There are suggestions that increased uncertainty makes fiscal policy temporarily less effective. In this paper, I examine the relationship between business uncertainty and fiscal policy effectiveness in Germany. I use measures of business uncertainty that are derived from the firm-level data of the Ifo Business Climate Survey and interact them with the parameters of a structural vector autoregression to produce state-dependent spending multipliers. The impact of increased uncertainty on the spending multiplier is generally small and often statistically not significant in the short run. By contrast, I obtain a significant positive impact on the long-run multiplier. These baseline results are supported by a variety of robustness checks and specifications.

We examine optimal monetary policy in a New Keynesian model with unemployment and financial frictions where banks produce loans using equity as collateral. Firms and households demand loans to finance externally a fraction of their flows of expenditures. Our findings show amplifying business-cycle effects of a more rigid loan production technology. In the monetary policy analysis, the optimal rule clearly outperforms a Taylor-type rule. The optimized interest-rate response to the external finance premium turns significantly negative when either banking rigidities are high or when financial shocks are the only source of business cycle fluctuations.

Over the past few decades, both the relative price of housing structures and housing services consumption relative to nondurables increased significantly in the United States. This paper explores demand-side factors such as an increase in idiosyncratic earnings risks and changes in housing institutions as potential explanations for the phenomenon. We build a general equilibrium incomplete markets model of housing and compare two steady states that correspond to the 1967 and 2000 U.S. economies. Our model can generate the simultaneous increase in the relative price of houses and housing services consumption relative to nondurables. We find that the increased earnings risks are crucial in replicating this pattern.

In this paper, I analyze the ability of monetary policy to stabilize both the macroeconomy and financial markets under two different scenarios: fixed- and variable-rate mortgages. I develop and solve a new Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model (DSGE) that features a housing market and a group of constrained individuals who need housing collateral to obtain loans. A given share of constrained households borrows at a variable rate, whereas the rest borrow at a fixed rate. I consider two alternative ways of introducing a macroprudential approach to enhancing financial stability: one in which monetary policy, using the interest rate as an instrument, responds to credit growth; and a second one in which the macroprudential instrument is instead the loan-to-value ratio (LTV). The results show that when rates are variable, a countercyclical LTV rule performs better in stabilizing financial markets than monetary policy. However, when rates are fixed, even though monetary policy is less effective in stabilizing the macroeconomy, it does a good job in promoting financial stability.

While credit cards provide transactions services, as do currency and demand deposits, credit cards have never been included in measures of the money supply. The reason is accounting conventions, which do not permit adding liabilities, such as credit card balances, to assets, such as money. However, economic aggregation theory and index number theory measure service flows and are based on microeconomic theory, not accounting. Barnett et al. derived the aggregation and index number theory needed to measure the joint services of credit cards and money. They derived and applied the theory under the assumption of risk neutrality. But since credit card interest rates are high and volatile, risk aversion may not be negligible. We extend the theory by removing the assumption of risk neutrality to permit risk aversion in the decision of the representative consumer.

This study explores the growth and welfare effects of monetary policy in a scale-invariant Schumpeterian growth model with endogenous human capital accumulation. We model money demand via a cash-in-advance (CIA) constraint on research and development (R&D) investment. Our results can be summarized as follows. We find that an increase in the nominal interest rate leads to a decrease in R&D and human capital investment, which, in turn, reduces the long-run growth rates of technology and output. This result stands in stark contrast to the case of exogenous human capital accumulation in which the long-run growth rates of technology and output are independent of the nominal interest rate. Simulating the transitional dynamics, we find that the additional long-run growth effect under endogenous human capital accumulation amplifies the welfare effect of monetary policy. Decreasing the nominal interest rate from 10% to 0% leads to a welfare gain that is equivalent to a permanent increase in consumption of 2.82% (2.38%) under endogenous (exogenous) human capital accumulation.

Can increasing market power cause a decrease in the aggregate savings? We answer this question by using a heterogeneous agents model that features both idiosyncratic labor and capital income risk. Under complete markets, the saving rate does not depend on the degree of market power, but when markets are incomplete, higher markups substantially reduce the aggregate saving rate. This is due to endogenous changes in the distribution of income and wealth. A calibration of the model using the observed changes in market power in the United States since the 1970s closely matches the decline in the US saving rate. Furthermore, when market power increases, the model generates distributional changes that are consistent with the data.

I consider an economy growing along the balanced growth path that is hit by an adverse shock to its capital accumulation process. The model integrates efficiency wages due to imperfect monitoring of the quality of labor in a search and matching framework with methods of dynamic general equilibrium analysis. I show that, depending on the firms' abilities to assess workers' performance, the discipline device role of unemployment may account for sharp declines in employment and jobless recoveries driven by exceptional increases in the work effort of employees. The model also explains why rigid real wages may prevail in equilibrium: the large movements in unemployment are indeed associated with real wage rigidity, which is generated endogenously by efficiency wages.

This paper examines the government spending multiplier when economic agents combine adaptive learning and knowledge about future fiscal policy to form their expectations. The analysis shows that the effects of a government spending shock substantially change when the rational expectations hypothesis is replaced by this learning mechanism. In contrast to the dynamics under rational expectations, a government spending shock in a small-scale new Keynesian DSGE model with learning crowds in private consumption and is associated with a positive comovement between real wages and hours worked. In the baseline calibration, the output multiplier under learning is above one and about twice as large as under rational expectations.

