The reduction in international trade has been more than the reduction in economic activity during the 2008 financial crisis, against the one-to-one relationship between them implied by standard trade models. This so-called the Great Trade Collapse (GTC) has been investigated extensively in the literature resulting in alternative competing stories as potential explanations. By introducing and estimating a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model using 18 quarterly series from the USA, including those that represent the competing stories, this paper evaluates the contribution of each story to GTC. The results show that retail inventories have contributed the most to the collapse and the corresponding recovery, followed by protectionist policies, intermediate-input trade, and trade finance. Productivity and demand shocks have played negligible roles.

Within the seminal asset-pricing model by Brock and Hommes (Journal of Economic Dynamics Control 22, 1235–1274, 1998), heterogeneous boundedly rational agents choose between a fixed number of expectation rules to forecast asset prices. However, agents’ heterogeneity is limited in the sense that they typically switch between a representative technical and a representative fundamental expectation rule. Here, we generalize their framework by considering that all agents follow their own time-varying technical and fundamental expectation rules. Estimating our model using the method of simulated moments reveals that it is able to explain the statistical properties of the daily and monthly behavior of the S&P500 quite well. Moreover, our analysis reveals that heterogeneity is not only a realistic model property but clearly helps to explain the intricate dynamics of financial markets.

We study an impact of the financial intermediation on economic growth. We assume the simple model of the economic growth in the form of an autonomous dynamical system with a financial sector represented by banks and real sector represented by households and firms. We assume that financial intermediation services are described by financial intermediation technology which is a function depending on the share of labor employed by banks. Investments realized by firms depend not only on savings accumulated by banks but also on financial intermediation technology. We obtain a three-dimensional dynamical system and analyze the existence of a saddle equilibrium in the growth process associated with financial intermediation. Using mathematical methods of dynamical systems, we analyze growth paths, and we study the stationary states of the system and their stability. We found that equilibrium is reached only by trajectories located on two submanifolds. The resulting analysis provides an insight into the saddle solution with a stable incoming separatrix lying on one of the invariant manifolds.

In this paper, we are motivated by the fact that little is known about the relative performance of broad and narrow Divisia monetary aggregates, and by recent work that tests and rejects the appropriateness of the aggregation assumptions that underlie the various monetary aggregates published by the Federal Reserve as well as a large number of monetary asset groupings suggested by earlier studies. We present a comprehensive comparison of narrow versus broad Divisia monetary aggregates within three classes of empirical models. We compute correlations between the cyclical components of Divisia monetary aggregates at different levels of aggregation and the cyclical component of industrial production. We test for Granger causality running from the Divisia aggregates to industrial production and various other measures of real economic activity. We also reestimate a structural vector autoregression based on earlier work by Leeper and Roush [(2003) Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking 35, 1217–1256] and Belongia and Ireland [(2015) Journal of Business and Economic Statistics 33, 255–269; (2016) Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 48, 1223–1266], modifying that earlier work using monthly rather than quarterly data and extending it, both using broad as well as narrower Divisia monetary aggregates and by allowing for Generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) behavior in the structural shocks.

We present an analysis of interregional consumption risk sharing in Russia between 1999 and 2009 using novel estimation methods. In addition to standard fixed-effects panel estimations, we use system and difference GMM estimators to reflect time dynamic properties and possible endogeneity between output and consumption. Furthermore, we apply spatial models that control for spatial dependence across regions. The results show that regional consumption deviations from the national average are highly persistent in time and space. Nevertheless, the regional consumption risk sharing in Russia is relatively high with 70%–90% of idiosyncratic risk being smoothed. Finally, fiscal policy and the degree of financial development appear to contribute to the consumption smoothing.

Why do governments in developing economies favor roads rather than schools in public investment scale-ups? We study this question using a dynamic general equilibrium model and argue that the different pace at which roads and schools contribute to economic growth, public debt intolerance, and political myopia are central to this decision. In a thought experiment with a large return differential in favor of schools, a benevolent government would intuitively devote the majority of an investment scale-up to them. However, the fraction of schools chosen by the government falls with increasing levels of debt intolerance and political myopia. In particular, political myopia is a meaningful explanation for the observed result to the extent that an extremely myopic government would not invest in schools at all.

This paper studies the implications of price flexibility on output volatility under menu costs and finds price flexibility to be output-destabilizing under supply shocks, but not necessarily so under demand shocks. We illustrate that such a result hinges on the extent to which firms can adjust along both the intensive and the extensive margins, the latter of which is often absent in the literature.

This paper examines the mechanisms that determine the “vanishing effect of finance” on economic growth found in recent studies. Based on both current (171 countries, 1960–2014) and historical (21 OECD countries, 1870–2009) data, the results show that financial development promotes growth in poorer countries by increasing education and investment, and by decreasing fertility. The relevance of these transmission channels declines when countries become richer. The growth effect of the financial sector in high-income countries primarily depends on new ideas and potentials for innovation projects. Consequently, the major decline in factor productivity growth since the early 2000s has contributed to the reduction in the financial sector’s average effect on growth.

