We study the interaction between dispersed and sticky information by assuming that firms receive private noisy signals about the state in an otherwise standard model of price setting with sticky information. We compute the unique equilibrium of the game induced by the firms’ pricing decisions and derive the resulting Phillips curve. The main effect of dispersion is to magnify the immediate impact of a given shock when the degree of stickiness is small. Its effect on persistence is minor: even when information is largely dispersed, a substantial amount of informational stickiness is needed to generate persistence in aggregate prices and inflation.

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between unconventional monetary policy (UMP), measured through shadow interest rates, and housing markets for the USA, the United Kingdom, Japan, and the Euro Area using a set of time-varying parameter vector autoregressive models. Our findings suggest that the monetary policy transmission mechanism to the housing market has not changed with the implementation of quantitative easing or forward guidance for most economies considered. A counterfactual exercise provides some evidence that UMP has been particularly successful in dampening the consequences of the financial crisis on housing markets in the USA, while the effects are more muted in the remaining countries considered.

This paper develops a theory of human capital to investigate the role of early childhood health in explaining the large and persistent schooling gaps observed within and across countries. Quantitative analysis using the theory and data from 98 countries shows that early health inequalities within developingcountries strongly amplify later schooling gaps— counterfactually eliminating inequalities reduces schooling Ginis by an average of 18% in developing economies but has only mild effects in richer countries. Moreover, early health inequalities are found to be an important source of schooling variation across countries— universally equating early health to the average US level reduces the cross-country standard deviation of average schooling attainment by over 40%. Additional policy experiments reveal that the gains from early health interventions tend to be amplified by later educational investments in developing economies, while those targeting school-aged children may be limited if early health conditions are ignored.

We show that path dependency in economic development can emerge in a model where social distance affects capital accumulation. This effect works through the impact of social interactions on individuals’ incentives to invest. Social distance evolves intergenerationally, as the process of social interactions with people from different backgrounds generates familiarity and experiences that are bequeathed to the next generation, thus shaping their perceptions and opinions about “outsiders.” A key result is the possibility of alienation among people who belong to different groups, if social distance is above a threshold. The initial conditions with respect to social distance and the capital stock can both be critical in determining the economy’s long-term prospects.

Even for the standard skill-biased technological change (SBTC) literature, the generic rise in the skill premium in the face of the relative increase in skilled workers since the 1980s seems a little puzzling. We develop a general equilibrium SBTC growth model that allows the dominance of either the price channel or the market-size channel mechanism through which network spillovers affect the technological-knowledge bias and, thus, the paths of intra-country wage inequality. The proposed mechanisms can accommodate facts not explained by the earlier literature.

Unlike most existing studies on the endogenous institutions, literature on theoretical growth has traditionally considered institutions as exogenous. In this paper, a learn-by-doing-based growth model is adopted and integrated with endogenous institutions to study how economic agents’ incentives engage in institutional improvements or exploit institutional imperfections. From maximization of identical agent utility, the economic growth model includes capital, labor, technology, and institutions. The study is to analyze the effect of institutions on the stability of equilibrium, balanced economic growth path, and convergence rate in the process of economic growth. It is concluded that, firstly, improving institutions is a decisive factor for China’s high economic growth rate for the past years; secondly, improving institutions can increase the capital stock per unit of effective labor in steady state; thirdly, imperfect institutions can explain income difference among countries; and finally, technology plays a key role only under the conditions adapting to institutions.

We highlight a state variable misspecification with one accepted method to implement stochastic volatility (SV) in DSGE models when transforming the nonlinear state-innovation dynamics to its linear representation. Although the technique is more efficient numerically, we show that it is not exact but only serves as an approximation when the magnitude of SV is small. Not accounting for this approximation error may induce substantial spurious volatility in macroeconomic series, which could lead to incorrect inference about the performance of the model. We also show that, by simply lagging and expanding the state vector, one can obtain the correct state-space specification. Finally, we validate our augmented implementation approach against an established alternative through numerical simulation.

This paper presents a new testing method for the scapegoat model of exchange rates. A number of steps are implemented to determine whether macro-fundamentals are scapegoats for the evolution of exchange rates. Estimation is conducted using a Bayesian Gibbs sampling approach applied to eight countries (five developed and three emerging) versus the USA over the period 2002Q1–2014Q4. The macro-fundamentals that we consider are real GDP growth, the inflation rate, the long-run nominal interest rate, and the current account to GDP ratio. We calculate the posterior probabilities that these macro-fundamentals are scapegoats. For the inflation rate, these probabilities are considerably higher than the imposed prior probabilities of ½ in five out of eight countries (in particular, the Anglo-Saxon economies).

Monthly disaggregated US data from 1978 to 2016 reveal that exposure to news on inflation and monetary policy helps to explain inflation expectations. This remains true when controlling for household personal characteristics, perceptions of government policy effectiveness, expectations of future interest and unemployment rates, and sentiment. We find an asymmetric impact of news on inflation and monetary policy after 1983, with news on rising inflation and easier monetary policy having a stronger effect in comparison to news on lowering inflation and tightening monetary policy. Our results indicate the impact on inflation expectations of monetary policy news manifested through consumer sentiment during the lower bound period.