This study proposes the unified framework of a three-sector model with structural change where agriculture, manufacturing, and service sectors have different production technologies. All three sectors use the factors of capital, labor, and land as inputs. The constant-growth path (CGP), which is the trajectory along which the rental rate of capital remains constant, is used to reconcile the Kaldor and Kuznets facts, and plays a role in linking the wage rate and land rent in the three-factors model. Because the prices of agricultural goods and services are determined endogenously, the CGP condition is no longer the knife-edge condition. We find that the dynamic system along the CGP in the three-sector, three-factor model corresponds to the standard two-sector optimal growth model.

We employ a life-cycle model with income risk to analyze how tax-deferred individual accounts affect households' savings for retirement. We consider voluntary accounts as opposed to mandatory accounts with minimum contribution rates. We contrast add-on accounts with carve-out accounts that partly replace social security contributions. Quantitative results suggest that making add-on accounts mandatory has adverse welfare effects across income groups. Carve-out accounts generate positive welfare effects across all income groups, but gains are lower for low income earners. Default investment rules in individual accounts have a modest impact on welfare.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, competing measures of the trend in macroeconomic variables such as U.S. real GDP have featured prominently in policy debates. A key question is whether large shocks to macroeconomic variables will have permanent effects—i.e., in econometric terms, do the data contain stochastic trends? Unobserved-components models provide a convenient way to estimate stochastic trends for time series data, with their existence typically motivated by stationarity tests that allow at most a deterministic trend under the null hypothesis. However, given the small sample sizes available for most macroeconomic variables, standard Lagrange multiplier tests of stationarity will perform poorly when the data are highly persistent. To address this problem, we propose the use of a likelihood ratio test of stationarity based directly on the unobserved-components models used in estimation of stochastic trends. We demonstrate that a bootstrap version of this test has far better small-sample properties for empirically relevant data-generating processes than bootstrap versions of the standard Lagrange multiplier tests. An application to U.S. real GDP produces stronger support for the presence of large permanent shocks using the likelihood ratio test than using the standard tests.

The literature has proposed two potential channels through which monetary policy played a role in the Great Inflation in the United States. One approach posits that the Federal Reserve held misperceptions of the economy. An alternative explanation contends that policy makers shifted preferences from an output gap stabilization goal toward inflation stabilization after 1979. This paper develops a medium-scale macroeconomic model that incorporates real-time learning by policy makers as well as a (potential) shift in policy makers' preferences. The empirical results show that combining both views—distorted policy makers' beliefs about the persistence of inflation and the inflation-output gap trade-off, accompanied by a stronger preference for inflation stabilization after 1979—illuminates the role played by monetary policy in propagating and ending the Great Inflation.

The present paper studies the interaction between short-run business cycle fluctuations and economic growth at the empirical level. We identify a measure of potential output with that rate of growth consistent with a constant unemployment rate, and we estimate the effects of GDP growth rates on the latter in 13 Latin American and 18 OECD countries during the period 1981–2011. The results of both parametric (OLS/IV and a panel estimator that allows for parameter heterogeneity and cross-section dependence) and nonparametric (a penalized regression spline estimator) econometric techniques show that the measure of potential output experiences positive (negative) changes in periods of high (low) growth in the majority of countries. However, in contrast to the sample of OECD countries, we find that less than half of the sample of Latin American countries experience statistically significant changes in this measure of potential output in periods of low growth.

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.

A key result in macroeconomics is the “time inconsistency of short-run optimal plans.” It is argued that inflationary bias results if central bankers do not precommit to a monetary policy rule. The macro literature, however, does not address the way in which board members arrive at the “optimal choice of inflation rate.” That is a matter of a micro subfield called social choice. If we consider that on any board, members have different priors about the states of nature for the economy, but they all receive the same signal before deciding, then they will have different posterior probabilities for the states, even if they have many data, if one state has a low probability of occurring, such as an unlikely catastrophic-risk event. Thus, it is not clear what the optimal plan is. Therefore, discretion rather than rules may be the optimal plan in social choice settings.

Replacing the pay-as-you-go defined benefit (PAYG DB) system with an at least partially funded defined contribution (DC) system generates fiscal costs that need financing. The fiscal closures at hand differ by the channel and the extent of distortions. The main contribution of this paper is a thorough comparison of the welfare effects of the various fiscal closures of the pension system reform. In addition, we decompose the welfare effects to the parts attributable to changing the way pensions are financed (PAYG ⇒ prefunding) and to changing the way pensions are computed (DB ⇒ DC). We show that depending on the fiscal closure, the welfare effects differ substantially for the same pension system reform. The financing of the the pension system gap with public debt allows more intergenerational redistribution.

The paper suggests that the political changes brought about by the increase in the proportion of college graduates in the U.S. labor force in the 1970s may have contributed to the decline in the college premium during the 1970s and its increase during the 1980s and 1990s. The study argues that the proportion of skilled workers in the labor force affected their relative importance in the political process. Thus, the increase in the proportion of skilled workers during the 1970s reduced the skill premium in the short run, but induced a change in policies that favored skilled workers and increased the skill premium in the long run.

