Recent empirical work on globalization and inflation analyzes multicountry data sets in panel and/or cross-section frameworks and reaches inconclusive results. This paper highlights their shortcomings and reexamines the issue utilizing heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques that allow for cross-section heterogeneity and dependence. It finds that in a sample of developing countries globalization of both trade and finance, on the average, exerts a significant and positive effect on inflation, whereas in a sample of developed countries there is, on the average, no significant impact of openness. Neither type of openness disciplines inflationary policy. Despite this, there are large variations in the effect across countries, due possibly to differences in the quality of political institutions, central bank independence, the exchange-rate regimes, financial development, and/or legal traditions.

This paper develops a dynamic dual-economy model and examines how the long-run outcome of an economy depends on the initial distribution of wealth and sectoral productivity. It is shown that, for fast transformation into a developed economy, the initial distribution must be such that extreme poverty is not prevalent so that most people can take education to acquire basic skills and the size of the “middle class” is large enough so that an adequate number of people can access education to acquire advanced skills. Both conditions seem to have held in successful East Asian nations, where, as in the model economy undergoing such transformation, the fraction of workers with advanced skills rose greatly and inequalities between these workers and others fell over time. In contrast, if the former condition holds but the latter does not, which would be the case for many nations falling into the “middle income trap,” consistent with facts, the fraction of workers with basic skills and the share of the modern sector rise, but inequality between workers with advanced skills and with basic skills worsens and the traditional sector persists for long periods. If the former condition does not hold, which would be true for the poorest economies, the dual structure and high inequality between workers without basic skills and others persist for very long periods. Consistently, Hanushek and Woessmann (2012) [Hanushek, Eric A. and Ludger Woessmann (2012) Do better schools lead to more growth? Cognitive skills, economic outcomes, and causation. Journal of Economic Growth 17, 267–321] find that the share of students with basic skills and that of top performance have significant effects on economic growth that are complementary to each other.

We model an industry that supplies intermediate goods in a growing economy. Agents can choose whether to provide labor or to become firm owners and compete in the industry. The idea that entry is determined through occupational choice has major implications for the economy's dynamics. Particularly, the results show that economic dynamics are governed by endogenous volatility in the determination of both the number of industry entrants and in the growth rate of output. Consequently, we argue that occupational choice and the structural characteristics of the endogenous market structure can act as both the impulse source and the propagation mechanism of economic fluctuations.

This paper studies how search externalities and wage bargaining distort vacancy creation and the allocation of workers to jobs in markets with two-sided heterogeneity. To do so, I propose a model of a frictional labor market where heterogeneous workers decide which job to look for and firms decide which technology to adopt. At equilibrium, there is perfect segmentation across sectors, which is determined by a unique threshold of workers' productivity. This threshold is inefficient because of participation and composition externalities. The Pigouvian tax scheme that decentralizes optimal sorting shows that these externalities have opposite signs. Furthermore, their relative strength depends on the distribution of workers' skills, so that when there are many (few) skilled workers, too many (few) high-technology jobs are created.

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.

This paper develops an overlapping-generations model in which agents make educational and fertility decisions under life-cycle considerations and retirement from work is distinguished from death. Gains in adult longevity induce agents to decrease fertility, invest in education, and achieve higher income in order to save more for retirement. Even if working life is shortened by early retirement, this mechanism works as long as adult longevity increases sufficiently. Our model can explain the positive effect of life expectancy on education without contradicting the fact that working life length has not substantially increased, because of retirement. We also provide new insights into the interaction between fertility and retirement decisions.

We study the dynamics of poverty and health in a model of endogenous growth and rational health behavior. Population health depends on the prevalence of infectious diseases that can be avoided through costly prevention. The incentive to do so comes from the negative effects of ill health on the quality and quantity of life. The model can generate a poverty trap where infectious diseases cycle between high and low prevalence. These cycles originate from the rationality of preventive behavior in contrast to the predator–prey dynamics of epidemiological models. We calibrate the model to reflect sub-Saharan Africa's recent economic recovery and analyze policy alternatives. Unconditional transfers are found to improve welfare relative to conditional health-based transfers: at low income levels, income growth (quality of life) is valued more than improvements to health (quantity of life).

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.

This study examines the cause of higher (5% or more) economic growth rates in countries around the world over the past 35 years. It explores the long- and short-term relationships between GDP and government expenditures in these countries. A panel data set of 60 countries over the period from 1976 to 2010 is deployed to implement pooled mean group estimation. Countries are divided into three economic growth rate groups: high, middle, and low. Panel-based/error correction models are used to estimate long-term equilibrium relationships and short-term dynamics between government expenditures and GDP growth rates. Results indicate that the hypothesis of a common long-term elasticity and a short-term dynamic relationship between GDP growth rates and government expenditures cannot be rejected for high group countries, whereas for middle group countries this is true only for the long term, not for the short term. No long-term or short-term relationship between these two variables exists for low-growth-rate countries.

Term premia are shown to provide crucial information for discriminating among alternative sources of change in the economy, namely shifts in the variance of structural shocks and in monetary policy. These sources have been identified as competing explanations for time-varying features of major industrial economies during the 1980s and 1990s. Although hardly distinguishable through the lens of standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models, lower nonpolicy shock variances and “tighter” monetary policy regimes imply higher and lower term premia, respectively. As a result, moving to tighter monetary policy alone cannot explain the improved U.S. macroeconomic stability in the 1980s and 1990s: term premia would have shifted downward, a fact inconsistent with the evidence of higher premia from early 80s onward. Conversely, favorable shifts in nonpolicy innovation variance imply movements in term premia that are at least qualitatively consistent with historical patterns.

