We study the sensitivity of the inflation–growth trade-off in monetary growth models to the introduction of search frictions in the labor market. We consider three types of endogenous growth models: (1) the AK model, (2) the Lucas supply-side model, and (3) the two-sector model of Jones and Manuelli. We show that the effects depend on the specification of the cash-in-advance constraint and the magnitude of the semi-interest elasticity of the income velocity. For the AK model, economic growth increases with higher inflation. For the other two models, growth declines for the case of the standard cash-in-advance constraint on consumption, whereas it either increases or decreases if money is introduced, as in the cash–credit good economy of Dotsey and Ireland, depending on the semi-interest elasticity of the income velocity. The welfare effects of inflation are shown to be economically significant in the presence of search unemployment.

This paper shows that limited asset-market participation (LAMP) generates an extra inflation bias when the fiscal and the monetary authority play strategically. A fully redistributive fiscal policy eliminates the extra inflation bias, but at the cost of reducing Ricardians' welfare. A fiscal authority that redistributes income only partially reduces the inflation bias, but raises government spending. Although a fully conservative monetary policy is necessary to get price stability, it implies a reduction in liquidity-constrained consumers' welfare, in the absence of redistributive fiscal policies. Finally, under a crisis scenario, none of the policy regimes is able to avoid the fall in economic activity when the increase in the fraction of LAMP is coupled with a negative technology shock, whereas optimal policy can avoid recession when it responds to the increase in LAMP proportion alone.

This paper estimates univariate and multivariate trend-cycle decomposition models of GDP and considers the novel possibility of regime switches in the growth of potential output. We compute both ex post and real-time estimates of the output gap to check the stability of our estimates to GDP data revisions. We find some evidence of regime changes in the growth of potential output during the recessions experienced by the euro area. We also run a forecasting experiment to evaluate the predictive power of the output gap for inflation. The benchmark autoregressive model tends to obtain the best forecasts for one-quarter-ahead forecasts, but the output gap measures help to forecast inflation for longer horizons.

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.

Currency fluctuations are an important determinant of labor market dynamics. Vice versa, relative labor costs affect real exchange rate dynamics. The optimal choice of exchange rate regimes cannot neglect this nexus. We assess such a choice using a two-country model with frictional labor markets. The monetary authority faces a tension between the classical insulating property of floating exchange rates and the destabilizing effects of currency fluctuations on (relative) job flows. Results show that the second motive is important: optimal monetary policy prescribes (some) response to the exchange rate. We also reexamine the conditions for optimal policy in a currency area whose members experience asymmetries in labor market institutions.

Aggregate hours worked per working-age person decreased in Austria by 25% from 1970 to 2005. During the same time period, taxes increased, particularly the effective marginal tax rate on labor income. Using a standard general equilibrium growth model with taxes, I quantitatively assess the role played by the evolution of taxes in the evolution of hours worked in Austria. The model accounts for 76% of the observed decrease in hours worked per working-age person. My results are in line with other studies, which find taxes play an important role in explaining aggregate hours worked.

This paper investigates the impact of institutions on the dollarization of the domestic banking system using a unique policy experiment: the process of accession of countries to the European Union (EU). Using a dynamic factor model, we decompose fluctuations in financial dollarization for 24 transition economies into a common factor, an EU factor, a non-EU factor, and country-specific factors. The EU factor, which proxies for improvements in institutions under the set criteria for eventual membership, reveals the importance of institutions for the extent of financial dollarization over time. The results also indicate the asymmetric impact of improved institutions on the domestic bank's balance sheets by inducing higher loan dollarization and lower deposit dollarization. The relative importance of the EU factor to the financial dollarization of a country is associated to the degree of comovement of its business cycle with that of the EU.

This paper presents a theory of the labor market matching process in terms of incentive-based, two-sided search among heterogeneous agents. The matching process is decomposed into its two component stages: the contact stage, in which job searchers make contact with employers, and the selection stage, in which they decide whether to match. We construct a theoretical model explaining two-sided selection through microeconomic incentives. Firms face adjustment costs in responding to heterogeneous variations in the characteristics of workers and jobs. Matches and separations are described through firms' job offer and firing decisions and workers' job acceptance and quit decisions. Our calibrated model for the United States can account for important empirical regularities, such as the large volatilities of labor market variables, that the conventional matching model cannot.

We study optimal monetary stabilization policy in a DSGE model with microfounded money demand. A search externality creates “congestion,” which causes aggregate output to be inefficient. Because of the informational frictions that give rise to money, households are unable to insure themselves perfectly against aggregate shocks. This gives rise to a welfare-improving role for monetary policy that works by adjusting the nominal interest rate in response to these shocks. Optimal policy is determined by choosing a set of state-contingent nominal interest rates to maximize the expected lifetime utility of the agents subject to the constraints of being an equilibrium.

The performance of unit root tests on simulated series is compared, using the business-cycle model of Chang et al. [Journal of Money, Credit and Banking 39(6), 1357–1373 (2007)] as a data-generating process. Overall, Monte Carlo simulations show that the efficient unit root tests of Ng and Perron (NP) [Econometrica 69(6), 1519–1554 (2001)] are more powerful than the standard unit root tests. These efficient tests are frequently able (i) to reject the unit-root hypothesis on simulated series, using the best specification of the business-cycle model found by Chang et al., in which hours worked are stationary with adjustment costs, and (ii) to reduce the gap between the theoretical impulse response functions and those estimated with a Structural VAR model. The results of Monte Carlo simulations show that the hump-shaped behavior of data can explain the divergence between unit root tests.