This paper documents a positive correlation between the genetic distance to the world technological frontier (United Kingdom, United States) and the year of the onset of the fertility transition across countries. This result is robust to controlling for a large set of geographical, climatic, historical, and institutional variables. Two main mechanisms could explain this reduced-form relationship. First, genetic distance to the world technological frontier can affect the onset of the fertility transition through its impact on the timing and intensity of technology adoption. Second, genetic distance to the technological frontier can capture other cultural differences and the process of diffusion of cultural norms that are related to fertility but not through technology adoption. We find suggestive evidence supporting both mechanisms.

This paper examines the local determinacy implications of using consumption taxes and income taxes to finance a balanced budget fiscal policy for a variety of popular monetary policy rules. It is shown using a New Keynesian framework that the severity of the indeterminacy problem that arises under each tax system depends not only on the specification of the interest-rate feedback rule, but also on the magnitude of the steady state tax rate, the steady state government debt–output ratio, and the degree of price stickiness. Significant differences in the determinacy criteria across the two tax systems are found to exist. The robustness of the results is assessed by extending the baseline model to include capital accumulation and the taxation of bond interest income. From a policy perspective, our results suggest that future shifts toward indirect taxation could have nontrivial implications for the setting of monetary policy under balanced budget rules, in particular the ability of the Taylor principle to achieve determinacy.

Misallocation of resources across firms leads to lower aggregate productivity. In this paper, we provide new estimates of manufacturing productivity differences across countries and establish by how much they would be reduced if such misallocation were eliminated. Using World Bank survey data for formal manufacturing firms in 52 low- and middle-income countries, we show that manufacturing productivity would increase by an average of 62%, but productivity gaps relative to the United States would remain large. We also find that lower-income countries do not have more to gain from reducing misallocation, as efficiency of resource allocation is uncorrelated with income levels.

This paper investigates the nonlinear dynamics of the inflation–output type of Phillips curve based on a multiple-regime smooth transition regression model using data from China. The empirical results indicate significant nonlinearities in China's Phillips curve. The relationship between inflation and output can be modeled by a four-regime smooth transition regression model in which the responses of inflation to output depend on both inflation and economic growth rates. The inflation–output type Phillips curve may be positively sloped, negatively sloped, or even vertical in the short term, depending on different business cycles. Furthermore, we analyze business cycle fluctuations based on the nonlinear Phillips curve, indicating a coexisting zone of stable inflation rate and rapid growth rate.

The impact that output has on future total factor productivity is not internalized by competitive agents. As a result, the allocation that a planner would choose cannot be reached as a competitive equilibrium outcome (neither for infinitely lived agents nor for overlapping generations): the market remuneration to capital and labor is too low. The planner's allocation can nonetheless be implemented by a fiscal policy subsidizing the returns to savings and the wage rate as needed. The exact policy differs depending on whether only past investment or total output influences productivity: in the first case only capital returns need to be subsidized, whereas in the second case labor income needs to be subsidized too. The policy is balanced period by period by means of a lump-sum tax.

In this paper, we investigate the importance of aggregate fluctuations for the assessment of the optimal level of public debt in an incomplete-markets economy. We start by building a steady state model in which households are only subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic risk and evaluate the optimal level of public debt. We then augment the model to allow for aggregate risk and measure the impact on the optimal level. We show that the cyclical behavior of the economy has a quantitative impact on this level that can be decomposed into the effects of the aggregate productivity shock and the cyclicality of unemployment. Moreover, we find that matching wealth distribution statistics substantially changes the optimal level of public debt.

The paper presents an agent-based model to study the possible effects of different fiscal and monetary policies in the context of debt deflation. We introduce a modified Taylor rule that includes the financial position of firms as a target. Monte Carlo simulations provide a representation of the complex feedback effects generated by the interaction among the different transmission channels of monetary policy. The model also reproduces the evidence of low inflation during stock market booms and shows how it can lead to overinvestment and destabilize the system. The paper also investigates the possible reasons behind this stylized fact by testing different behavioral rules for the central bank. We find that, in a context of sticky prices and volatile expectations, endogenous credit creation can be identified as the main source of the divergent dynamics of prices in the real and financial sectors.

In this paper I study the impact of increasing longevity on pay-as-you-go pension systems. First, I show that increasing longevity increases the internal rate of return. The size of the effect differs for different policy regimes. It is higher for the case where the retirement age is increased to keep the system in balance than for the case where the necessary adjustment is achieved by reducing pension benefits. Second, I study optimally chosen retirement decisions and I show that the socially optimal policy involves a shorter working life than the private optimum. The social optimum can be implemented by the use of a PAYG system that combines an actuarial and a flat pension.

This paper analyzes the dynamics of public debt in a simple two-period overlapping-generations model of endogenous growth with productive public goods. Alternative fiscal rules are defined, with particular attention devoted to the golden rule. Conditions under which multiple equilibria may emerge are characterized. The analysis is then extended to consider the case of partial depreciation, an endogenous risk premium, an endogenous primary surplus rule, a generalized golden rule, a nonseparable utility function, and network externalities. If network effects are sufficiently strong, an increase in public investment may shift the economy from a low-growth equilibrium to a steady state characterized by both higher public debt ratios and higher output growth. This shift may enhance welfare as well. These results illustrate the importance of preserving, even in a context of fiscal retrenchment, the allocation of resources to specific types of public investment.