Consider the problem of a benevolent government that needs to finance the provision of a public good with distortionary taxes and cannot commit to policies beyond the current period. In such a case, public expenditure is inefficiently low. If the government further loses the ability to set tax rates before production in the period takes place, then it will not internalize how its policy choices distort current factor markets. Thus, to counterbalance the costs of future distortions, it increases public good provision. For a calibrated economy, removing within-period commitment implies a welfare gain worth half a percent of yearly consumption. A similar gain can be obtained if instead, capital depreciation is allowed to be fully deducted from taxable income.

This paper uses a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of a two-sector small open economy to analyze how the Maastricht criteria modify a fully credible optimal monetary policy in the Economic and Monetary Union accession countries. We show that if the country is not constrained by the criteria, optimal policy should stabilize fluctuations in PPI inflation, in the aggregate output gap, and in the domestic and international terms of trade. The optimal policy constrained permanently by the Maastricht criteria is characterized by reduced variability of the nominal exchange rate, CPI inflation, and the nominal interest rate and by lower optimal targets for CPI inflation and nominal interest rate. This policy results in higher variability and nonzero means for both PPI inflation and output gap, thus leading to additional, but small, welfare costs compared with the unconstrained policy.

This paper develops a general equilibrium model with a banking system and a reserves market and shows that (i) the macroeconomic stabilizing properties of the nominal interest rate rules change quite substantially when we move from a model without a banking system to one with a banking system and a reserves market; (ii) the interplay between fiscal and monetary policies, in particular inflation-indexed versus non-indexed bonds, is crucial in determining the macroeconomic stabilizing properties of monetary rules; (iii) active rules and passive rules perform equally in regard to their macroeconomic stabilizing properties; (iv) continuous- and discrete-time specifications deliver the same/different (in)determinacy results for both the labor-only model and the endogenous-capital model under forward-looking/current-looking rules; (v) the inclusion of physical investment narrows the indeterminacy region under forward-looking rules; and (vi) current-looking rules make equilibrium determinacy impossible for both the labor-only economy and the endogenous-capital economy. Economic intuitions are provided.

This paper investigates the international dimension of economic fluctuations and transmission of structural shocks by estimating a structural VAR model for the United States, the euro area, and Japan—the three largest economies—over the post-Bretton Woods period. The main findings are as follows: (1) Supply-side shocks (technology and supply-level shocks) explain most of the fluctuations in cross-country output deviations. (2) Real-demand shocks are the most important source of real-exchange-rate fluctuations. (3) Current account is usually influenced by all types of shocks, with technology shocks playing a stronger role. In particular, technology shocks play a prominent role in the existing global imbalance (the large external deficit of the United States). (4) Technology and supply-level shocks generate opposite-signed correlations between output differential and current account, whereas real and nominal-demand shocks generate opposite-signed correlations between real exchange rate and current account.

We develop a growth model where knowledge is embodied in individuals and diffused across sectors through labor mobility. The existence of labor mobility costs constrains mobility and thus generates labor misallocation. Different levels of labor misallocation imply different levels of exploitation of available knowledge and therefore different total factor productivity across countries. We derive a positive relationship between growth and labor mobility, which is consistent with the empirical evidence, by assuming aggregate constant returns to capital. We also analyze the short- and long-run effects of labor mobility costs in the case of decreasing returns to capital. It turns out that changes in mobility costs have larger economic effects when different types of workers have small rather than large complementarities. Finally, we show that different labor income taxes or labor market tightness imply different rates of labor mobility and therefore can explain differences in Gross Domestic Product across countries.

We focus on the interaction of frictions both at the firm level and in the banking sector in order to examine the transmission mechanism of the shocks and to reflect on the response of the monetary policy to increases in interest rate spreads, using DSGE models with financial frictions. However, VAR models are linear and the solutions of DSGEs are often linear approximations; hence they do not consider time variation in parameters that could account for inherent nonlinearities and capture the adaptive underlying structure of the economy, especially in crisis periods. A novel method for time-varying VAR models is introduced. As an extension to the standard homoskedastic TVP-VAR, we employ a Markov-switching heteroskedastic error structure. Overall, we conduct a comparative empirical analysis of the out-of-sample performance of simple and hybrid DSGE models against standard VARs, BVARs, FAVARs, and TVP-VARs, using data sets from the U.S. economy. We apply advanced Bayesian and quasi-optimal filtering techniques in estimating and forecasting the models.

A recent finding of the SVAR literature is that the response of hours worked to a (positive) technology shock depends on the assumed order of integration of the hours. In this work we relax this assumption, allowing fractional integration in hours and productivity. We find that the sign and magnitude of the estimated responses depend crucially on the identification assumptions employed. Although the responses of hours recovered with short-run (SR) restrictions are positive in all data sets, long-run (LR) identification results in negative, although sometimes not significant responses. We check the validity of these assumptions with the Sims procedure, concluding that both LR and SR are appropriate to recover responses in a fractionally integrated VAR. However, the application of the LR scheme always results in an increase in sampling uncertainty. Results also show that even the negative responses found in the data could still be compatible with real business cycle models.

It was always considered to be a major achievement of modern business cycle economics that it was solidly grounded in neoclassical growth theory. Preserving this joint foundation, however, imposes a discipline on the specification of models with variable capital utilization. In this note we show that conventional specifications of the depreciation cost of capital utilization and the labor supply elasticity, introduced into business cycle theory to generate a satisfactory amplification of shocks, entail counterfactual growth dynamics: the positive association between capital stock and GDP along the growth path turns negative. Across economies with access to the same technology, the economy with the lowest capital stock per capita is predicted to produce the highest output per capita. We compute lower and upper bounds for the involved elasticities between which these counterfactual dynamics are avoided.

Building on the time-varying-coefficient (TVC) model, we propose a generalization of the concept of cointegration, allowing for the possibility that a set of variables measured with error entails a nonlinear relationship with unknown functional form. Both the dependent and explanatory variables of this relationship may be nonstationary (not necessarily of unit-root type), but there exists a nonlinear combination of all these explanatory variables that completely explains all the variation in the dependent variable. The TVC model allows us to test for the presence of this generalized cointegration in the absence of knowledge of the true nonlinear functional form and the full set of explanatory variables. We present the basic stages of the technique and discuss in detail how the issues of nonstationarity and cointegration affect each stage of the TVC estimation procedure.