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.

A challenge that faces many advanced economies is how to finance age-related spending programs as the population ages. In this paper, we investigate two policy options–pension cuts and tax hikes–to mitigate fiscal pressure arising in the special context of Australia, whose population is ageing fast while growing substantially in size due to immigration. Using a computable overlapping generations model, we find that while both policy reforms can achieve a similar fiscal goal, they lead to different distributional and welfare effects across income groups over time. Future generations prefer pension cuts, whereas current generations prefer tax hikes to finance government spending commitments. Moreover, within the tax hike option, taxing income or consumption results in opposing macroeconomic and welfare effects. Indeed, our opposing intra- and inter-temporal welfare outcomes highlight some political complexity when devising a more sustainable tax-transfer system.

The transcript of a panel discussion marking the 50th anniversary of John Muth's “Rational Expectations and the Theory of Price Movements” (Econometrica 1961). The panel consisted of Michael Lovell, Robert Lucas, Dale Mortensen, Robert Shiller, and Neil Wallace. The discussion was moderated by Kevin Hoover and Warren Young. The panel touched on a wide variety of issues related to the rational-expectations hypothesis, including its history, starting with Muth's work at Carnegie Tech; its methodological role; applications to policy; its relationship to behavioral economics; its role in the recent financial crisis; and its likely future.

The panel discussion was held in a session sponsored by the History of Economics Society at the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) meetings in the Capitol 1 Room of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Denver, Colorado.

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.

Using results from the literature on H∞ control, this paper incorporates model uncertainty into a frequency-domain approach to stabilization policy. The derived policies guarantee a minimum performance level even in the worst of (a bounded set of) circumstances. Robust H∞ policies are shown to be more “activist” than H2 policies in the sense that their impulse responses are larger. Robust policies also tend to be more autocorrelated. Consequently, the premium associated with being able to commit is greater under model uncertainty. Without commitment, the policymaker is not able to (credibly) smooth his response to the degree that he would like. A contribution of this paper is its analysis of robust control in a model featuring a forward-looking state transition equation, which arises from the fact that the private sector bases its decisions on expectations of future government policy. Existing applications of H∞ control in economics follow the engineering literature, and only consider backward-looking state transition equations.

We propose a simple short-run Post-Keynesian model in which the key aspects of shadow banking, namely securitization and the production of structured finance instruments, are explicitly formalized. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to broaden purely real-side Post-Keynesian models and their traditional focus on shareholder-value orientation, the financialization of non-financial firms, and the profit-led vs. wage-led dichotomy. We rather put emphasis on the role of financial institutions and rentier-friendly environment in determining the predominance of specific growth and distribution regimes. First, we illustrate the macroeconomic rationale of shadow banking practices. We show how, before the 2007–08 crisis, securitization and shadow banking allowed for an increase in profitability for the whole financial sector, while apparently keeping leverage under control. Second, we define a variety of shadow-banking-led regimes in terms of economic activity, productive capital accumulation, and income distribution.

We review several control problems, all related to robust control in some way, that lead to a minimax linear quadratic problem. We stress the fact that although an augmented performance index appears, containing an L2 norm of a disturbance signal, only the nonaugmented quadratic performance index is of interest per se in each case.

This work shows the asymmetric effect of the reduction in transportation costs across different sectors in the process of the Great Divergence. Specifically, the analysis indicates that reductions in transportation costs of industrial goods enhance convergence of the growth rates of trading economies. In contrast, reductions in transportation costs of nonindustrial goods contribute to a further divergence across countries.

The relationship between the price of oil and the level of economic activity is a fundamental empirical issue in macroeconomics. Hamilton (1983) showed that oil prices had significant predictive content for real economic activity in the United States prior to 1972, whereas Hooker (1996) argued that the estimated linear relations between oil prices and economic activity appear much weaker after 1973. In the debate that followed, several authors suggested that the apparent weakening of the relationship between oil prices and economic activity is illusory, arguing that the true relationship between oil prices and real economic activity is asymmetric, with the correlation between oil price decreases and output significantly different from the correlation between oil price increases and output—see, for example, Mork (1989) and Hamilton (2003).

This paper uses spectral theory to develop the following two testable hypotheses in a unified framework for the predictions of business-cycle and endogenous growth models: (i) financial development affects only business-cycle volatility; and (ii) shocks affect both business-cycle volatility and long-run volatility of GDP growth. In other words, volatility caused by shocks is more persistent than that caused by financial underdevelopment. We decompose the business-cycle and long-run volatility by the spectral method and then test the hypotheses at the cross-country level. Empirical evidence provides support for both hypotheses. Higher private credit, a bank-based measure of financial development, dampens business-cycle volatility but not long-run volatility. Volatility of shocks, as measured by the volatility of changes in the terms of trade, magnifies both business-cycle and long-run volatility. The results are robust to accounting for endogeneity, a market-based measure of financial development, and an alternative method of volatility decomposition.

