Search Results
Working Paper
Model uncertainty and intertemporal tax smoothing
In this paper we examine how model uncertainty due to the preference for robustness (RB) affects optimal taxation and debt structure in the Barro tax-smoothing model (1979). We first study how the government spending shocks are absorbed in the short run by varying taxes or through debt under RB. Furthermore, we show that introducing RB can improve the model?s predictions by generating (i) the observed relative volatility of the changes in tax rates to government spending and (ii) the observed comovement between government deficits and spending, and (iii) more consistent behavior of government ...
Working Paper
Production and Inventory Dynamics under Ambiguity Aversion
We propose a production-cost smoothing model with Knightian uncertainty due to ambiguity aversion to study the joint behavior of production, inventories, and sales. Our model can explain four facts that previous studies find difficult to account for simultaneously: (i) the high volatility of production relative to sales, (ii) the low ratio of inventory-investment volatility to sales volatility, (iii) the positive correlation between sales and inventories, and (iv) the negative correlation between the inventory-to-sales ratio and sales. We find that the stock-out avoidance motive (Kahn 1987) ...
Working Paper
Growth and Welfare Gains from Financial Integration Under Model Uncertainty
We build a robustness (RB) version of the Obstfeld (1994) model to study the effects of financial integration on growth and welfare. Our model can account for the empirically observed heterogeneity in the relationship between growth and volatility for different countries. The calibrated model shows that financial integration leads to significantly larger gains in growth and welfare for advanced countries than developing countries, with some developing countries experiencing growth and welfare loss in financial integration. Our analytical solutions help uncover the key mechanisms by which this ...
Working Paper
Human Capital Dynamics and the U.S. Labor Market
The high U.S. unemployment rate after the Great Recession is usually considered to be a result of changes in factors influencing either the demand side or the supply side of the labor market. However, no matter what factors have caused the changes in the unemployment rate, these factors should have influenced workers' and firms' decisions. Therefore, it is important to take into account workers' endogenous responses to changes in various factors when seeking to understand how these factors affect the unemployment rate. To address this issue, we estimate a Mortensen-Pissarides style of ...
Journal Article
Spending Patterns and Cost of Living for Younger versus Older Households
Older households have faced slightly higher inflation rates than younger households over the past 40 years, though this gap is narrowing.
Working Paper
Robust control, informational frictions, and international consumption correlations
In this paper we examine the effects of two types of information imperfections, robustness (RB) and nite information-processing capacity (called rational inattention or RI), on international consumption correlations in an otherwise standard small open economy model. We show that in the presence of capital mobility in nancial markets, RB lowers the international consumption correlations by generating heterogeneous responses of consumption to income shocks across countries facing different macroeconomic uncertainty. However, the calibrated RB model cannot explain the observed consumption ...
Journal Article
How Did the 2018–19 U.S. Tariff Hikes Influence Household Spending?
Jun Nie, Alice von Ende-Becker, and Shu-Kuei X. Yang construct a tariff intensity measure to assess the uneven effects of the 2018–19 tariff increases across different types of households. They find that low-income households were more exposed to tariff increases than high-income households; younger households were more exposed than older households; Black households were more exposed than white or Asian households; and Hispanic households were more exposed than non-Hispanic households. In addition, they find that the tariff increases led to only a small shift in household spending from ...
Journal Article
Gauging the Strength of Chinese GDP Growth
Jun Nie constructs an alternative measure to evaluate the strength of Chinese GDP growth and identifies potential risks to China?s growth in the near term.
Journal Article
Implications of recent U.S. energy trends for trade forecasts
The development of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling has brought significant structural change to the energy sector, increasing energy production and decreasing net energy imports. Future changes in energy policy or technology could have even larger effects on energy exports and thus overall exports. As a result, distinguishing energy from non-energy components of trade becomes important for forecasts in both the near and longer term. Craig S. Hakkio and Jun Nie introduce models separating energy from the non-energy components of trade to examine how changes in energy production ...
Journal Article
How Has the Current Lockdown in China Affected the Global Supply Chain?
The recent lockdown in China is expected to exacerbate disruptions in the global supply chain. Using high-frequency data, I show that supply chain disruptions from the current lockdown are likely to be less severe than those from the lockdown in 2020. However, highly transmissible COVID-19 variants continue to present risks, and supply chain disruptions could intensify if the current lockdown is extended or applied to other regions of China.