This paper investigates the effects of monetary policy on long-run economic growth via different cash-in-advance (CIA) constraints on R&D in a Schumpeterian growth model with vertical and horizontal innovations. The relationship between inflation and growth is contingent on the relative extents of CIA constraints and diminishing returns to two types of innovation. This model can generate a mixed (monotonic or non-monotonic) relationship between inflation and growth, given that the relative strength of monetary effects on growth between different CIA constraints and that of R&D-labor-reallocation effects between different diminishing returns vary with the nominal interest rate. In the empirically relevant case where horizontal R&D is subject to larger diminishing returns than vertical R&D, inflation and growth can exhibit an inverted-U relationship when the CIA constraint on horizontal R&D is sufficiently larger than that on vertical R&D. Finally, we calibrate the model to the US economy and find that the growth-maximizing rate of inflation is around 2.4%, which is consistent with the recent empirical estimates.

This study examines the expectational stability of rational expectations equilibria (REE) under alternative Taylor rules when trend inflation is nonzero. We find that when trend inflation is high, the REE is likely to be expectationally unstable. This result holds true regardless of the nature of the data (such as contemporaneous, forecast, or lagged data) introduced in the Taylor rule. Our results suggest that high macroeconomic volatility during the period of high trend inflation can be explained well by introducing the concept of expectational stability.

We aim at establishing whether the institutional adoption of inflation targeting has changed the conduct of monetary policy. To do so, we test the hypothesis of inflation targeting translating into a stronger response to inflation in a Taylor rule with three alternative econometric models: a structural break model, a time-varying parameter model with stochastic volatility, and a Markov-switching VAR model. We conclude that inflation targeting has not led to a stronger response to inflation in the reaction function of the monetary authority. This result suggests that inflation targeting being meant to anchor inflation expectations through enhanced credibility and accountability, it may enable a central bank to stabilize inflation without pursuing aggressive action toward inflation variations.

We study labor-income and consumption taxation in an overlapping-generations model featuring endogenous growth due to interfirm investment externalities. Consumption, saving, and labor supply display life-cycle features because mortality and labor productivity are age-dependent and because annuity markets may be imperfect. The government's method of revenue recycling critically affects the growth consequences of taxation. Purely consumptive government spending has a negative impact on growth. Redistribution of tax revenue from dissavers to savers may lead to an increase in growth due to beneficial intergenerational transfer effects.

We examine the determinants of income mobility and inequality in a Ramsey model with elastic labor supply and heterogeneous wealth and ability. Both agents with lower wealth and those with greater ability tend to supply more labor, implying that labor supply decisions may have an equalizing or unequalizing effect depending on the relative importance of the two sources of heterogeneity. Moreover, these decisions are central to the extent of mobility observed in an economy. The relationship between mobility and inequality is complex. For example, a reduction in the interest rate and an increase in the wage rate reduce capital income inequality and allow upward mobility of the ability-rich. However, the increase in the labor supply of high-ability agents in response to higher wages raises earnings dispersion and thus has an offsetting effect. As a result, high mobility can be associated with an increase or a decrease in overall income inequality.

A quantitative framework of firm dynamics is developed where the size of the informal sector is determined by financial constraints and the burden of taxation. Improving access to credit for formal sector firms increases aggregate total factor productivity and output while reducing the size of the informal sector. Introducing size-dependent taxes reduces the gains from financial development as they incentivize firms to produce at a relatively limited scale. The aggregate effects of eliminating formal sector registration costs are positive but modest relative to previous theoretical models and the gains generated by financial development, and consistent with empirical evidence based on micro-level data.

We systematically evaluate how to translate a Calvo wage duration into an implied Rotemberg wage adjustment cost parameter in medium-scale New Keynesian DSGE models by making use of the well-known equivalence of the two setups at first order. We consider a wide range of felicity functions and show that the assumed household insurance scheme and the presence of labor taxation greatly matter for this mapping, giving rise to differences of up to one order of magnitude. Our results account for the inclusion of wage indexing, habit formation in consumption, and the presence of fixed costs in production. We also investigate the conditional and unconditional welfare implications of the wage-setting schemes under efficient and distorted steady states.

