium framework. Based on the theoretical nonlinear relationships that link interest rates to both the marginal rates of substitution and transformation in a monetary production economy, we develop an estimation and simulation procedure to generate historical time series of interest rates. We find that the predictions of interest rates based on a general equilibrium theory are partially consistent with US data.
Working Papers , Paper 2005-037

Journal Article
Relative Income Traps

Despite economic growth in the post-World War II period, few developing countries have been able to catch up to the income levels in the United States or other advanced economies. Such countries remain trapped at a relative low- or middle-income level. In this article, the authors redefine the concept of income traps as situations in which income levels relative to the United States remain constantly low and with no clear sign of convergence. This approach allows them to study the issue of economic convergence (or lack of it) directly. The authors describe evidence pointing to the existence ...
Review , Volume 98 , Issue 1 , Pages 41-60

Working Paper
Long and Plosser Meet Bewley and Lucas

We develop a N-sector business cycle network model a la Long and Plosser (1983), featuring heterogenous money demand a la Bewley (1980) and Lucas (1980). Despite incomplete markets and a well-defined distribution of real money balances across heterogeneous households, the enriched N-sector network model remains analytically tractable with closed-form solutions up to the aggregate level. Relying on the tractability, we establish several important results: (i) The economy's input-output network linkages become endogenously time-varying over the business cycle?thanks to the influence of the ...
Working Papers , Paper 2018-8

Working Paper
Time-Inconsistent Optimal Quantity of Debt

A key property of the Aiyagari-type heterogeneous-agent models is that the equilibrium interest rate of public debt lies below the time discount rate. This fundamental property, however, implies that the Ramsey planner's fiscal policy may be time-inconsistent because the forward-looking planner would have a dominate incentive to issue plenty of debt, such that all households are fully self-insured against idiosyncratic risk whenever the interest rate of government borrowing is lower than the household time discount rate. But such a full self-insurance allocation may be paradoxical because, to ...
Working Papers , Paper 2020-037

Journal Article
Oil price shocks and inflation risk

Oil price shocks appear to have only transitory effects on headline inflation and virtually no impact on measures of underlying trend inflation.
Economic Synopses

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 Papers , Paper 2013-011

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