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Discussion Paper
Macroeconomic implications of investment-specific technological change
A quantitative investigation of investment-specific technological change for the U.S. postwar period is undertaken, analyzing both long-term growth and business cycles within the same framework. The premise is that the introduction of new, more efficient capital goods is an important source of productivity change, and an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the more traditional Hicks-neutral form of technological progress. The balanced growth path for the model is characterized and calibrated to U.S. National Income and Product Account data. The long- and short-run U.S. data are ...
Discussion Paper
Custom versus fashion: path-dependence and limit cycles in a random matching game
A pairwise random matching game is considered to identify the social environments that give rise to the social custom and fashion cycles. The game, played by Conformists and Nonconformists, can generate a variety of socially stable behavior patterns. In the path-dependence case, Conformists set the social custom and Nonconformists revolt against it; what action becomes the custom is determined by history. In the limit cycle case, Nonconformists become fashion leaders and switch their actions periodically, while Conformists follow with delay. The outcome depends on the relative share of ...
Discussion Paper
The replacement problem
We construct a vintage capital model of economic growth in which the decision to replace old technologies with new ones is modeled explicitly. Depreciation in this environment is an economic, not a physical concept. We describe the balanced growth paths and the transitional dynamics of this economy. We illustrate the importance of vintage capital by analyzing the response of the economy to fiscal policies designed to stimulate investment in new technologies.
Discussion Paper
Alternative specifications for consumption and the estimation of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution
This paper documents several advantages associated with using state level consumption data to examine consumption behavior and especially to estimate the Intertemporal Elasticity of Substitution (IES). In contrast to the results of Hall (1988) and Campbell and Mankiw (1989), we provide substantial evidence indicating that the IES is significantly different from zero and probably close to one. Since the overidentifying restrictions of the standard Euler equation are generally rejected, we use these data to explore the nature of these rejections and evaluate an alternative specification of ...
Discussion Paper
Cyclical factor utilization
We introduce procyclical labor and capital utilization, as well as costs of rapidly increasing employment, into a business-cycle model. Plausible variations in factor utilization enable us to explain observed variability of real GNP with considerably smaller economy-wide disturbances. The costs of adjustment create very interesting and realistic lead and lag relationships: Employment does not peak until a full quarter after output; workweeks, effort, capital utilization, and productivity all sharply lead the business cycle.
Discussion Paper
Optimal welfare-to-work programs
A Welfare-to-Work (WTW) program is a mix of government expenditures on passive (unemployment insurance, social assistance) and active (job search monitoring, training, wage taxes/subsidies) labor market policies targeted to the unemployed. This paper provides a dynamic principal-agent framework suitable for analyzing the optimal sequence and duration of the different WTW policies, and the dynamic pattern of payments along the unemployment spell and of taxes/subsidies upon re-employment. First, we show that the optimal program endogenously generates an absorbing policy of last resort (that we ...
Discussion Paper
The efficiency and welfare effects of tax reform: are fewer tax brackets better than more?
Using the well-known dynamic fiscal policy framework pioneered by Auerbach and Kotlikoff, we examine the efficiency and welfare implications of shifting from a linear marginal tax rate structure to a discrete rate structure characterized by two regions of flat tax rates of 15 and 28 percent. For a wide range of parameter values, we find that there is no sequence of lump-sum transfers that the (model) government can feasibly implement to make the shift from the linear to the discrete structure Pareto-improving. We conclude that the worldwide trend toward replacing rate structures having many ...
Discussion Paper
Dynamics of the trade balance and the terms of trade: the J-curve revisited
We provide a new interpretation of the statistical relation between the trade balance and the terms of trade. This relation includes the J-curve, the tendency for trade balances to be negatively correlated with contemporaneous movements in the terms of trade, positively correlated with lagged movements. We document this property in international data and show that it arises, as well, in a two-country stochastic growth model. In the model trade dynamics result, in large part, from fluctuations in investment. A favorable productivity shock in the domestic economy leads to an increase in ...
Discussion Paper
Priors for macroeconomic time series and their application
This paper takes up Bayesian inference in a general trend stationary model for macroeconomic time series with independent Student-t disturbances. The model is linear in the data, but nonlinear in parameters. An informative but nonconjugate family of prior distributions for the parameters is introduced, indexed by a single parameter which can be readily elicited. The main technical contribution is the construction of posterior moments, densities, and odds ratios using a six-step Gibbs sampler. Mappings from the index parameter of the family of prior distribution to posterior moments, ...