The paper compares the effects of market-based (M-B) and command-and-control (C&C) climate policies on the direction of technical change and the prevention of environmental disasters. Drawing on a model of endogenous growth and directed technical change, we show that M-B policies (carbon taxes and subsidies toward clean sectors) suffer from path dependence and exhibit bounded window of opportunities: delays in their implementation make them ineffective both in redirecting technical change, (i.e. triggering a transition toward clean energy) and in avoiding environmental catastrophes. On the contrary, we find that C&C interventions are favored by path dependence and guarantee policy effectiveness irrespectively of the timing of their introduction. As the hypothesis of path dependence in technological change has received vast empirical support and it is a key feature of many models of growth, we argue that C&C policies should be seen as a valuable and non-equivalent alternative to M-B interventions.

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.

This paper introduces adaptive learning into the third-generation currency crisis model of Aghion, Bacchetta, and Banerjee (2001, Currency crises and monetary policy in an economy with credit constraints, European Economic Review 45, 1121–1150). Adaptive learning might reflect, for example, uncertainty about the economy's exposure to adverse balance sheet effects. Even when equilibrium is unique, we show that the learning algorithm's escape dynamics can produce the same kind of Markov-switching exchange rate behavior that is typically attributed to sunspots or herds. An advantage of our learning model is that currency crises become endogenous, in the sense that their stochastic properties can be related to assumptions about learning and other structural features of the economy.

In this work, we find that the zero capital income tax result might not hold, even at the steady state, when the government discount rate differs from the individual one. As intuitive Pigouvian considerations would suggest, capital income should be taxed (subsidized) when the government is less (more) impatient than individuals are. However, a counterintuitive asymmetry emerges as for the steady state since, in the long run, capital income cannot be taxed because of the explosive distortionary effect of positive taxes. The asymmetry is ruled out with a logarithmic utility function because, in this case, the anticipated policy path does not affect current individual choices and thus the cumulative distortionary effect of taxes disappears.

The paper analyzes a multicountry extension of the Barro model of productive public expenditure. In the presence of positive infrastructural externalities between countries, the provision of infrastructure will be inefficiently low if countries do not coordinate. This provides a role for a supranational body, such as the European Union, to coordinate the policies of the individual governments. It is shown how intervention by a supranational body can raise welfare by internalizing the infrastructural externality. Infrastructural externalities increase the importance of tax policy in the growth process and distribute the benefits of taxation across countries.

In this paper I show that the intensity at which intermediate goods are used in the production process affects aggregate total factor productivity (TFP). To do this, I construct an input–output model economy in which firms produce gross output by means of a production function in capital, labor, and intermediate goods. This production function is subject, together with the standard neutral technical change, to intermediates-biased technical change. Positive (negative) intermediates-biased technical change implies a decline (increase) in the elasticity of gross output with respect to intermediate goods. In equilibrium, this elasticity appears as an explicit part of TFP in the value added aggregate production function. In particular, when the elasticity of gross output with respect to intermediates increases, aggregate TFP declines. I use the model to quantify the impact of intermediates-biased technical change for measured TFP growth in Italy. The exercise shows that intermediates-biased technical change can account for the productivity slowdown observed in Italy from 1994 to 2004.

This paper studies the determinacy of equilibrium in a new Keynesian model with deep habits under different interest rate rules. The main finding is that an interest rate rule satisfying the Taylor principle is no longer a sufficient condition to guarantee determinacy. Including interest rate smoothing and a response to output deviations from steady state significantly enlarges the regions of determinacy. However, under all the simple interest rate rules considered, determinacy is not guaranteed for a very high degree of deep habits. Deep habits give rise to countercyclical markups, which is in line with empirical evidence and makes them an appealing feature in the study of demand shocks. The countercyclicality of markups also leads to multiple equilibria because of self-fulfilling expectations for a high degree of deep habit formation.

This paper analyzes the effects of an unanticipated increase in immigration in a macroeconomic model with search and matching frictions. It shows how an immigration shock can lead to a temporary increase in unemployment under a variety of conditions and that this is qualitatively consistent with the responses from a VAR estimated on postwar US data.

Recent U.S. evidence suggests that the response of labor share to a productivity shock is characterized by countercyclicality and overshooting. These findings cannot be reconciled easily with existing business cycle models. We extend the Diamond–Mortensen–Pissarides model of search in the labor market by considering strategic interactions among an endogenous number of producers, which leads to countercyclical price markups. Although Nash bargaining delivers a countercyclical labor share, we show that countercyclical markups are fundamental to address the overshooting. On the contrary, we find that real wage rigidity does not seem to play a crucial role in the dynamics of the labor share of income.

We generalize a trade model with firm-specific heterogeneity and R&D-based growth to allow for endogenous education and fertility. The framework is able to explain cross-country differences in living standards and trade intensities by the differential pace of human capital accumulation among industrialized countries. Consistent with the empirical evidence, scale matters for relative economic prosperity as long as countries are closed, whereas scale does not matter in a fully globalized world. The average human capital of a country, by contrast, influences its relative economic prosperity irrespective of trade-openness.