We identify international output and inflation uncertainty and analyze their impact on individual countries' macroeconomic performance. Output and inflation uncertainty on an international level is measured through the conditional variances of common factors in inflation and output growth, estimated from a bivariate dynamic factor model with GARCH errors. The impact of international and country-specific uncertainty is analyzed by including the conditional variances as regressors. We find increases in uncertainty during the first and second oil crisis, the 1980s and 1990s recessions as well as the recent Great Recession to be confined to the international level. The effect of international uncertainty results to be highly significant and unambiguously negative on countries' output growth and inflation rates whereas the impact of country-specific uncertainty is very mixed.

We add agency costs into a two-country, two-good international business-cycle model. In our model, changes in the relative price of investment arise endogenously. Despite the fact that technology shocks are uncorrelated across countries, the relative price of investment is positively correlated across countries in our model, much as it is in detrended U.S./Euro-area data. We also find that financial frictions tend to increase the volatility of the terms of trade and the international correlations of consumption, hours worked, output, and investment. We then compare this model to an alternative model that also includes risk shocks. We use credit spread data (for the United States) to calibrate the AR(1) process for risk shocks. We find that risk shocks are too small to significantly impact the model's dynamics.

In this paper, we consider the effects of population aging on a pay-as-you-go financed defined contributions pension scheme. We show that when retirement decisions are endogenous, aging increases the retirement age and the steady-state level of capital. The effect on pension payouts is in general ambiguous, except for the solution of full retirement, when this effect is unambiguously negative.

This paper develops a microfounded macroeconomic modeling framework to investigate the relationship between informality and the income distribution. We show that multiple equilibria may rise if credit markets are imperfect and that there is a nondivisible entry cost in the formal economy. The theoretical analysis demonstrates that in the steady state, low levels of inequality are negatively correlated with high informality; conversely, high inequality exacerbates informality. This finding supports the hypothesis of an optimal level of inequality that minimizes the informal economy relative to the impact of other levels of inequality. However, for ordinary income distributions, changes in the level of inequality have only a slight effect on the informality rate. We calibrate the model using data on the U.S. and Mexican economies to estimate the level of inequality that minimizes the informality rate. The self-employment rate emerges as the most relevant determinant of the informality rate.

This paper studies the effect of different types of child subsidies on the economic allocation and the cross-sectional fertility pattern. I construct a rich but tractable general equilibrium model with overlapping generations of heterogeneous individuals, two sectors of production and a government. I derive analytically how fertility choices are affected by changes in household resources and child subsidies and show the numerical results of two policy experiments. A subsidy on childcare favors the birth rates of educated, high-wage individuals. Parents work more so that the subsidy program is partly financed by a rise in labor earnings. In contrast, a lump-sum child allowance stimulates fertility of uneducated, low-wage parents the most. This policy has a larger effect on the average birth rate, but as parents perform most of the care themselves it comes at the expense of a lower supply of labor and a greater tax burden.

This paper uncovers a mechanism by which bubbles crowd in capital investment. If capital formation is initially depressed by a binding credit constraint, a bubble triggers a savings glut. Higher returns in a new bubbly equilibrium attract additional savings, which are channeled to expand investment at the extensive margin, leading to permanently higher capital, output, and wages. We demonstrate that crowding-in through this channel is a robust phenomenon that occurs along the entire time path.

We study liquidity effects and monetary policy in a model with fully flexible prices and explicit roles for money and financial intermediation. Banks hold some fractions of deposits and money injections as liquidity buffers. The higher the fraction kept as reserves, the less liquid the money is. Unexpected money injections raise output and lower nominal interest rates if and only if the newly injected money is more liquid than the initial money stocks. If banks hold no liquidity buffers, liquidity effects are eliminated. In an extended model with temporary shocks, we show that failure to withdraw state-contingent money injections does not make the stabilization policy neutral, though the economy may undergo higher short-run fluctuations than otherwise. Under this circumstance, the success of stabilization policy relies on unexpected money injections being more liquid than the initial money stock.

We argue that a random-coefficients representation of the classical Barro's model of unemployment dynamics can be used as a theoretical basis for a panel quantile autoregressive model of the unemployment rate. Estimating the latter with State-level data for the United States (1980–2010), we find that (i) unemployment persistence increases along quantiles of the conditional unemployment distribution; (ii) disregarding State-fixed effects implies an overestimation of unemployment persistence along unemployment quantiles; (iii) a macroeconomic shock changes not only the location but also the dispersion of the distribution of the State unemployment rates; (iv) a federal policy equally applied in each State can reduce unemployment inequality among States; (v) “hysteresis” and “natural rate” hypotheses can co-exist along quantiles of the unemployment distribution, with the former being not rejected at upper quantiles. In sum, while the standard approach to the estimation of unemployment persistence implicitly assumes that quantile parameter heterogeneity does not matter, we suggest that it does.

We consider a New-Keynesian model with financial and labor market frictions where firms borrowing is limited by the enforcement constraint. The wage is set in a bargaining process where the firm's shareholder and worker share the production surplus. As debt service is considered to be a part of production costs, firms borrow to reduce the surplus which allows to lower the wage. We study the model's response to financial shock under two Taylor-type interest rate rules: first one responds to inflation and borrowing, second one to inflation and unemployment. We have found that the second rule delivers better policy in terms of the welfare measure. Additionally, we show that the feedback on unemployment in this rule depends on the extent of workers' bargaining power.

Recent research has shown that forward-looking Taylor rules are subject to indeterminacy in New Keynesian models with capital and investment spending. This paper shows that adopting a forward-looking Wicksellian rule that responds to the price level, rather than to inflation, is one potential remedy for the indeterminacy problem. This result is shown to be robust to variations in both the labor supply elasticity and the degree of price stickiness, the inclusion of capital adjustments costs, and if output also enters into the interest-rate feedback rule. Finally, it is shown that the superiority of Wicksellian rules over Taylor rules is not only confined to forward-looking policy, but also extends to both backward-looking and contemporaneous-looking specifications of the monetary policy rule.

This paper builds a standard search model with flexible prices and wages, and extensive and intensive labor adjustments. Money is introduced into the model through a cash-in-advance constraint in which only consumption is cash constrained. The model reproduces labor-market dynamics under a productivity shock and/or a monetary shock. I can replicate the Beveridge and Phillips curves that are observed in the data, and do not need to rely on the New Keynesian model or real wage rigidity. I find that the nonexistence of an extensive margin and different money mechanisms, such as cash constraints on investment and money in the utility function, do not change the above replications. Furthermore, I can still replicate the Beveridge curve even without money or with rigid prices.