We use laboratory experiments with human subjects to test the relevance of different inflation-targeting regimes. In particular and within the standard New Keynesian model, we evaluate to what extent communication of the inflation target is relevant to the success of inflation targeting. We find that if the central bank cares only about inflation stabilization, announcing the inflation target does not make a difference in terms of macroeconomic performance compared with a standard active monetary policy. However, if the central bank also cares about the stabilization of economic activity, communicating the target helps to reduce the volatility of inflation, interest rate, and output gap, although their average levels are not affected. This finding is consistent with the theoretical literature and provides a rationale for the adoption of a flexible inflation-targeting regime.

There exist a variety of reasons for the failure to find a unique cointegrating relationship between economic time series where one would normally be expected on the basis of economic theory. Among these are the testing procedure, the span of the data set, the choice of lag length in generating the test statistic, the presence of structural breaks, and the presence of cointegration only beyond some threshold. We propose the concept of regime-sensitive cointegration whereby the underlying series need not be cointegrated at all times. We show that cointegration can be switched off when a common stochastic trend is added. Alternatively, cointegration can be switched on or off because series normally believed to contain a unit actually do not. This implies that a linear combination of such variables need not be cointegrated. To illustrate the concept empirically, we test the hypothesis of interest-rate parity, and related hypotheses, using daily Eurorates for the United States and Canada.

Using laboratory experiments within a New Keynesian framework, we explore the interaction between the formation of inflation expectations and monetary policy design. The central question in this paper is how to design monetary policy when expectations formation is not perfectly rational. Instrumental rules that use actual rather than forecasted inflation produce lower inflation variability and reduce expectational cycles. A forward-looking Taylor rule where a reaction coefficient equals 4 produces lower inflation variability than rules with reaction coefficients of 1.5 and 1.35. Inflation variability produced with the latter two rules is not significantly different. Moreover, the forecasting rules chosen by subjects appear to vary systematically with the policy regime, with destabilizing mechanisms chosen more often when inflation control is weaker.

The monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), with its annual demographic March supplement, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) are the leading sources of data on worker reallocation across occupations, industries, and firms. Much of the active current research is based on these data. In this paper, we contrast these data sets as sources of data for measuring the dynamics of worker mobility. We find that (i) (March) CPS data are characterized by a substantial amount of noise when it comes to identifying occupational and industry switches; (ii) March CPS data provide a poor measure of annual occupational mobility and, instead, most likely measure mobility over a much shorter period; (iii) (the changes in) the procedure to impute missing data have a dramatic effect on the interpretation of the CPS data in, e.g., the trend in occupational mobility. The most important shortcomings of the PSID are the facts that (i) occupational and industry affiliation data are available in most years at an annual frequency; (ii) the PSID's sample, by design, excludes immigrants arriving in the United States after 1968; (iii) the Retrospective Occupation–Industry Files with reliable occupation and industry affiliation data are available only until 1980.

This paper analyzes productive government expenditure in a stochastic AK growth model. First, a centrally planned economy is characterized, emphasizing the trade-off between the effects of both deterministic and stochastic government expenditures on the equilibrium growth rate and its variance. Both the growth-maximizing and the welfare-maximizing shares of government expenditure are derived and shown to depend (differentially) upon the degree of risk in the economy. Whereas production risk reduces the welfare-maximizing share of government expenditure, it may either increase or decrease the growth-maximizing share, depending upon the degree of risk aversion. Next, the stochastic equilibrium in a decentralized economy is derived. The first-best optimal tax structure is characterized and its dependence on risk is determined. The formal analysis is supplemented by some numerical simulations to assess the quantitative significance of risk and the divergence that this generates between the welfare-maximizing and growth-maximizing size of government.

This paper characterizes the elasticity of factor substitution in one-sector convex growth models with a general production function. It shows that an elasticity of substitution that is asymptotically greater than unity is a sufficient (but not a necessary) condition for the existence of a lower bound on the marginal product of capital, which in turn can lead to unbounded endogenous growth. Hence, an elasticity of substitution that eventually becomes greater than unity can counteract the role of diminishing returns to capital. This renders factor substitution a powerful engine of growth.