The present article presents novel results on the Ramsey–Cass–Koopmans growth model. It is shown that the shadow price of capital goes to infinity as the capital stock goes to zero even if all functions are bounded with finite derivatives and that imposing the Inada condition of infinite derivative of the per capita production function at zero stock is irrelevant. It is also shown that unless marginal utility at zero consumption is infinity, there will be a non-empty interval where the Keynes–Ramsey rule does not hold. The paper also shows that the stable saddle path in a phase diagram with the state variable and the shadow price has an unrecognized economic interpretation that enables us to illustrate the value function as the integral of the stable saddle path.

The aim of this research is to build on a theory for explaining economic development in a (neoclassical) growth model with endogenous fertility. The economy is inhabited by overlapping generations of rational and identical individuals and identical competitive firms producing with a constant-returns-to-scale technology and no externalities. From a theoretical perspective, the distinguishing feature of this work is that endogenous fertility per se explains the existence of low- and high-development regimes. It provides different reasons (history driven or expectations driven) why some countries enter development trajectories with high GDP and low fertility and others experience underperformances with low GDP and high fertility. The model is also capable to reproduce fertility fluctuations and explain the baby busts and baby booms observed in the last century in some developed countries.

We provide aggregate macroeconomic evidence on how, in the long run, a diverse degree of complexity in production may affect not only the rate of economic growth, but also the correlation between the latter, population growth and the monopolistic (intermediate) markups. For a sample of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, we find that the impact of population change on economic growth is slightly positive. According to our theoretical model, this implies that the losses due to more complexity in production are lower than the corresponding specialization gains. Using a finite mixture model, we also classify the countries in the sample and verify for each cluster the impact that the population growth rate and the intermediate sector’s markups exert on the 5-year average real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate.

This paper compares the conventional Calvo and Rotemberg price adjustments at the zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal interest rates. Although the two pricing mechanisms are equivalent to a first-order approximation around the zero-inflation steady state, they produce very different results, based on a fully-nonlinear method. Specifically, the nominal interest rate hits the ZLB more frequently in the Calvo model than in the Rotemberg model. At the ZLB, deflation is larger and recessions are more severe in the Calvo model. The main reason for the difference in results is that price adjustment costs show up in the resource constraints in the Rotemberg. When they are rebated to the household, the two models behave similarly.

We study a model in which parents care about the economic and social status of their offspring. The chances of an individual achieving social status depends on innate traits, that is, IQ, ability, social and cultural environment, and other price-insensitive endowments, passed on by their parents, on human capital investments and on chance events. Parents can, through human capital investments, increase the offspring’s probability of climbing the social ladder, although they cannot borrow against the children’s perspective earning. Consequently, income and trait heterogeneity are the determinants of unequal opportunities and of intergenerational mobility.

This paper presents a pure currency economy with a nondegenerate distribution of money holdings in which, as conjectured by Wallace (Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, 259–274, 2014), there are transfer schemes financed by money creation that improve ex ante welfare relative to no-intervention. Differently from what was advocated by Wallace, pecuniary-like externalities, rather than the need to share liquidity risks, are responsible for the result.

This paper compares different implementations of monetary policy in a new-Keynesian setting. We can show that a shift from Ramsey optimal policy under short-term commitment (based on a negative feedback mechanism) to a Taylor rule (based on a positive feedback mechanism) corresponds to a Hopf bifurcation with opposite policy advice and a change of the dynamic properties. This bifurcation occurs because of the ad hoc assumption that interest rate is a forward-looking variable when policy targets (inflation and output gap) are forward-looking variables in the new-Keynesian theory.

In the context of a prototypical New Keynesian model, this paper examines the theoretical interrelations between two tractable formulations of progressive taxation on labor income versus (i) the equilibrium degree of nominal-wage rigidity as well as (ii) the resulting volatilities of hours worked and output in response to a monetary shock. In sharp contrast to the traditional stabilization view, we analytically show that linearly progressive taxation always operates like an automatic destabilizer which leads to higher cyclical fluctuations within the macroeconomy. We also obtain the same business cycle destabilization result under continuously progressive taxation if the initial degree of tax progressivity is sufficiently low.

This study explores the welfare effects of patent protection in a Romer-type expanding variety model in which R&D and capital accumulation are both engines of growth. It shows that the comparison between the productivity of R&D and that of capital plays an important role in the welfare analysis. When the relative productivity of R&D compared to capital is high (low), social welfare takes an inverted-U shape for (is decreasing in) the strength of patent protection, and the welfare-maximizing degree of patent protection is no greater than (identical to) the growth-maximizing degree. Moreover, the model is calibrated to the US economy and the numerical results support these welfare implications.

The period of low interest rates since the global financial crisis provides a unique opportunity to examine monetary policy reaction functions near the zero lower bound (ZLB). Using smooth transition regressions for the Euro area and a panel of industrialized countries we show that central banks anticipate the ZLB by less aggressive policies in its vicinity while we do not find a significant difference between both regimes for the US.

This paper analyzes the effect of the sectoral composition of government spending on the stability properties of a two-sector economy with a progressive tax structure. The results suggest that indeterminacy is more likely to occur if the fraction of government spending on consumption goods increases. This study also finds that, under progressive taxation, a sufficiently high public-consumption share is needed to generate indeterminacy. It is shown that, with the benchmark parameterization, a higher fraction of government spending on consumption goods needs to be implemented with a more progressive tax scheme to stabilize the economy. Moreover, it is emphasized that belief-driven economic fluctuations may indeed be a feature of the U.S. economy.