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Working Paper
Self-fulfilling credit cycles
This paper argues that self-fulfilling beliefs in credit conditions can generate endoge- nously persistent business cycle dynamics. We develop a tractable dynamic general equi- librium model in which heterogeneous firms face idiosyncratic productivity shocks. Capital from less productive firms is lent to more productive ones in the form of credit secured by collateral and also as unsecured credit based on reputation. A dynamic complemen- tarity between current and future credit constraints permits uncorrelated sunspot shocks to trigger persistent aggregate fluctuations in debt, factor ...
Journal Article
A Taylor Rule for Public Debt
Public debt is an important source of liquidity in economies facing shortages of private credit. It is also a bubble whose current price depends on expectations of what it will buy at future dates. In this article, the author studies how the government must balance the provision of sufficient liquidity against the risk of adverse expectations regarding future debt prices when private liquidity has dried up. The socially optimal balance is captured in a Taylor-like rule that sets a target for real public debt and manages expectations by overreacting to deviations from the target value. ...
Working Paper
Self-Fulfilling Credit Cycles
In U.S. data 1981?2012, unsecured firm credit moves procyclically and tends to lead GDP, while secured firm credit is acyclical; similarly, shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. In this paper we develop a tractable dynamic general equilibrium model in which unsecured firm credit arises from self-enforcing borrowing constraints, preventing an efficient capital allocation among heterogeneous firms. Unsecured credit rests on the value that borrowers attach to a good credit reputation which is a forward-looking ...
Journal Article
Monetary policy as equilibrium selection
Can monetary policy guide expectations toward desirable outcomes when equilibrium and welfare are sensitive to alternative, commonly held rational beliefs? This paper studies this question in an exchange economy with endogenous debt limits in which dynamic complementarities between dated debt limits support two Pareto-ranked steady states: a suboptimal, locally stable autarkic state and a constrained optimal, locally unstable trading state. The authors identify feedback policies that reverse the stability properties of the two steady states and ensure rapid convergence to the constrained ...
Journal Article
Credit Cycles and Business Cycles
Unsecured firm credit moves procyclically in the United States and tends to lead gross domestic product, while secured firm credit is acyclical. Shocks to unsecured firm credit explain a far larger fraction of output fluctuations than shocks to secured credit. This article surveys a tractable dynamic general equilibrium model in which constraints on unsecured firm credit preclude an efficient capital allocation among heterogeneous firms. Unsecured credit rests on the value that borrowers attach to a good credit reputation, which is a forward-looking variable. Self-fulfilling beliefs over ...
Working Paper
Incomplete Credit Markets and Monetary Policy
We study monetary policy when private credit markets are incomplete. The macroeconomy we study has a large private credit market, in which participant households use non-state contingent nominal contracts (NSCNC). A second, small group of households only uses cash, supplied by the monetary authority, and cannot participate in the credit market. There is an aggregate shock. We find that, despite the substantial heterogeneity, the monetary authority can provide for optimal risk-sharing in the private credit market and thus overcome the NSCNC friction via a counter-cyclical price level rule. The ...
Working Paper
The optimal inflation target in an economy with limited enforcement
We formulate the central bank's problem of selecting an optimal long-run inflation rate as the choice of a distorting tax by a planner who wishes to maximize discounted utility for a heterogeneous population of infinitely-lived households in an economy with constant aggregate income. Households are divided into cash agents, who store value in currency alone, and credit agents who have access to both currency and loans. The planner's problem is equivalent to choosing inflation and nominal rates consistent with a resource constraint along with an incentive constraint that ensures credit agents ...
Working Paper
Private and public circulating liabilities
Changes in the legal and technological environment in the U.S. have created the possibility of private banknote issue, or its electronic equivalent. We wish to understand the implications of this possibility for economic performance. Accordingly, we construct and analyze a dynamic general equilibrium model in which privately-issued liabilities may circulate, either by themselves, or alongside a stock of outside money. In each case we provide results on the existence and multiplicity of equilibria, and we characterize local dynamics in a neighborhood of a steady state. Our results support ...
Working Paper
Earnings and wealth inequality and income taxation: quantifying the tradeoffs of switching to a proportional income tax in the U.S.
This paper quantifies the steady-state aggregate, distributional, and mobility effects of switching the U.S. to a proportional income tax system.
Speech
The optimal inflation target in an economy with limited enforcement
Presented at Indiana University.