This paper studies how monetary policy should react to oil shocks in a microfounded model with staggered price-setting and oil as an input in a CES production function. In particular, we extend Benigno and Woodford [Journal of the European Economic Association 3 (6) (2005), 1–52] to obtain a second-order approximation to the expected utility of the representative household when the steady state is distorted and the economy is hit by oil price shocks. The main result is that oil price shocks generate an endogenous trade-off between inflation and output stabilization when oil has low substitutability in production. We also find, in contrast to Benigno and Woodford, that this trade-off is reduced, but not eliminated, when we get rid of the effects of monopolistic distortions in the steady state. Moreover, the size of the endogenous “cost-push” shock generated by fluctuations in the oil price increases when it is more difficult to substitute other factors for oil.

Although a number of economists have tried to revive the idea of nominal GDP targeting since the financial crisis of 2008, very little has been said about how this objective might be achieved in practice. This paper adopts and extends a strategy first outlined by Holbrook Working and later employed in the P-Star model. It presents a series of theoretical and empirical results to argue that Divisia monetary aggregates can be controlled by the Federal Reserve and that the trend velocities of these aggregates exhibit the stability required to make long-run targeting of a nominal objective feasible.

This paper considers a sticky price model with a cash-in-advance constraint where agents forecast inflation rates with the help of econometric models. Agents use least-squares learning to estimate two competing models of which one is consistent with rational expectations once learning is complete. When past performance governs the choice of forecast model, agents may prefer to use the inconsistent forecast model, which generates an equilibrium where forecasts are only constrained rational. Output and inflation then display persistence, inflation responds sluggishly to nominal disturbances, and the dynamic correlations of output and inflation match U.S. data surprisingly well. The rational expectations equilibrium instead has great difficulty in matching any of these features.

This paper evaluates two well-known models of growth with inequality that have explicit micro underpinnings related to household choice. With incomplete markets or transactions costs, wealth can constrain investment in business and the choice of occupation and also constrain the timing of entry into the formal financial sector. Using the Thai Socio-Economic Survey (SES), we estimate the distribution of wealth and the key parameters that best fit cross-sectional data on household choices and wealth. We then simulate the model economies for two decades at the estimated initial wealth distribution and analyze whether the model economies at those micro-fit parameter estimates can explain the observed macro and sectoral aspects of income growth and inequality change. Both models capture important features of Thai reality. Anomalies and comparisons across the two distinct models yield specific suggestions for improved research on the micro foundations of growth and inequality.

We study the conditions that guarantee equilibrium determinacy in a standard sticky price model augmented with a cost channel. A central bank that assigns some positive weight to the output gap in its reaction function makes the economy more prone to multiple equilibria relative to the standard case. The value of the threshold on the interest rate response to inflation is above one and depends on the fraction of firms that need to borrow their bills payment.

This paper focuses on the demand for money in the United States in the context of two globally flexible functional forms—the Fourier and the asymptotically ideal model (AIM)—estimated subject to full regularity, using methods suggested over 20 years ago. We provide a comparison in terms of violations of the regularity conditions for consumer maximization and in terms of output in the form of a full set of elasticities. We also provide a policy perspective, using (for the first time) parameter estimates that are consistent with global regularity, in that a very strong case can be made for abandoning the simple-sum approach to monetary aggregation, on the basis of the low elasticities of substitution among the components of the popular M2 aggregate of money.

We use two-stage optimal control techniques to solve some adoption problems under embodied technical change. We first solve a benchmark problem without learning behavior. At the date of switching, the consumption level is shown to drop, as the relative price of capital goes down (obsolescence). In such a case, the economy sticks to the initial technology, or immediately switches to a new technology with a higher level of embodiment, depending on how the obsolescence costs compare to the induced growth advantage. In a second step, we introduce learning. The learning curve involves fixed costs and incentives to wait as well. Adoption is shown to depend on the growth advantage of switching net of obsolescence and learning fixed costs. The economy will switch if and only if this indicator is positive. If it is big enough to “compensate” the option of waiting, then the economy switches immediately. Otherwise, the economy waits.

