Search Results
Working Paper
Bank Liquidity and Capital Regulation in General Equilibrium
We develop a nonlinear dynamic general equilibrium model with a banking sector and use it to study the macroeconomic impact of introducing a minimum liquidity standard for banks on top of existing capital adequacy requirements. The model generates a distribution of bank sizes arising from differences in banks' ability to generate revenue from loans and from occasionally binding capital and liquidity constraints. Under our baseline calibration, imposing a liquidity requirement would lead to a steady-state decrease of about 3 percent in the amount of loans made, an increase in banks' holdings ...
Working Paper
Optimal Dynamic Tax-Transfer Policies in Heterogeneous-Agents Economies
In the design of an optimal tax-transfer system, there are two complementary conventional wisdoms: the labor-efficiency argument and the debt-efficiency argument. The former emphasizes the trade-off between redistribution and distortions in the labor market, while the latter emphasizes the trade-off between gains from monopoly rents and distortions in the asset market. We use an analytically tractable infinite-horizon model with both ex-ante and ex-post heterogeneity to show that neither argument is complete in the design of the tax-transfer system. Instead, in Aiyagari-type models the ...
Working Paper
Mobility
This paper studies short-run wealth mobility in a heterogeneous agents, incomplete-markets model. Wealth mobility has a ?hump-shaped? relationship with the persistence of the stochastic process governing labor income: low when shocks are close to i.i.d. or close to a random walk, and higher in between. The standard incomplete markets framework features less wealth mobility than found in the PSID wealth supplements. We include features commonly used in the literature to capture wealth inequality and find that they do little to improve the model?s performance for wealth mobility. Finally, we ...
Working Paper
Credit, Bankruptcy, and Aggregate Fluctuations
We document the cyclical properties of unsecured consumer credit (procyclical and volatile) and of consumer bankruptcies (countercyclical and very volatile). Using a growth model with household heterogeneity in earnings and assets with access to unsecured credit (because of bankruptcy costs) and aggregate shocks, we show that the cyclical behavior of household earnings growth accounts for these properties, albeit not for the large volatility of credit. We ?nd that tilting household consumption towards goods that can be purchased on credit and a slight countercyclicality in the terms of access ...
Report
Spillovers and Spillbacks
We study international monetary policy spillovers and spillbacks in a tractable two-country Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model. Relative to Representative Agent (RANK) models, our framework introduces a precautionary-savings channel, as households in both countries face uninsurable income risk, and a real-income channel, as households have heterogeneous marginal propensities to consume (MPC). While both channels amplify the size of spillovers/spillbacks, only precautionary savings can change their sign relative to RANK. Spillovers are likely to be larger in economies with higher ...
Discussion Paper
Understanding Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian Models: Insights from a PRANK
In recent years there has been a lot of interest in the effect of income inequality (heterogeneity) on the economy, from both academics and policymakers. Researchers have developed Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) models that incorporate heterogeneity and uninsurable idiosyncratic risk into the New Keynesian models that have become a cornerstone of monetary policy analysis. This research has argued that heterogeneity and idiosyncratic risk change many features of New Keynesian models – the transmission of conventional monetary policy, the forward guidance puzzle, fiscal multipliers, ...
Report
Understanding HANK: insights from a PRANK
We show analytically that whether incomplete markets resolve New Keynesian ?paradoxes? depends primarily on the cyclicality of income risk, rather than marginal propensity to consume (MPC) heterogeneity. Incomplete markets reduce the effectiveness of forward guidance and multipliers in a liquidity trap only with procyclical risk. Countercyclical risk amplifies these ?puzzles.? Procyclical risk permits determinacy under a peg; countercyclical risk generates indeterminacy even under the Taylor principle. MPC heterogeneity leaves determinacy and paradoxes qualitatively unaffected, but can change ...
Working Paper
Uninsurable Income Risk and the Welfare Effects of Reducing Global Imbalances
We highlight the welfare effect of policies that balance global current accounts when households face uninsurable income risk and borrowing constraints. Subsidizing savings in debtor economies reduces current account imbalances and raises the welfare of almost all citizens by increasing world capital, raising wages, and improving insurance for low-wealth households. The same balancing of current accounts is achieved by taxing savings in lender economies; however, this policy hurts most households by reducing global capital. These results suggest that balancing global imbalances may be a ...
Working Paper
Optimal Ramsey Capital Income Taxation —A Reappraisal
This paper addresses a long-standing problem in the optimal Ramsey capital taxation literature. The tractability of our model enables us to solve the Ramsey problem analytically along the entire transitional path. We show that the conventional wisdom on Ramsey tax policy and its underlying intuition and rationales do not hold in our model and may thus be misrepresented in the literature. We uncover a critical trade off for the Ramsey planner between aggregate allocative efficiency in terms of the modified golden rule and individual allocative efficiency in terms of self-insurance. Facing the ...
Report
The cost of business cycles for unskilled workers
This paper reconsiders the cost of business cycles under incomplete markets. Primarily, we focus on the heterogeneity in the cost of business cycles among agents with different skill levels. Unskilled workers are subject to a much larger risk of unemployment during recessions than are skilled workers. Moreover, unskilled workers earn less income, which limits their ability to self-insure. We examine how this heterogeneity in unemployment risk and income translates into heterogeneity in the cost of business cycles. We set up a dynamic general equilibrium model with incomplete markets, in which ...