Search Results
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 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 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.
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 ...
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 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 ...
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.
Working Paper
The effectiveness of monetary policy: an assessment
When monetary policies are endogenous, the conventional VAR approach for detecting the effect of monetary policies is powerless. This paper proposes to test the implication of monetary policies along a different dimension. That implication is to exploit the policy induced exogeneity of endogenous variables that are the source of monetary non-neutrality. We illustrate the idea by constructing a new Keynesian sticky wage model with capital accumulation and then testing the implications of optimal monetary policies for nominal wages under both complete and incomplete information. Econometric ...
Working Paper
A Search-Based Neoclassical Model of Capital Reallocation
As a form of investment, the importance of capital reallocation between firms has been increasing over time, with the purchase of used capital accounting for 25% to 40% of firms total investment nowadays. Cross- firm reallocation of used capital also exhibits intriguing business-cycle properties, such as (i) the illiquidity of used capital is countercyclical (or the quantity of used capital reallocation across rms is procyclical), (ii) the prices of used capital are procyclical and more so than those of new capital goods, and (iii) the dispersion of firms' TFP or MPK (or the bene t of capital ...
Journal Article
Why do Chinese households save so much?