Over the past three decades, analysis of dynamics has come to the forefront of macroeconomic theory. A key impetus for progress on this front has been the connections developed between equilibrium growth theory, on one hand, and the field of nonlinear dynamics, on the other. Kazuo Nishimura's work has been at the center of these advances, and the lines of research he initiated remain an exciting area of study for young researchers with strong technical skills.

This paper develops a general technique for the computation of comparative dynamics in perfect-foresight discrete-time models. The method developed here is both applicable and general; it can be used to analyze the effects of the perturbation of parameters on endogenous variables and the welfare of an economic system derived from more general multisector models. It is neither restricted to the system's dimensions nor restricted by the assumption of distinct eigenvalues in the system.

This special issue of Macroeconomic Dynamics presents a timely and fresh body of high-quality research on the complexity and evolution of the international oil markets, the dynamics of the price of oil, and the financialization and the interconnections of oil, energy, and nonenergy commodity markets.

Shimer (Mismatch, American Economic Review 97, 1074–1101 [2007]) introduced a model of mismatch in which limited mobility of vacant jobs and unemployed workers provides a microfoundation for their coexistence in equilibrium. He assumed that the short side of a local labor market receives all the gains from trade. In this note I show that modifying this assumption on wage-setting can deliver more reasonable predictions for wages at the level of the local market and in the aggregate.

The European sovereign debt crisis has revived the debate about appropriate fiscal rules in the European Economic and Monetary Union. Whereas the Stability and Growth Pact and the Fiscal Compact make no distinction between public consumption and investment expenditure, the aim of the current paper is to analyze the implications of the adoption of the Golden rule in a monetary union, distinguishing between the two types of public expenditure. With the help of a macroeconomic model, we show that introducing a Golden rule and smoothing public investment expenditure would be welfare-improving, and mostly for countries where taxation rates and the productivity of public investment are highest, and for the most closed countries. It would also be the most beneficial for countries where the monetary transmission parameter, the propensity to consume, and the price elasticity of supply are weakest, whereas supply-side distortions are the strongest.

The previous conclusion that a uniform lump-sum estate tax could implicitly provide annuity income was reached by ignoring the inheritance that agents receive. However, when the agents leave a bequest, they should also receive an inheritance from their parents. Thus, we make the inheritance received—bequests left cycle complete and fully endogenous. Interestingly, the differential timing and sizes of inheritance then generate unequal wealth effects even with actuarially fair annuity markets. To restore the first best, the government has to adopt an estate tax regime that is no longer uniform. Thus, once bequest is fully endogenized, a uniform estate tax no longer bears the annuity role. Further, the differential timing in receiving inheritance creates an unequal wealth distribution, which is also nonstationary. The paper manifests the importance of accounting for and tracing the inheritance received by agents for any crucial policy recommendation.

We motivate and provide an overview to New Monetarist Economics. We then briefly describe the individual contributions to the Macroeconomics Dynamics special issues on money, credit, and liquidity.

It is commonly accepted that credit market frictions are an important source of macroeconomic fluctuations. But what is the link between the two? And what is the driving factor of asset prices volatility? To answer these questions, we have introduced a specific credit friction, limited commitment, in a general equilibrium model with production and investment in productive capital, where agents can trade bonds. The model always displays a stationary equilibrium where bonds are traded. More importantly, limited commitment may generate stochastic endogenous fluctuations driven by self-fulfilling volatile expectations (sunspots), yielding credit and investment cycles and bond price volatility consistent with data.

Two essential imperfections determine the degree of the financial sector development in an economy: lending frictions, which constrain the ability to extend loans to borrowers; and, trading frictions, which constrain the trading of these loans in secondary markets. I develop a dynamic general equilibrium model where long-term investment is the engine of growth to study macroeconomic consequences of financial development. In the model, long-term loans are extended to entrepreneurs in a primary market and then traded in a secondary market among financiers. In competitive equilibria, reductions in either lending or trading frictions enlarge the financial sector. Although financial deepening through low-cost lending is always welfare improving, financial deepening stimulated by low-cost trading could be detrimental to the society. I illustrate that a model qualitatively consistent with the U.S. financial development episode of the last 30 years should exhibit disproportionately large reductions in trading frictions relative to lending frictions.

This paper introduces a method of optimization in infinite-horizon economies based on the theory of correspondences. The proposed approach allow us to study time-separable and non-time-separable dynamic economic models without resorting to fixed point theorems or transversality conditions. When our technique is applied to the standard time-separable model it provides an alternative and straightforward way to derive the common recursive formulation of these models by means of Bellman equations.

Guillermo Calvo is one of the most influential economists in the field of international macroeconomics of the past 30 years. He has produced seminal articles in every area of macroeconomics and international economics that he has worked on, including his early classic articles on capacity utilization and time inconsistency, his 1980's works on efficiency wages, price stickiness, and policy credibility, and his recent studies on sudden stops and emerging market crises. Yet, the defining feature of Guillermo Calvo's contribution to our profession is not the depth and wide scope of the economic theories he has developed, but the central emphasis he puts in all his work on the role of economics as a tool for understanding reality and improving the quality of human life.