This paper deals with the development of growth models from the optimal one-sector neoclassical approach of Cass–Malinvaud–Koopmans vintage, through two-sector, multisector, and turnpike models, and proceeds to discuss their displacement by the single-sector stochastic growth model. We also focus on the definitional shift regarding the turnpike. This is done by surveying both unpublished and published work by Uzawa, Cass, Koopmans, and McKenzie regarding growth and the turnpike, the cross-fertilization between them, and how this brought about the conflation of optimality and the turnpike, and the metamorphosis of the notion of the turnpike, from that of Dorfman–Samuelson Solow, to the Koopmans–McKenzie “amalgam” of models. Finally, the appearance of endogenous growth models, based on the work of Shell and Uzawa, is dealt with.

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.

This paper offers a reinterpretation of the Fed's time-varying implicit inflation target, based on two considerations. The first is that the need to alleviate the burden of distortionary taxation may justify the choice of a positive inflation rate. The second is based on compelling evidence that the degree of price and wage indexation falls with trend inflation. In fact, we find that a proper characterization of the joint evolution of fiscal variables and nominal rigidities has a strong impact on the Ramsey optimal policies, implying optimal inflation dynamics that are consistent with the observed evolution of U.S. trend inflation. By contrast, tax policies have been too lax, especially at the time of the controversial Bush tax cuts.

This paper investigates the effects of R&D subsidies on aggregate product variety and endogenous productivity growth without scale effects. In a two-country model with imperfect knowledge diffusion, the larger country has a greater share of firms with higher productivity levels. The concentration of relatively productive firms increases knowledge flows between firms, causing an increase in firm-level employment in innovation. Accordingly, the aggregate growth rate is higher when counties are asymmetric than when they are similar in size. The larger scale of firm-level innovation activity reduces market entry, however, and aggregate product variety falls. In this framework, national R&D subsidies have positive effects on the industry share, relative productivity, and wage rate of the implementing country. If the smaller country introduces an R&D subsidy, aggregate product variety rises and productivity growth falls. If the larger country introduces an R&D subsidy, productivity growth rises, but aggregate product variety may rise or fall.

This paper explores the hypothesis that the sources of economic and financial crises differ from those of noncrisis business cycle fluctuations. We employ Markov-switching Bayesian vector autoregressions (MS-BVARs) to gather evidence about the hypothesis on a long annual U.S. sample running from 1890 to 2010. The sample covers several episodes useful for understanding U.S. economic and financial history, which generate variation in the data that aids in identifying credit supply and demand shocks. We identify these shocks within MS-BVARs by tying credit supply and demand movements to inside money and its intertemporal price. The model space is limited to stochastic volatility (SV) in the errors of the MS-BVARs. Of the 15 MS-BVARs estimated, the data favor a MS-BVAR in which economic and financial crises and noncrisis business cycle regimes recur throughout the long annual sample. The best-fitting MS-BVAR also isolates SV regimes in which shocks to inside money dominate aggregate fluctuations.

Habit formation is a fixture of contemporary new Keynesian models. The vast majority assume that agents form habits strictly over consumption of an aggregate good, leaving open the question of whether it might be preferable to have them form habits over differentiated products instead–an arrangement known as deep habits. I answer this question by estimating a model that nests both habit concepts as special cases. Estimates reveal that the data favor a specification in which consumption habits are stronger at the product level than at the aggregate level. A mix of significance tests and simulation results indicate that including deep habits greatly improves model fit, most notably with regard to inflation dynamics.

The transcript of a panel discussion marking three decades of the real business cycle approach to macroeconomic analysis as manifested in Kydland and Prescott's “Time to Build” (Econometrica, 1982) and Long and Plosser's “Real Business Cycles” (Journal of Political Economy, 1983). The panel consists of Edward Prescott, Finn Kydland, Charles Plosser, John Long, Thomas Cooley, and Gary Hansen. The discussion is moderated by Sumru Altug and Warren Young. The panel touches on a wide variety of issues related to real business cycle models, including their history and methodology, starting with the work of Prescott and Kydland at Carnegie Tech and Plosser and Long at Rochester; their applications to policy; and their role in the recent financial crisis and likely future.

The panel discussion was held in a session sponsored by the History of Economics Society at the Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) meetings in the Randle A Room of the Manchester Grand Hyatt Hotel in San Diego, California.

We use a two-sector neoclassical open economy model with traded and nontraded goods and endogenous markups to investigate the effects of temporary fiscal shocks. One central finding is that theory can be reconciled with evidence once we allow for endogenous markups and assume that the traded sector is more capital-intensive than the nontraded sector. More precisely, although both ingredients are essential to produce the real exchange rate depreciation, only the second ingredient is necessary to account for the simultaneous decline in investment and the current account, in line with the evidence.

Recent U.S. evidence suggests that the response of labor share to a productivity shock is characterized by countercyclicality and overshooting. These findings cannot be reconciled easily with existing business cycle models. We extend the Diamond–Mortensen–Pissarides model of search in the labor market by considering strategic interactions among an endogenous number of producers, which leads to countercyclical price markups. Although Nash bargaining delivers a countercyclical labor share, we show that countercyclical markups are fundamental to address the overshooting. On the contrary, we find that real wage rigidity does not seem to play a crucial role in the dynamics of the labor share of income.