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.

The application of exchange rate target zones modeling to interest rates allows interpreting the puzzles that emerged with the public debt euro area crisis, namely the nonlinear behavior of the interest rates and the fact that some stand-alone countries, not belonging to the euro area, have not been subject to speculative attacks in spite of equally large public debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) ratios. As a matter of fact, this model shows that in the case of a noncredible upper threshold for the interest rate (that may be due to both the lack of room for increasing further the required government primary surplus and/or the absence of a monetary authority acting as a lender of last resort), the resulting public debt unsustainability determines an interest rate nonlinearity and makes the crisis possible for public debt levels that would be stable in the presence of a credible interest rate target.

This paper examines the evolution of the distribution of industry-specific business cycle linkages, which are modeled through a multivariate Markov-switching model and estimated by Gibbs sampling. Using nonparametric density estimation approaches, we find that the number and location of modes in the distribution of industrial dissimilarities change over the business cycle. There is a relatively stable trimodal pattern during expansionary and recessionary phases characterized by highly, moderately, and lowly synchronized industries. However, during phase changes, the density mass spreads from moderately synchronized industries to lowly synchronized industries. This agrees with a sequential transmission of the industrial business cycle dynamics.

In an incomplete markets economy with sunspots, the Pareto-criterion cannot rank sunspot equilibria of different levels of excess price-level volatility. Therefore, I propose a measure of excess volatility cost in terms of a period-0 endowment good. Ex-ante endowment subsidies are provided, in theory, to each consumer, so that the resulting equilibrium allocation of the higher volatility is Pareto-equivalent to the original benchmark equilibrium with a lower volatility level. The aggregate volatility cost is computed as the sum of all consumers' subsidies. Focusing on local analysis that considers small variations around a given volatility level, I show that the aggregate cost strictly increases in volatility even though each individual cost does not necessarily have this property.

We present a stylized model that illustrates how interbank trading can reduce the sensitivity of lending to entrepreneurs' net worth, thus affecting the transmission mechanism of monetary policy through the credit channel. We build a model-consistent measure of interconnectedness and document that, in the United States, this measure has increased substantially during the period 1952–2016. Finally, interacting the measure of interconnectedness in a structural vector autoregression and a factor-augmented vector autoregression for the US economy, we find that the impulse responses of several real and financial variables to monetary policy shocks are dampened as interconnectedness increases. We confirm the same result using data from 10 Euro area countries for the period 1999–2016.

This paper extends Woodford's approach to the robustly optimal monetary policy to a general linear quadratic framework. We provide algorithms to solve for a time-invariant linear robustly optimal policy in a timeless perspective and for a time-invariant linear Markov perfect equilibrium under discretion. We apply our methods to a New Keynesian model of monetary policy with persistent cost-push shocks and inflation persistence. We find that the robustly optimal commitment inflation is less responsive to a cost-push shock when the shock is more persistent and that the robustly optimal discretionary policy is more responsive to lagged inflation when inflation is more persistent.

This paper develops an endogenous growth model with industrial transformation and a stylized foreign expert-based internalization advantage framework to determine the composition of heterogeneous foreign multinationals in a developing host economy. A key feature of the model is the introduction of a dichotomous relationship between domestic and foreign firms, where the latter perceives heterogeneity among the productivity of domestic workers. This results in the skills acquisition decision and foreign subsidiaries' operational mode choice to be determined along the same ability distribution of the host economy. This subsequently determines the shares of the different types of multinationals in a host economy. Parameterized for Malaysia, policy experiments are conducted. A balanced investment liberalization measure for all foreign firms is found to outperform measure targeting only selected types, though there is a threshold doing-business cost value below which such a standalone Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)-promoting policy does not generate positive growth effect. This then calls for composite program that maximizes the policy complementarities between human capital and FDI-promoting policies.

This paper explores the impact of gender differences in the desire for sex and the distribution of power in the household on the onset of the demographic transition and the take-off to growth. Depending on the price and efficacy of modern contraceptives, the gender wage gap, and female bargaining power, the economy assumes one of two possible equilibria. At the traditional equilibrium, contraceptives are not used, fertility is high and education and growth are low. At the modern equilibrium, contraceptives are used, fertility is low and further declining with increasing income, and education and growth are high. The theory motivates a “wanted fertility reversal”: At the traditional equilibrium, men prefer more children than women, whereas at the modern equilibrium, men prefer fewer children than women. Female empowerment causes households to provide more education for their children and leads to an earlier uptake of modern contraceptives and an earlier onset of the demographic transition and the take-off to modern growth.

This paper considers parental time investment in early childhood as an education input and investigates its relationships with other inputs in their contribution to human capital. I develop a 12-period overlapping generations model where human capital formation is a multistage process. The model is calibrated to the US economy so that the generated data matches patterns in parental education spending and child care time. The estimation results show that time input is complementary to education expenditure. I apply the model by implementing three early education policies. The first two involve more government spending and the third is paid parental leave. The policy experiments show that adopting paid parental leave is the most costly means of increasing human capital. An education subsidy is more effective than a direct increase in government spending at promoting human capital; however, its impact on earnings inequality and persistence is smaller.