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Working Paper
Exchange Rates and Endogenous Productivity
Real exchange rates (RERs) display sizable uctuations not only over the business cycle, but also at lower frequencies, resulting in large and persistent swings over decades|facts that many business cycle models struggle to match. We propose an international macroeconomics model with endogenous productivity to rationalize these facts. In the model, endogenous growth amplifies stationary uctuations generating persistent productivity differences between countries that trigger low-frequency cycles in the RER. The estimated model effortlessly replicates the empirical spectrum, autocorrelation, and ...
Report
Transitional Dynamics in Aggregate Models of Innovative Investment
What quantitative lessons can we learn from models of endogenous technical change through innovative investments by firms for the impact of changes in the economic environment on the dynamics of aggregate productivity in the short, medium, and long run? We present a unifying model that nests a number of canonical models in the literature and characterize their positive implications for the transitional dynamics of aggregate productivity and their welfare implications in terms of two sufficient statistics. We review the current state of measurement of these two sufficient statistics and ...
Working Paper
Bounded Learning from Incumbent Firms
Social learning plays an important role in models of productivity dispersion and long-run growth. In economies with a continuum of producers and unbounded productivity distributions, social learning can sometimes leave long-run growth rates completely indeterminate. This paper modifies a model in which potential entrants attempt to imitate randomly selected incumbent firms by introducing an upper bound on how much entrants can learn from incumbents. When this upper bound is taken to infinity, a unique long-run growth rate emerges, even though the economy without upper bound has an unbounded ...
Working Paper
Permanent Primary Deficits, Idiosyncratic Long-Run Risk, and Growth
We consider an economy with perpetual youth and inelastic labor supply that grows endogenously. Consumers are subject to idiosyncratic capital accumulation risk and markets are incomplete. The government purchases consumption goods, makes transfers in the form of baby bonds, and it can use consumption and wealth taxes. The wealth distribution is given in closed form. When the intertemporal elasticity of substitution ɛ is equal to 1, the government can run a permanent primary deficit, up to a finite upper bound, if the coefficient of relative risk aversion is high enough and the factor share ...