This paper investigates the impact of the desire to keep up with the Joneses (KUJ) on economic growth and optimal tax policy in a continuous-time, overlapping-generations model with AK technology and exogenous, gradual retirement. Due to the desire to KUJ, the propensity to consume out of total wealth rises (declines), and the balanced growth rate declines (increases), when the households' individual total (physical and human) wealth is increasing (decreasing) with age. The rate of retirement determines whether or not a household's total wealth is increasing with age. If total wealth is increasing (decreasing) with age, an optimal allocation is decentralized by an intergenerationally progressive (regressive) lump-sum tax system. The desire to KUJ strengthens the intergenerational regressivity (progressivity) of the optimal tax system. The optimal tax implications of the desire to KUJ are a key finding of this paper.

This paper provides a unified approach to characterizing the relation between factor substitution and economic growth in different one-sector growth models (namely, the Solow, Ramsey, and Diamond models). Our main finding is that if better factor substitution raises savings in the steady state, then a higher per capita income results. There are two channels by which factor substitution affects savings: the positive efficiency effect via income and the ambiguous distribution effect via factor income shares. If the efficiency effect dominates, then a higher elasticity of substitution leads to a higher level of per capita steady-state income. In transition, factor substitution affects the rate of convergence both directly and through the equilibrium profit share. The former arises from diminishing marginal productivity of capital whereas the latter reflects its relative scarcity. Depending on the interaction of these effects, the net outcomes are characterized.

We analyze the impact of increasing longevity on technological progress within an overlapping generations research and development (R&D)-based growth framework and test the model's implication on Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data from 1960 to 2011. The central hypothesis is that—by raising the incentives of households to invest in physical capital and in R&D—decreasing mortality positively affects technological progress and productivity growth. The empirical results confirm the theoretical prediction. This implies that the demographic changes we observed in industrialized economies over the last decades were not detrimental to economic prosperity, at least as far as technological progress and productivity growth are concerned.

We construct a unified overlapping-generations framework of equilibrium growth that includes the Blanchard “perpetual youth” model, the Samuelson model, and the infinitely lived–agent model as limit specifications for a “realistic” two-parameter survivorship function. We assess how the limit specifications compare with the general survival function, and analyze how exogenous changes in demographic conditions affect equilibrium growth and savings rates. Predicted effects are consistent with some cross-country correlations between demographic conditions and growth rates.

This paper considers a correlated unobserved-components model for output, employment, and hours in order to disentangle the causes for the last three jobless recoveries. The composition of the structural shocks during recessions and the periods immediately following recessions has changed, as have the responses of employment and hours to those shocks. Recessions before 1984 were followed by recoveries driven by positive permanent shocks to output, whereas post-1984 recessions were followed by weak recoveries in demand. Employment is more sensitive to demand shocks post-1984, leading to weak recoveries in employment. In addition, hours and employment were complements before 1984, but are treated as substitutes after 1984. Much of the initial decrease in demand is now absorbed on the intensive margin.

In this paper I consider the relation between gross output– and value added–based total factor productivity (TFP) measures. It appears that, without any (micro-)economic theory being required, a conditional relationship between TFP indices can be derived, in which the Domar factor plays an important role. At the same time it turns out that gross output– and value added–based TFP indicators (difference-type measures) always coincide. In the Divisia index framework and maintaining the classical assumptions (profit maximization and a production technology that exhibits globally constant returns to scale), it appears that both TFP indices measure technological change, albeit in a dual way. In establishing this result, no separability assumptions are involved. Both indices are in general path-dependent. Path independence of the gross output–based TFP index requires that the technology exhibit Hicks input neutrality, whereas path independence of the value added–based TFP index requires Hicks value-added neutrality. These two concepts of neutrality are, however, not dual.

