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Working Paper
What about Japan?
As a result of the BoJ's large-scale asset purchases, the consolidated Japanese government borrows mostly at the floating rate from households and invests in longer-duration risky assets to earn an extra 3% of GDP. We quantify the impact of Japan's low-rate policies on its government and households. Because of the duration mismatch on the government balance sheet, the government's fiscal space expands when real rates decline, allowing the government to keep its promises to older Japanese households. A typical younger Japanese household does not have enough duration in its portfolio to ...
Working Paper
Reassessing aggregate returns to scale with standard theory and measurement
Constant returns to scale is a central construct of neoclassical theory. Previous studies argued that one must adopt a specification of the production function with substantial unobserved service variation to reconcile constant returns with the data. Some economists have argued that this finding has not resolved the size of returns to scale, since factor service variation is unobserved, and there is no generally accepted theory to guide specification of this alternative framework. In this paper we show that the stochastic version of the neoclassical growth model delivers an orthogonality ...
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Valuation equilibria with clubs
This paper considers model worlds in which there is a continuum of individuals who form finite-sized associations to undertake joint activities. We show how, through a suitable choice of commodity space, restrictions on the composition of feasible groups can be incorporated into the specification of the consumption and production sets of the economy. We also show that if there are a finite number of types, then the classical results from the competitive analysis of convex finite-agent economies can be reinterpreted to apply.
Working Paper
What about Japan?
As a result of the BoJ's large-scale asset purchases, the consolidated Japanese government borrows mostly at the floating rate from households and invests in longer-duration risky assets to earn an extra 3% of GDP. We quantify the impact of Japan's low-rate policies on its government and households. Because of the duration mismatch on the government balance sheet, the government's fiscal space expands when real rates decline, allowing the government to keep its promises to older Japanese households. A typical younger Japanese household does not have enough duration in its portfolio to ...
Report
Dynamic games with hidden actions and hidden states
We consider a class of dynamic games in which each player?s actions are unobservable to the other players and each player?s actions can influence a state variable that is unobservable to the other players. We develop an algorithm that solves for the subset of sequential equilibria in which equilibrium strategies depend on private information only through the privately observed state.
Working Paper
Why doesn’t technology flow from rich to poor countries?
What is the role of a country?s financial system in determining technology adoption? To examine this, a dynamic contract model is embedded into a general equilibrium setting with competitive intermediation. The terms of finance are dictated by an intermediary?s ability to monitor and control a firm?s cash flow, in conjunction with the structure of the technology that the firm adopts. It is not always profitable to finance promising technologies. A quantitative illustration is presented where financial frictions induce entrepreneurs in India and Mexico to adopt less-promising ventures than in ...
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Deflation and the international Great Depression: a productivity puzzle
This paper presents a dynamic, stochastic general equilibrium study of the causes of the international Great Depression. We use a fully articulated model to assess the relative contributions of deflation/monetary shocks, which are the most commonly cited shocks for the Depression, and productivity shocks. We find that productivity is the dominant shock, accounting for about 2/3 of the Depression, with the monetary shock accounting for about 1/3. The main reason deflation doesn't account for more of the Depression is because there is no systematic relationship between deflation and output ...
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Re-examining the contributions of money and banking shocks to the U.S. Great Depression
This paper quantitatively evaluates the hypothesis that deflation can account for much of the Great Depression (1929?33). We examine two popular explanations of the Depression: (1) The ?high wage? story, according to which deflation, combined with imperfectly flexible wages, raised real wages and reduced employment and output. (2) The ?bank failure? story, according to which deflationary money shocks contributed to bank failures and to a reduction in the efficiency of financial intermediation, which in turn reduced lending and output. We evaluate these stories using general equilibrium ...
Working Paper
Finite memory and imperfect monitoring
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Efficient allocations with hidden income and hidden storage
We consider an environment in which individuals receive income shocks that are unobservable to others and can privately store resources. We provide a simple characterization of the efficient allocation in cases in which the rate of return on storage is sufficiently high or, alternatively, in which the worst possible outcome is sufficiently dire. We show that, unlike in environments without unobservable storage, the symmetric efficient allocation is decentralizable through a competitive asset market in which individuals trade risk-free bonds among themselves.