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Working Paper
Privately optimal contracts and suboptimal outcomes in a model of agency costs
This paper derives the privately optimal lending contract in the celebrated financial accelerator model of Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999). The privately optimal contract includes indexation to the aggregate return on capital, household consumption, and the return to internal funds. Although privately optimal, this contract is not welfare maximizing as it leads to a sub-optimally high price of capital. The welfare cost of the privately optimal contract (when compared to the planner outcome) is significant. A menu of time-varying taxes and subsidies can decentralize the planner?s ...
Working Paper
The price puzzle and indeterminacy in an estimated DSGE model
We extend Lubik and Schorfheide's (2004) likelihood-based estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models under indeterminacy to encompass a sample period including both determinacy and indeterminacy by implementing the change-point methodology (Chib, 1998). The most striking finding about the indeterminacy regime, which is estimated to coincide with the Great Inflation of the 1970s, is that it exhibits the price puzzle, in that the inflation rate rises immediately and in a sustained manner following a positive interest rate shock. Thus, the price puzzle might have been a ...
Working Paper
An evaluation of the performance of an applied general equilibrium model of the Spanish economy
In 1985?86 the authors were members of a team that constructed a static applied general equilibrium model that was used to analyze the impact on the Spanish economy of the 1986 fiscal reform, which accompanied Spain?s entry into the European Community. This paper compares the results obtained to recently published data for 1985?87; we find that the model performed well in predicting the changes in relative prices and resource allocation that actually occurred, particularly if we incorporate exogenous shocks that affected the Spanish economy in 1986. We also analyze the sensitivity of the ...
Report
International business cycles with endogenous incomplete markets
Backus, Kehoe and Kydland (1992), Baxter and Crucini (1995) and Stockman and Tesar (1995) find two major discrepancies between standard international business cycle models with complete markets and the data: In the models, cross-country correlations are much higher for consumption than for output, while in the data the opposite is true; and cross-country correlations of employment and investment are negative, while in the data they are positive. This paper introduces a friction into a standard model that helps resolve these anomalies. The friction is that international loans are imperfectly ...
Report
On the equilibrium concept for overlapping generations organizations
A necessary feature for equilibrium is that beliefs about the behavior of other agents are rational. We argue that in stationary OLG environments this implies that any future generation in the same situation as the initial generation must do as well as the initial generation did in that situation. We conclude that the existing equilibrium concepts in the literature do not satisfy this condition. We then propose an alternative equilibrium concept, organizational equilibrium, that satisfies this condition. We show that equilibrium exists, it is unique, and it improves over autarky without ...
Working Paper
Neighborhood dynamics and the distribution of opportunity
This paper uses an overlapping-generations dynamic general equilibrium model of residential sorting and intergenerational human capital accumulation to investigate effects of neighborhood externalities. In the model, households choose where to live and how much to invest toward the production of their child?s human capital. The return on the parent?s investment is determined in part by the child?s ability and in part by an externality from the average human capital in their neighborhood. We use the model to test a prominent hypothesis about the concentration of poverty within ...
Report
The existence of rational expectations equilibrium: a retrospective
This paper provides a selective review of theoretical research on the consistency of rational expectations equilibrium and its properties in microeconomic models. The general equilibrium framework is emphasized throughout the paper. After defining rational expectations equilibrium for a pure exchange economy, the paper presents a simple counterexample to illustrate that rational expectations equilibria need not exist. Results are summarized for the generic existence of fully revealing rational expectations equilibria in smooth economies satisfying additional dimensionality assumptions. Then ...
Report
Dynamic equilibrium economies: a framework for comparing models and data
We propose a constructive, multivariate framework for assessing agreement between (generally misspecified) dynamic equilibrium models and data, a framework which enables a complete second-order comparison of the dynamic properties of models and data. We use bootstrap algorithms to evaluate the significance of deviations between models and data, and we use goodness-of-fit criteria to produce estimators that optimize economically relevant loss functions. We provide a detailed illustrative application to modeling the U.S. cattle cycle.