In structural VARs, unexpected monetary tightening often leads to the price puzzle, a counterintuitive increase in inflation in the impulse response function. The identification of impulse responses requires at least a minimal set of structural assumptions, and models exhibiting the price puzzle typically use standard assumptions focusing mainly on relationships among contemporaneous disturbances. This note uses a well-established stylized fact, the long lags of monetary policy, to motivate a simple additional identifying assumption. The assumption eliminates a single term in one equation of the reduced form, and with it the price puzzle.

This paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from those of noncrisis business cycle fluctuations. We employ Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) to gather evidence about the hypothesis on a long annual U.S. sample running from 1890 to 2010. The sample covers several episodes useful for understanding U.S. economic and financial history, which generate variation in the data that aids in identifying credit supply and demand shocks. We identify these shocks within MS-BVARs by tying credit supply and demand movements to inside money and its intertemporal price. The model space is limited to stochastic volatility (SV) in the errors of the MS-BVARs. Of the 15 MS-BVARs estimated, the data favor a MS-BVAR in which economic and financial crises and noncrisis business cycle regimes recur throughout the long annual sample. The best-fitting MS-BVAR also isolates SV regimes in which shocks to inside money dominate aggregate fluctuations.

This paper addresses the problem of multiple equilibria in a model of time-consistent monetary policy. It suggests that this problem originates in the assumption that agents have rational expectations and proposes several alternative restrictions on expectations that allow the monetary authority to build credibility for a disinflationary policy by demonstrating that it will stick to that policy even if it imposes short-run costs on the economy. Starting with these restrictions, the paper derives conditions that guarantee the uniqueness of the model's steady state; monetary policy in this unique steady state involves the constant deflation advocated by Milton Friedman.

A (jump) Markov process (generalized birth-and-death process) is used to model interactions of a large number of agents subject to field-type externalities. Transition rates are (nonlinear) functions of the composition of the population of agents classified by the choices they make. The model state randomly moves from one equilibrium to another, and exhibits asymmetrical oscillations (business cycles). It is shown that the processes can have several locally stable equilibria, depending on the degree of uncertainty associated with consequences of alternative choices. There is a positive probability of transition between any pair of such basins of attraction, and mean first-passage times between equilibria can be different when different pairs of basins are calculated.

This paper introduces a general procedure that tests the significance of the departures from utility maximization, departures defined as violations of the general axiom of revealed preference (GARP). This general procedure is based on (i) an adjustment procedure that computes the minimal perturbation in order to satisfy GARP by using the information content in the transitive closure matrix and (ii) a test procedure that checks the significance of the necessary adjustment. This procedure can be easily implemented and programmed, and we run Monte Carlo simulations to show that it is quite powerful.

Standard economic theories of asset markets assume that assets are valued entirely for the consumption streams they can finance. This paper examines the introduction of the demand for status (as a function of wealth) into a model of uninsurable idiosyncratic risk—the “spirit of capitalism” (“soc”) assumption. We find that soc preferences lead to less inequality in wealth; placing wealth into the utility function leads to a shrinking wealth distribution. The drop in wealth concentration is smaller if the utility function implies status is a luxury good, but no parametrization leads to higher wealth Gini coefficients than the benchmark case. We then consider the consequences of revenue-neutral tax reforms with and without soc preferences, finding that they make little difference for this policy experiment.

This paper examines the behavior of the finance premium after technology and monetary shocks in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model where borrowers use a fraction of their production (output) as collateral. We show that this simple framework is capable of producing a countercyclical finance premium, while matching the well-documented stylized facts of macro dynamics. A key feature is the endogenous derivation of the default probability from break-even conditions, which results in the loan rate being set as a countercyclical finance premium over the cost of borrowing from the central bank. The latter is shown to provide an accelerator effect through which shocks can amplify the loan spread and the dynamic response of macro variables.