We introduce adaptive learning behavior into a general-equilibrium life-cycle economy with capital accumulation. Agents form forecasts of the rate of return to capital assets using least-squares autoregressions on past data. We show that, in contrast to the perfect-foresight dynamics, the dynamical system under learning possesses equilibria that are characterized by persistent excess volatility in returns to capital. We explore a quantitative case for theselearning equilibria. We use an evolutionary search algorithm to calibrate a version of the system under learning and show that this system can generate data that matches some features of the time-series data for U.S. stock returns and per-capita consumption. We argue that this finding provides support for the hypothesis that the observed excess volatility of asset returns can be explained by changes in investor expectations against a background of relatively small changes in fundamental factors.

We assess the long-run growth effects of automation in the overlapping generations framework. Although automation implies constant returns to capital and, thus, an AK production side of the economy, positive long-run growth does not emerge. The reason is that automation suppresses wage income, which is the only source of investment in the overlapping generations model. Our result stands in sharp contrast to the representative agent setting with automation, where sustained long-run growth is possible even without technological progress. Our analysis therefore provides a cautionary tale that the underlying modeling structure of saving/investment decisions matters for the derived economic impact of automation. In addition, we show that a robot tax has the potential to raise per capita output and welfare at the steady state. However, it cannot induce a takeoff toward positive long-run growth.

This research demonstrates that international financial integration changes the way in which financial development affects inequality within a country. Specifically, both cross-country analysis and dynamic panel data analysis using data collected from more than 100 countries provide evidence indicating that if the financial market of a country is strongly closed to the world market, financial development narrows inequality within that country, whereas if the financial market of a country is strongly open to the world market, financial development widens inequality within that country. Our theoretical framework provides a possible explanation for our empirical findings.

This paper analyzes the optimal inflation tax in economies with structural imperfections in labor, commodity, and currency markets. The Friedman rule is a classic result in economics that claims that the optimal monetary policy is to set a zero nominal interest rate. This Ramsey equilibrium is robust in a wide range of environments without imperfections in input, output, or financial markets. In many developing countries, however, a large fraction of activity takes place in the “informal” sector. Roughly speaking, the informal sector is the untaxed and unregulated market sometimes referred to as the underground economy. We obtain three results. First, we show that when structural imperfections such as an informal sector exist, the optimal inflation tax is positive. Second, we show that structural imperfections introduce an important asymmetry in the welfare cost function. Third, we provide quantitative results.

This paper develops a small-scale DSGE model that embeds a demographic structure within a monetary policy framework. We extend the nonmonetary overlapping-generations model of Gertler and present a small synthesis model that combines the setup of Gertler with a New Keynesian structure, implying that the short-run dynamics related to monetary policy can be compared with that of the standard New Keynesian model. In sum, the model offers a New Keynesian platform that can be used to characterize the response of macroeconomic variables to demographic shocks, similarly to the responses to technology or monetary policy shocks. We offer such characterizations for flexible and sticky price equilibria. Empirically, we calibrate the model to demographic developments projected for the euro area. The main finding is that the projected slowdown in population growth and the increase in longevity contribute slowly over time to a decline in the equilibrium interest rate.

Multiple-equilibria macroeconomic models suggest that consumers' and investors' perceptions about the state of the economy may be important independent factors for business cycles. In this paper, we verify empirically the interrelations between waves of optimism and pessimism and subsequent economic fluctuations. We focus on the behavior of nonfundamental movements in the consumer sentiment index, as a proxy for consumers' sunspots, and in the business formation index, representing investors' animal spirits, around economic turning points. We find that bearish consumers and entrepreneurs were present before the onset of some U.S. economic downturns, sometimes even when the fundamentals were all very strong. In particular, our analysis shows that self-fulfilling pessimism may have played a nontrivial role in the 1969–1970, the 1973–1975, and the 1981–1982 recessions. The results are robust to a range of alternative linear and nonlinear specifications. Our evidence provides some empirical support for the role of nonfundamental rational expectations in economic fluctuations.

This paper analyzes the empirical interdependecies among asset returns, real activity, and inflation from multicountry and international points of view. We find that innovations in nominal stock returns are not significantly related to inflation or real activity, that the U.S. term structure of interest rates predicts both domestic and foreign inflation rates and domestic future real activity, and that innovations in inflation do not significantly affect real activity. An interpretation of the dynamics and some policy implications of the results are provided.