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Working Paper
Bretton Woods and the Reconstruction of Europe
The Bretton Woods international financial system, which was in place from roughly 1949 to 1973, is the most significant modern policy experiment to attempt to simultaneously manage international payments, international capital flows, and international currency values. This paper uses an international macroeconomic accounting methodology to study the Bretton Woods system and finds that it: (1) significantly distorted both international and domestic capital markets and hence the accumulation and allocation of capital; (2) significantly slowed the reconstruction of Europe, albeit while limiting ...
Working Paper
Bad Investments and Missed Opportunities? Postwar Capital Flows to Asia and Latin America
Since 1950, the economies of East Asia grew rapidly but received little international capital, while Latin America received considerable international capital even as their economies stagnated. The literature typically explains the failure of capital to flow to high growth regions as resulting from international capital market imperfections. This paper proposes a broader thesis that country-specific distortions, such as domestic labor and capital market distortions, also impact capital flows. We develop a DSGE model of Asia, Latin America, and the Rest of the World that features an ...
Journal Article
Commentary on \\"Model fit and model selection\\"
Working Paper
The Consequences of Bretton Woods’ International Capital Controls and the High Value of Geopolitical Stability
This paper quantifies the positive and normative effects of international capital controls on global and regional economic activity under The Bretton Woods international financial system and thereafter. A three region, open economy, DSGE capital flows accounting framework consisting of the U.S., Western Europe, and the Rest of the World, is developed to identify capital controls and quantify their impact. We find these controls had large positive and normative effects by restricting international capital flows. Counterfactual analyses show world output would have been 0.6% higher had there ...
Journal Article
Short-run effects on money when some prices are sticky
Working Paper
Foreclosure delay and U.S. unemployment
Through a purely positive lens, we study and document the growing trend of mortgagors who skip mortgage payments as an extra source of "informal" unemployment insurance during the 2007 recession and the subsequent recovery. In a dynamic model, we capture this behavior by treating both delinquency and foreclosure not as one period events, but rather as protracted and potentially reversible episodes that influence job search behavior and wage acceptance decisions. With a relatively conservative parameterization, we find that the observed foreclosure delays increase the unemployment rate by an ...
Journal Article
Back to the future with Keynes
This article analyzes Keynes's "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"- an essay presenting Keynes's views about economic growth into the 21st century - from the perspective of modern growth theory. I find that the implicit theoretical framework used by Keynes to form his expectations about the 21st-century world economy is remarkably close to modern growth models, featuring a stable steady-state growth path driven by technological progress. On the other hand, Keynes's forecast of employment in the 21st century is far off the mark, reflecting a mistaken view that the income ...
Working Paper
Aggregate hours worked in OECD countries: new measurement and implications for business cycles
We build a dataset of quarterly hours worked for 14 OECD countries. We document that hours are as volatile as output, that a large fraction of labor adjustment takes place along the intensive margin, and that the volatility of hours relative to output has increased over time. We use these data to reassess the Great Recession and prior recessions. The Great Recession in many countries is a puzzle in that labor wedges are small, while those in the U.S. Great Recession - and those in previous European recessions - are much larger.
Report
Re-examining the contributions of money and banking shocks to the U.S. Great Depression
This paper quantitatively evaluates the hypothesis that deflation can account for much of the Great Depression (1929?33). We examine two popular explanations of the Depression: (1) The ?high wage? story, according to which deflation, combined with imperfectly flexible wages, raised real wages and reduced employment and output. (2) The ?bank failure? story, according to which deflationary money shocks contributed to bank failures and to a reduction in the efficiency of financial intermediation, which in turn reduced lending and output. We evaluate these stories using general equilibrium ...
Journal Article
How capital taxes harm economic growth: Britain versus the United States
The different methods used by Great Britain and the United States to finance World War II had a significant impact on postwar economic growth in the two countries. In this article, Lee Ohanian discusses the evolution of war-finance policies in the two countries and examines how the different approaches?taxing capital income versus issuing government debt?led to differences in economic performance after the war.