This paper develops a firm dynamics model augmented with an endogenous net-worth-building feature at the firm level and investigates how opportunities for entrepreneurs to accumulate wealth can mitigate the implications of limited enforceability for resource allocation, productivity, and macroeconomic development. In the steady-state equilibrium of the model, financially constrained entrepreneurs select short-term investment projects because short-term investment enhances net-worth building and relaxes credit constraints. The limited contract enforceability suppresses macroeconomic output; however, entrepreneurial net-worth building offsets the per capita income losses. I calibrate the steady state of the model for the U.S. economy as a baseline and conduct quantitative exercises. The counterfactual simulations reveal that net-worth building could reduce, for instance, about two-thirds of the per capita income discrepancy between the United States and Brazil that can be attributed to limited enforcement. The theoretical and quantitative results from the paper are highly relevant to financial development and entrepreneurship policies implemented in developing countries.

This paper embeds labor market search frictions into a New Keynesian model with financial frictions. The econometric estimation establishes that labor market frictions substantially improve the empirical fit of the model. The effect of the interaction between labor and financial frictions on aggregate fluctuations depends on the nature of the shock. For monetary policy, technology, and entrepreneurial wealth shocks, labor market frictions amplify the effect of financial frictions, because robust changes in hiring lead to persistent movements in employment and return on capital that reinforce the original effect of financial frictions. For cost-push, labor supply, marginal efficiency of investment, and preference shocks, labor market frictions dampen the effect of financial frictions by reducing the real cost of repaying existing debt, which lowers the external finance premium.

Empirical studies find that expenditures on both durable and nondurable goods fall following a contractionary monetary policy shock. However, in standard two-sector models with staggered nondurable goods prices and flexible durable goods prices, consumption of durables rises whereas that of nondurables falls in response to a contractionary policy shock. To resolve this co-movement problem, I extend the model to include a realistic financial friction that firms must pay for their productive inputs prior to production, i.e., working capital, along with habit formation in nondurable goods consumption. Following a positive interest rate shock, the working capital channel raises production costs, thereby discouraging production of both durable and nondurable goods. Furthermore, habit formation induces households to smooth the growth rate of nondurable goods consumption, and hence mitigates the fall in the nondurable goods sector. The model solves the co-movement problem and successfully generates a more sensitive response in the durable goods sector, as observed in the data.

When producers are heterogeneous, the degree of competition between them affects aggregate output not only via markups and deadweight losses, but also through aggregate productivity due to specialization. As competition tightens, high-productivity producers gain market share at the cost of low-productivity ones, generating economic growth through increased aggregate productivity and capital accumulation, in line with what is observed empirically. Consequently, competition is not limited to reducing deadweight losses, and can play a greater role in economic growth and development than traditionally assumed. Economic growth spurs profits, which leads to entry and increased competition that generates growth, so competition provides a channel through which the economy generates growth internally. When strong enough, this channel can make the returns to scale in the inputs that the economy accumulates endogenously go from being decreasing to nondecreasing at the aggregate level, thus enabling endogenous growth. In fact, these returns to scale are determined endogenously in our model, and vary with the scale of production, the degree of producer heterogeneity, and the barriers to entry.

We develop a macroeconomic model in which the government does not guarantee to repay debt. We ask whether movements in the price of government bonds can be rationalized by lenders' unwillingness to fully roll over debt when the outstanding level of debt exceeds the government's repayment capacity. Investors do not support a Ponzi game in this case, but ration credit supply, thus forcing default at an endogenously determined fractional repayment rate. Interest rates on government bonds reflect expectations of this event. Numerical results show that default premia can emerge at moderately high debt-to-GDP ratios where even small changes in fundamentals lead to steeply rising interest rates. The behavior of risk premia broadly accords with recent observations for several European countries that experienced a worsening of fundamental fiscal conditions.

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.

In this paper we investigate the relationship between leverage and the level of economic activity in the United States, using quarterly data over the period 1951–2012. We address the question for five different measures of leverage—household leverage, nonfinancial firm leverage, commercial bank leverage, broker–dealer leverage, and shadow bank leverage—making a distinction between traditional banks and shadow banks, the latter being a consequence of financial innovation and deregulation in the financial services industry over the past 30 years. We investigate whether the relationship between leverage and the level of economic activity is nonlinear and asymmetric using slope-based tests as well as tests of the null hypothesis of symmetric impulse responses. Our results inform policymakers about the important distinction between traditional banks and the market-based financial intermediaries that have been at the center of the global financial crisis of 2007–2009. They also inform about the macroeconomic effects of the deleveraging process that began in 2008, as well as about the need for countercyclical macroprudential policies to reduce the procyclicality of the financial system.

This note studies the implications of the price reset hazard function for the monetary transmission mechanism of sticky price models. I first document some general analytical results that highlight the central role of the price (accumulative) distribution in linking the hazard function and the impulse response function. I find that nominal rigidity underlying increasing hazard functions is more successful than real rigidity in replicating realistic macro persistence. In addition, numerical simulations show that the interaction between the increasing hazard function and the real rigidity provides a powerful propagation mechanism for monetary shocks.