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.

We study the transmission mechanism of a Green QE, defined as a policy that tilts the central bank’s balance sheet toward green bonds, that is bonds issued by non-polluting firms. We merge a DSGE framework with an environmental model, in which CO2 emissions increase the stock of atmospheric carbon, which in turn decreases total factor productivity. Imperfect substitutability between green and brown bonds is a necessary condition for the effectiveness of Green QE. However, even under this assumption, the effect of Green QE in reducing emissions is negligible and in some cases close to nil.

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.

This paper analyzes the role of money and monetary policy as well as the forecasting performance of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with and without separability between consumption and money. The study is conducted over three crisis periods in the Eurozone, namely, the ERM crisis, the dot-com crisis, and the global financial crisis (GFC). The results of successive Bayesian estimations demonstrate that during these crises, the nonseparable model generally provides better out-of-sample output forecasts than the baseline model. We also demonstrate that money shocks have some impact on output variations during crises, especially in the case of the GFC. Furthermore, the response of output to a money shock is more persistent during the GFC than during the other crises. The impact of monetary policy also changes during crises. Insofar as the GFC is concerned, this impact increases at the beginning of the crisis, but decreases sharply thereafter.

This paper analyzes the effects of corporate tax liability on firm-level total factor productivity (TFP) as the key driver of economic performance. This is a new dimension in the UK productivity puzzle that has not attracted attention so far. We use 6559 manufacturing firms over 2004–2011 to investigate whether higher levels of corporate tax affect the productivity catch-up process by reducing after-tax earnings that could alternatively be used for productivity-enhancing investment, particularly focusing on R&D- and export-intensive firms. Our key results are summarized as follows: first, higher levels of corporate taxation impact adversely on TFP and this finding is robust to different tax measures and insensitive to endogeneity bias; second, as R&D- and export-intensive firms tend to have relatively higher TFP growth, higher levels of tax liability as a share of earnings before interest and taxes decelerate TFP growth of these firms.

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.

The lack of a supranational legal authority that can enforce private contracts across borders makes debt repayment in an international setting contingent on borrowers' willingness to pay rather than ability to pay. This market failure (i.e., inadequate enforcement) causes investment to fall short of its unconstrained level. This paper examines how foreign aid affects a country's willingness to honor private investment agreements. We consider two types of aid: technical assistance and loan subsidies. We show that when enforcement is inadequate, aid has the following effects: (i) it reduces default risk, promotes capital flows, and can, in principle, restore investment to its unconstrained level; (ii) when default risk is high, aid can increase the welfare of both the recipient and the donor country. Thus, foreign aid serves as an enforcement mechanism in an international setting. This provides a nonaltruistic rationale for foreign aid. Finally, we discuss the implications of providing bilateral versus multilateral aid (e.g., by individual countries versus multilateral organizations).

We estimate consumption Euler equations using U.K. household-level data, employing a switching regression technique. We find excess sensitivity to income for one group of households but not for a second group. The likelihood of excess sensitivity is greater for the young, those without liquid assets, the degree-educated, ethnic minorities and those with negative home equity, consistent with liquidity constraints and buffer-stock saving. Housing capital gains affect the consumption plans of the excess sensitivity group of households, but not the other group. These results are consistent with a “collateral channel” for housing. Around 20%–40% of U.K. households display excess sensitivity.

This paper considers the effects of patent length and price regulation in an R&D growth model with variety expansion. Innovation requires lower bounds on patent length and price. Increasing patent duration promotes growth; increasing the cap on the price of patented products promotes growth below the monopoly-pricing level. Each policy instrument can raise welfare unless excessively used, and their welfare ranking depends on parameterizations. It is desirable, on welfare grounds, to limit patent protection along both dimensions, namely by limiting patent length and capping the price of patented products. Such limits raise welfare despite reducing the growth rate.

This paper establishes some stylized facts of the long-run relationship between growth and labor shares using historical data for the USA (1898–2010), the United Kingdom (1856–2010), and France (1896–2010). Performing individual country time–frequency analysis, we demonstrate the existence of long-term cycles in labor share of 30–50 years explaining a major part of the variance in the data. Further, the impact of labor share on growth changes sign with the frequency considered from negative at high frequencies to positive at low frequencies. Finally, the positive coefficient associated with the labor share at low frequencies increases over time.

An increase in inflation causes people to hold smaller real balances and to speed up their spending. Virtually all monetary models capture the first—inflation tax—effect. Few capture the second—hot potato—effect. Those that do associate negative welfare consequences with the hot potato effect. Because both the inflation tax and the hot potato effect imply that inflation has negative effects on welfare, an optimal monetary policy is characterized by the Friedman rule. In the model presented here, there is a hot potato effect, but—all else held constant—the hot potato effect has positive consequences for welfare. As a result, a departure from the Friedman rule can be socially desirable.

