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Working Paper
The great housing boom of China
China's housing prices have been growing nearly twice as fast as national income in the past decade despite (1) a phenomenal rate of return to capital and (2) an alarmingly high vacancy rate. This paper interprets such a prolonged paradoxical housing boom as a rational bubble that emerges naturally from China's large-scale economic transition, featuring an exceptionally high rate of return to capital driven by massive resource reallocation. Because such primarily resource-reallocation-driven high capital returns are not sustainable in the long run, expectations of high future demand for ...
Working Paper
Comment on Eggertsson, \"What fiscal policy is effective at zero interest rates?\"
Gauti B. Eggertsson's paper (published in NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2010) represents an important contribution to the analysis of fiscal policy in the New Keynesian model when the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate is binding. The paper accomplishes a great deal. It analyzes two types of taxes on capital and labor, the investment tax credit, a sales tax, and two types of government spending. It deserves to be an important reference on fiscal policy in a binding zero lower bound. In my discussion, I focus on the subset of Eggertsson's results that initially surprised me and that I ...
Working Paper
Moral hazard, investment, and firm dynamics
We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. Owners of firms delegate investment decisions to managers, whose consumption and investment decisions are private information. We solve the optimal contracts and characterize the implied general equilibrium. Our calibrated model has implications on the cross-sectional distribution and time-series dynamics of firms' investment, managers' compensation, and dividend payout policies. Risk sharing requires that managers' equity shares decrease with firm sizes. That, in turn, implies it is harder to prevent private benefit in ...
Working Paper
Monetary policy and stock market booms
Historical data and model simulations support the following conclusion: Inflation is low during stock market booms, so an interest rate rule that is too narrowly focused on inflation destabilizes asset markets and the broader economy. Adjustments to the interest rate rule can remove this source of welfare-reducing instability. For example, allowing an independent role for credit growth (beyond its role in constructing the inflation forecast) would reduce the volatility of output and asset prices.
Working Paper
Non-linear effects of taxation on growth
We study a model in which the effects of taxation on growth are highly non-linear. Marginal increases in tax rates have a small growth impact when tax rates are low or moderate. When tax rates are high, further tax hikes have a large, negative impact on growth performance. We argue that this non-linearity is consistent with the empirical evidence on the effect of taxation and other disincentives to investment and innovation on economic growth.
Working Paper
Understanding booms and busts in housing markets
Some booms in housing prices are followed by busts. Others are not. In either case it is difficult to find observable fundamentals that are correlated with price movements. We develop a model consistent with these observations. Real estate agents have heterogeneous expectations about long-run fundamentals but change their views because of "social dynamics." Agents meet randomly with one another. Those with tighter priors are more likely to convert others to their beliefs. The model generates a "fad": The fraction of the population with a particular view rises and then falls. Depending on ...
Working Paper
Causes and consequences of the oil shock of 2007–08
This paper explores similarities and differences between the run-up of oil prices in 2007??08 and earlier oil price shocks, looking at what caused the price increase and what effects it had on the economy. Whereas historical oil price shocks were primarily caused by physical disruptions of supply, the price run-up of 2007??08 was caused by strong demand confronting stagnating world production. Although the causes were different, the consequences for the economy appear to have been very similar to those observed in earlier episodes, with significant effects on overall consumption spending and ...
Working Paper
Liquidity needs in economies with interconnected financial obligations
A model is developed in which firms in a financial system have to settle their debts to each other by using a liquid asset (or money). The question studied is how many firms must have access to this asset from outside the financial system to make sure that all debts within the system are settled. The main result is that these liquidity needs are larger when these firms are more interconnected through their debts, that is, when they borrow from and lend to more firms. Two pecuniary externalities are discussed. One is the result of paying one creditor first rather than another. The second ...
Working Paper
Trading down and the business cycle
The authors document two facts: First, during recessions consumers trade down in the quality of the goods and services they consume. Second, the production of low-quality goods is less labor intensive than that of high-quality goods. Therefore, when households trade down, labor demand falls, increasing the severity of recessions. The authors find that the trading-down phenomenon accounts for a substantial fraction of the fall in U.S. employment in the recent recession. They study two business cycle models that embed quality choice and find that the presence of quality choice magnifies the ...
Working Paper
Optimal unemployment insurance and cyclical fluctuations
The authors study the design of optimal unemployment insurance in an environment with moral hazard and cyclical fluctuations. The optimal unemployment insurance contract balances the insurance motive to provide consumption for the unemployed with the provision of incentives to search for a job. This balance is affected by aggregate conditions, as recessions are characterized by reductions in job finding rates. We show how benefits should vary with aggregate conditions in an optimal contract. In a special case of the model, the optimal contract can be solved in closed form. We show how this ...