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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 ...
Working Paper
Low Risk Sharing with Many Assets
Classical contributions in international macroeconomics rely on goods-market mechanisms to reconcile the cyclicality of real exchange rates when financial markets are incomplete. However, cross-border trade in one domestic and one foreign-currency-denominated risk-free asset prohibits these mechanisms from breaking the pattern consistent with complete markets. In this paper, we characterize how goods markets drive exchange rate cyclicality, taking into account trade in risk-free and/or risky assets. We show that goods-market mechanisms come back into play, even when there is cross-border ...
Working Paper
The Ramsey Steady-State Conundrum in Heterogeneous-Agent Economies
In infinite horizon, heterogeneous-agent and incomplete-market models, the existence of an interior Ramsey steady state is often assumed instead of proven. This paper makes two fundamental contributions: (i) We prove that the interior Ramsey steady state assumed by Aiyagari (1995) does not exist in the standard Aiyagari model. Specifically, a steady state featuring the modified golden rule and a positive capital tax is feasible but not optimal. (ii) We design a modified, analytically tractable version of the standard Aiyagari model to unveil the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the ...
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 ...
Report
Optimal Monetary Policy According to HANK
We study optimal monetary policy in a heterogeneous agent new Keynesian economy. A utilitarian planner seeks to reduce consumption inequality, in addition to stabilizing output gaps and inflation. The planner does so both by reducing income risk faced by households, and by reducing the pass-through from income to consumption risk, trading off the benefits of lower inequality against productive inefficiency and higher inflation. When income risk is countercyclical, policy curtails the fall in output in recessions to mitigate the increase in inequality. We uncover a new form of time ...
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
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
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
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 ...