For the United States, the supply and wages of skilled labor relative to those of unskilled labor have grown over the postwar period. The literature has tended to explain this through “skill-biased technical change” (SBTC). Empirical work has concentrated around two variants: (1) capital-skill complementarity, (2) skill-augmenting technical change. Our purpose is to nest and discriminate between these two explanations. We do so in the framework of multilevel Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function, where factors are disaggregated into skilled and unskilled labor, and capital into structures and equipment capital. Using a five-equation system approach and several nesting alternatives, we retrieve estimates of the substitution elasticities and technical changes. Our estimations can produce results in line with capital-skill-complementarity hypothesis. However, those results are outperformed where the only source of the widening skill premium has been skill-augmenting technical change. We also show that the different explanations for SBTC have different implications for projected developments of the premium.

We investigate the dynamics of a cobweb model with heterogeneous beliefs, generalizing the example of Brock and Hommes (1997). We examine situations where the agents form expectations by using either rational expectations, or a type of adaptive expectations with limited memory defined from the last two prices. We specify conditions that generate cycles. These conditions depend on a set of factors that includes the intensity of switching between beliefs and the adaption parameter. We show that both Flip bifurcation and Neimark–Sacker bifurcation can occur as primary bifurcation when the steady state is unstable.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between money growth uncertainty and the level of economic activity in the United States. We pay explicit attention to the Divisia monetary aggregates. In doing so, we use the new vintage of the data [called MSI (monetary services indices) by the St. Louis Fed], together with the simple sum monetary aggregates, over the period from 1967:1 to 2011:3. In the context of a bivariate VARMA, GARCH-in-mean, asymmetric BEKK model, we show that increased Divisia money growth volatility (irrespective of the level of aggregation and the method of calculation) is associated with a lower average growth rate of real economic activity. However, there are no effects of simple-sum money growth volatility on real economic activity, except with the Sum M1 and perhaps Sum M2M aggregates. We conclude that monetary policies that focus on the Divisia monetary aggregates and target their growth rates will contribute to higher overall economic growth.

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of short-time work (STW) extensions—e.g., relaxing eligibility criteria or implementing new schemes—in OECD countries during the Great Recession. First, we find that the dampening effect of STW on the unemployment rate diminishes at higher take-up rates. Second, only countries with pre-existing STW schemes were able to fully exploit the benefits of STW. Third, the effects of STW were strongest when GDP growth was deeply negative at the beginning of the recession. In summary, our results indicate that STW is most effective when used as a fast-responding automatic stabilizer.

This paper shows that growth and income distribution dynamics are closely linked through occupation, financial intermediation, and education. We use micro data from Thailand for 1976–1996. The compositional changes across these characteristics account for half of the Thai inequality increase and 40% of the Thai growth and poverty reduction. Financial deepening and educational expansion contributed to increasing inequality, whereas occupational transformation contributed to poverty alleviation. The changes in income gaps across the income–status groups, that is, divergence and then convergence, give rise to inverted-U inequality dynamics. These two growth-related components of inequality dynamics, composition and income-gap dynamics, explain virtually all the change in overall inequality, except its initial rise. Thus, inequality dynamics can be viewed as an integral part of the wider process of growth, as Kuznets speculated.

An overlooked topic is the treatment of worker claims when firms are shutting down. In fact, when firms close, worker claims such as severance pay often go unfulfilled. To evaluate the quantitative importance of this observation, this paper develops a general equilibrium model with close attention to the exit margin, and examines how macroeconomic outcomes vary with the treatment of firing costs on exit. In the model, the impact of firing costs on employment weakens by a third when closing plants do not have to pay them, even though closure accounts for considerably less than one-third of total job destruction. Thus, the distribution of firm characteristics is a new channel for labor market rigidities to affect aggregates. The model also accounts for cross-country differences in the relationship between the structure of job flows and firm turnover.

We examine whether the importance of lagged inflation in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) may be a result of specification biases. NKPCs are estimated for four countries: France, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Using time-varying coefficient (TVC) estimation, a procedure that can deal with possible specification biases, we find support for the NKPC model that excludes lagged inflation. Our results indicate a Phillips-curve relationship for the countries considered that does not contain an inertial element.

In this paper, unemployment, growth, and income inequality are interdependent and endogenously determined in a unified model of a trade union. Analytically, we show that the effective labor force exhibits an intensive margin response, in the sense that in response to higher unionization the number of employed workers decreases, but each individual employed worker provides more working hours. This intensive margin response leads to the possibility of the coexistence of high unemployment and high growth. Moreover, unionization gives rise to an ambiguous effect on income inequality, whereas it has an unambiguously positive effect on the labor income share and growth rate. Our numerical study shows that the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital plays an important role in governing the steady-state consequences and affecting the impact of (de-) unionization. These results provide not only a plausible explanation of the empirical evidence, but also a reconciliation for the disparity in the empirical findings.

We develop business-cycle models with financial constraints, the driving force of which is news about the future (i.e., changes in expectations). We assume that an asset with fixed supply (“land”) is used as collateral, and firms need to hold collateral to finance their input costs. The latter feature introduces an interaction between the inefficiencies in the financial market and in the factor market. Good news raises the price of land today, which relaxes the collateral constraint. It, in turn, reduces the inefficiency in the labor market. If this force is sufficiently strong, the equilibrium labor supply increases. So do output, investment, and consumption. Our models also generate procyclical movement in Tobin's Q. We also show that when the news turns out to be wrong, the economy may fall into a recession.