Search Results
Journal Article
Happy hour economics, or how an increase in demand can produce a decrease in price
The standard supply-and-demand model is typically an economist?s most important analytical tool, but in some situations it does not capture the features of interest. For example, during ?happy hour,? bars near workplaces sell a higher-than-usual quantity of alcoholic beverages at a lower-than-usual price. This practice makes little sense using the standard competitive model, but an alternative model?the model of monopolistic competition?provides the needed analytic framework. ; This article provides a step-by-step construction of a monopolistic competition model in which many firms each ...
Working Paper
Are Supply Networks Efficiently Resilient?
We show that supply networks are inefficiently, and insufficiently, resilient. Upstream firms can expand their production capacity to hedge againstsupply and demand shocks. But the social benefits of such investments arenot internalized due to market power and market incompleteness. Upstreamfirms under-invest in capacity and resilience, passing-on the costs to downstreamfirms, and drive trade excessively towards the spot markets. There isa wedge between the market solution and a constrained optimal benchmark,which persists even without rare and large shocks. Policies designed to incentivize ...
Working Paper
Sticky prices, coordination and enforcement
Price-setting models with monopolistic competition and costs of changing prices exhibit coordination failure: In response to a monetary policy shock, individual agents lack incentives to change prices even when it would be Pareto-improving if all agents did so. The potential welfare gains are in part evaluated relative to a benchmark equilibrium of perfect, costless coordination; in practice, since agents will still have incentives to deviate from the benchmark equilibrium, coordination is likely to require enforcement. We consider an alternative benchmark equilibrium in which coordination is ...
Working Paper
Production interdependence and welfare
The international welfare effects of a country?s monetary policy shocks have been controversial in the literature. While a unilateral monetary expansion increases the production efficiency in each country, it affects terms of trade in favor of one country against another depending on the currencies of price setting. We show that the increased world production interdependence magnifies the efficiency-improvement effect while dampening the terms-of-trade effect. As a consequence, a unilateral monetary expansion can be mutually beneficial and thus Pareto improving regardless of in which currency ...
Working Paper
Time Use and the Efficiency of Heterogeneous Markups
What are the welfare implications of markup heterogeneity across firms? In standard monopolistic competition models, such heterogeneity implies inefficiency even in the presence of free entry. We enrich the standard model with heterogeneous firms so that preferences are non-separable in off-market time and market consumption and show that this changes the welfare implications of markup heterogeneity. In this context, homogeneity of markups is neither necessary nor sufficient for efficiency. The marginal cost of the marginal firm is weakly inefficiently high when off-market time and market ...
Working Paper
Effects of Credit Supply on Unemployment and Inequality
The Great Recession, which was preceded by the financial crisis, resulted in higher unemployment and inequality. We propose a simple model where firms producing varieties face labor-market frictions and credit constraints. In the model, tighter credit leads to lower output, lower number of vacancies, and higher directed-search unemployment. Where workers are more productive at higher levels of firm output, lower credit supply increases firm capital intensity, raises inequality by increasing the rental of capital relative to the wage, and has an ambiguous effect on welfare. At initial high ...
Working Paper
Vertical production and trade interdependence and welfare
The authors study international transmissions and welfare implications of monetary shocks in a two-country world with multiple stages of production and multiple border-crossings of intermediate goods. This empirically relevant feature is important, as it has opposite implications for two external spillover effects of a unilateral monetary expansion. If all production and trade are assumed to occur in a single stage, the conflict-of-interest terms-of-trade effect tends to dominate the common-interest efficiency-improvement effect for reasonable parameter values, so that the international ...
Working Paper
Multiple stages of processing and the quantity anomaly in international business cycle models
We construct a two-country DSGE model with multiple stages of processing and local currency staggered price-setting to study cross-country quantity correlations driven by monetary shocks. The model embodies a mechanism that propagates a monetary surprise in the home country to lower the foreign price level while restraining the home price level from rising too quickly; and, it does so through reducing material costs in terms of the foreign currency unit while dampening the upward movements in the costs in terms of the home currency unit, both in absolute terms and relative to the costs of ...