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Working Paper
Financial intermediaries, markets, and growth.
We build a model in which financial intermediaries provide insurance to households against a liquidity shock. Households can also invest directly on a financial market if they pay a cost. In equilibrium, the ability of intermediaries to share risk is constrained by the market. This can be beneficial because intermediaries invest less in the productive technology when they provide more risk-sharing. Our model predicts that bank-oriented economies should grow slower than more market-oriented economies, which is consistent with some recent empirical evidence. We show that the mix of ...
Working Paper
Production interdependence and welfare
The international welfare effects of a country?s monetary policy shocks have been controversial in the literature. While a unilateral monetary expansion increases the production efficiency in each country, it affects terms of trade in favor of one country against another depending on the currencies of price setting. We show that the increased world production interdependence magnifies the efficiency-improvement effect while dampening the terms-of-trade effect. As a consequence, a unilateral monetary expansion can be mutually beneficial and thus Pareto improving regardless of in which currency ...
Working Paper
Why does the cyclical behavior of real wages change over time?
This paper seeks to understand the evolution of the cyclical behavior of U.S. real wage rates from the interwar period to the post World War II period using a dynamic general equilibrium model that emphasizes demand-driven business cycle fluctuations. In the model, changes in the cyclical behavior of real wages arise endogenously from the interactions between nominal wage and price rigidities and an evolving input-output structure.
Discussion Paper
Chain of production as a monetary propagation mechanism
This paper studies a general equilibrium model with multiple stages of production and asynchronized price setting that provides a new explanation for the observed persistent real effects of monetary shocks. The key feature of the model is a vertical chain-of-production structure. In this model, the effects of monetary shocks on price adjustment are gradually dampened via the interactions of firms through their input-output relations and the timing of their price decisions. The model predicts that prices adjust by a smaller amount and less rapidly at later stages than at earlier stages, which ...
Discussion Paper
Staggered contracts and business cycle persistence
Staggered price and staggered wage contracts are commonly viewed as similar mechanisms in generating persistent real effects of monetary shocks. In this paper, we distinguish the two mechanisms in a general equilibrium framework. We show that, although the dynamic price setting and the dynamic wage setting equations are alike, a key parameter governing persistence is linked to the underlying preferences and technologies in different ways. Under the staggered wage mechanism, an intertemporal smoothing incentive in labor supply creates a real rigidity that is absent under the staggered price ...
Working Paper
Implementing Arrow-Debreu equilibria by trading infinitely-lived securities
We show that Arrow-Debreu equilibria with countably additive prices in infinite-time economy under uncertainty can be implemented by trading infinitely-lived securities in complete sequential markets under two different portfolio feasibility constraints: wealth constraint, and essentially bounded portfolios. Sequential equilibria with no price bubbles implement Arrow-Debreu equilibria, while those with price bubbles implement Arrow-Debreu equilibria with transfers. Transfers are equal to price bubbles on initial portfolio holdings. Price bubbles arise in sequential equilibrium under the ...
Working Paper
Financial intermediaries, markets, and growth
In many models of financial intermediation, markets reduce welfare because they limit the amount of risk-sharing intermediaries can offer. In this paper we study a model in which markets also promote investment in a productive technology. A trade-off between risk sharing and growth arises endogenously. In the model, financial intermediaries provide insurance to households against a liquidity shock. Households can also invest directly on a financial market if they pay a cost. In equilibrium, the ability of intermediaries to share risk is constrained by the market. This can be beneficial ...
Working Paper
Specific factors meet intermediate inputs: implications for strategic complementarities and persistence.
A central challenge to monetary business-cycle theory is to find a solution to the problem of persistence and delay in the real effects of monetary shocks. Previous research has identified separately specific factors and intermediate inputs as two promising mechanisms for generating the persistence and delay in a staggered price-setting framework. Models based on either of these two mechanisms have also been used in the design of optimal monetary policy. ; By examining a staggered price model that features both specific factors and intermediate inputs, the author finds an offsetting ...
Working Paper
Vertical production and trade interdependence and welfare
The authors study international transmissions and welfare implications of monetary shocks in a two-country world with multiple stages of production and multiple border-crossings of intermediate goods. This empirically relevant feature is important, as it has opposite implications for two external spillover effects of a unilateral monetary expansion. If all production and trade are assumed to occur in a single stage, the conflict-of-interest terms-of-trade effect tends to dominate the common-interest efficiency-improvement effect for reasonable parameter values, so that the international ...
Working Paper
International real business cycles with endogenous markup variability
The aggregate impact of decisions made at the level of the individual firm has recently attracted a lot of attention in both the macro and trade literatures. We adapt the benchmark international real business cycle model to a game-theoretic environment to add a channel for the strategic interaction among domestic and foreign firms. We show how the sum of strategic pricing decisions made at the level of the individual firm can have significant effects on the volatility and cross country co-movement of GDP and its components. Specifically we show that the addition of this one channel for ...