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Working Paper
Housing externalities : evidence from spatially concentrated urban revitalization programs
Using data compiled from concentrated residential urban revitalization programs implemented in Richmond, VA, between 1999 and 2004, we study residential externalities. Specifically, we provide evidence that in neighborhoods targeted by the programs, sites that did not directly benefit from capital improvements nevertheless experienced considerable increases in land value relative to similar sites in a control neighborhood. Within the targeted neighborhoods, increases in land value are consistent with externalities that fall exponentially with distance. In particular, we estimate that housing ...
Journal Article
Sectoral disturbances and aggregate economic activity
In this article, we provide an overview of the key mechanisms by which sectoral disturbances affect aggregate economic activity. We describe how the distribution of sectoral shares influences each sector's contribution to the variation in aggregate output. We also illustrate different aspects of the effects of input-output linkages across sectors on the amplification and propagation of idiosyncratic sectoral shocks. In particular, we review and summarize key conditions, first articulated in Dupor (1999), under which movements in aggregate output are invariant to sectoral disturbances, even in ...
Briefing
Using Inventories to Help Explain Post-1984 Business Cycles
Real business cycle (RBC) models have been highly successful at explaining business cycles that occurred before 1984. But since then, shifts in comovements and relative volatilities of key economic aggregates have challenged their preeminence. One possible refinement of the standard RBC model is to include multiple stages of production. This extension allows researchers to use inventory data to estimate the discount rate that firms use to assess future income streams. The results indicate that variations in the discount rate reflect financial frictions that have become significant drivers of ...
Working Paper
Learning about informational rigidities from sectoral data and diffusion indices
This paper uses sectoral data to study survey-based diffusion indices designed to capture changes in the business cycle in real time. The empirical framework recognizes that when answering survey questions regarding their firm's output, respondents potentially rely on infrequently updated information. The analysis then suggests that their answers reflect considerable information lags, on the order of 16 months on average. Moreover, because information stickiness leads respondents to filter out noisy output fluctuations when answering surveys, it helps explain why diffusion indices ...
Working Paper
Rent seeking bureaucracies and oversight in a simple growth model
Following recent cross-country empirical work, research on public policy and growth has come to examine the impact of inefficient or corrupt bureaucracies. Most of this work has emphasized the interactions of bureaucracies with private markets. By contrast, this paper focuses on the relationship between rent-seeking bureaucracies and their political authority. We show that when oversight is relatively costly, as in many developing economies, the political authority exercises little monitoring of its agencies which reduces the effectiveness of productive government spending. Moreover, when the ...
Journal Article
The evolution of city population density in the United States
Journal Article
Efficient public investment in a model with transition dynamics
Briefing
Is stimulative fiscal policy more effective at the zero lower bound?
Several recent research efforts have found that stimulative fiscal policy ? government spending or tax cuts ? can have unusual effects when nominal interest rates are as low as they are today. In particular, some studies have found that the government spending "multiplier" can be much larger at the zero lower bound. Despite these results, some caution is due when interpreting the size of the fiscal multiplier.
Working Paper
Growth Effects of Progressive Taxation
Criticisms of endogenous growth models with flat rate taxes have highlighted two features that are not substantiated by the data. These models generally imply: (1) that economic growth must fall with the share of government expenditures in output across countries, and (2) that one-time shifts in marginal tax rates should instantaneously lead to similar shifts in output growth. In contrast, we show that allowing for heterogenous households and progressive taxes into otherwise conventional linear growth models radically changes these predictions. In particular, economic growth does not have to ...