Guillermo Calvo's passion for the policy implications of economic theory is obvious to anyone who has met him since his days as Senior Advisor of the Research Department of the IMF in the mid-1980's. This feature of his professional interests was much less obvious to those who interacted with him during his early years as an important figure of the rational expectations revolution. It was probably hard to see that behind the highly technical treatment presented in his articles at that time was an author who had his feet soundly set on the ground and focused on understanding how society could benefit from the renaissance of macroeconomic theory that was taking place. Interestingly, Michael Rothschild did figure out the true nature of Guillermo Calvo in those early years. When the University of California at San Diego tried to hire Calvo in the mid-1980's, Rothschild explained to Calvo that he was an excellent fit for San Diego because he was a particular type of theoretician: “Most theoreticians make theory out of theory,” Rothschild noted, but Calvo was different because he made “theory out of reality, taking what is really out there and presenting it in a much wider and complex form than a well-developed but narrow theory.”

The following pages are excerpts from three interview sessions that Guillermo Calvo and I had at his office in the Inter-American Development Bank in the spring of 2003. These interviews provide a clear summary picture of Calvo as the theoretician of reality that Michael Rothschild described. The recollection of the conversation with Rothschild is one of many fascinating memories of Calvo's personal life and professional career that emerged during our meetings. We taped and transcribed the three meetings in Spanish and then Calvo and I together edited that material to produce this much shorter interview in English for Macroeconomic Dynamics.

Drawing on the empirical evidence that heterogeneity in inflation expectations is persistent and endogenously time-varying, we embed two inflation forecasting strategies—one based on costly ex ante perfect foresight, and the second based on costless ex ante extrapolative trend-following—in a macrodynamic model. Drawing also on the empirical evidence that inflation forecast errors may have to exceed some threshold before agents abandon their previously selected forecasting strategy, we describe agents as switching between forecasting strategies according to evolutionarily satisficing learning. Convergence to a long-run equilibrium consistent with output growth, unemployment and inflation at their natural levels may be achieved even if heterogeneity in inflation forecasting strategies (with predominance of the extrapolative foresight strategy) is an attractor of an evolutionarily satisficing dynamic perturbed by mutant agents. Thus, in keeping with the empirical evidence, heterogeneity in strategies to form inflation expectations (with prevalence of bounded rationality) can be a stable long-run equilibrium.

If one drops the strong assumption that firms and households know all of the relevant parameters, and instead models agents as learning these parameters, the estimated parameters become random variables. Taking expectations several periods into the future may then involve taking the expectation of a product of random variables. Because the resulting problem is difficult, previous research has avoided it. This paper makes some progress using both analytical and numerical techniques. Focusing especially on consumption, we find that the resulting covariance terms could account for the well-documented empirical result that consumption displays excess sensitivity to lagged income. We show that a similar covariance effect could play a role in many widely used economic models.

We develop a test of evolutionary change that incorporates a null hypothesis of homogeneity, which encompasses time invariance in the variance and autocovariance structure of residuals from estimated econometric relationships. The test framework is based on examining whether shifts in spectral decomposition between two frames of data are significant. Rejection of the null hypothesis will point not only to weak nonstationarity but to shifts in the structure of the second-order moments of the limiting distribution of the random process. This would indicate that the second-order properties of any underlying attractor set has changed in a statistically significant way, pointing to the presence of evolutionary change. A demonstration of the test's applicability to a real-world macroeconomic problem is accomplished by applying the test to the Australian Building Society Deposits (ABSD) model.

Government shares in total output are characterized by significant variation across countries. I noticed a strong negative correlation between government consumption shares and the price of government services in terms of private consumption. Motivated by this empirical observation, I developed a neoclassical growth model with added government that is capable of matching the variation in government shares very closely using only relative prices. In addition, I provide empirical evidence showing that the relative price of government consumption increases with income, which is consistent with distortions prevailing in poor countries. These two observations combined imply that government shares tend to be higher in poorer countries.

In this paper, we prove in terms of the prototype model of social common capital that the optimum conditions for sustainable processes of capital accumulation involving both private capital and social common capital coincide precisely with those for market equilibrium with the social common capital taxes at certain specific rates under the stationary expectations hypothesis concerning the future schedule of marginal productivity of capital of all kinds.

Externalities are a fundamental aspect of any modern interdependent economy. The fact that agents interact with one another makes it inevitable that their decisions will influence one another directly, in addition to any indirect impact that may occur through the market place. Ever since the earliest stages of the discipline, externalities have been of prime concern to economists, who have long argued that they provide an important motive for (economic) decision making. To cite one prominent example, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith notes that “Though it is in order to supply the necessities and conveniences of the body that the advantages of external fortune are originally recommended to us, yet we cannot live long in the world without perceiving that the respect of our equals, our credit and rank in the society we live in, depend very much upon the degree in which we possess, or are supposed to possess those advantages. The desire of becoming the proper objects of this respect . . . is perhaps the strongest of all our desires” [Smith (1759, pp. 348–349)]. In modern terminology, Adam Smith is referring to a consumption externality.

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.