Search Results
Working Paper
Land-price dynamics and macroeconomic fluctuations
We argue that positive comovements between land prices and business investment are a driving force behind the broad impact of land-price dynamics on the macroeconomy. We develop an economic mechanism that captures the comovements by incorporating two key features into a DSGE model: we introduce land as a collateral asset in firms' credit constraints, and we identify a shock that drives most of the observed fluctuations in land prices. Our estimates imply that these two features combine to generate an empirically important mechanism that amplifies and propagates macroeconomic fluctuations ...
Working Paper
Financial development and long-run volatility trends
Countries with more developed financial markets tend to have significantly lower aggregate volatility. This relationship is also highly non-linear starting from a low level of financial development the reduction in aggregate volatility is far more significant with respect to financial deepening than when the financial market is more developed. We build a fully-edged heterogeneous-agent model with an endogenous financial market of private credit and debt to rationalize these stylized facts. We show how financial development that promotes better credit allocations under more relaxed borrowing ...
Working Paper
Imperfect competition and sunspots
This paper shows that imperfect competition can be a rich source of sunspots equilibria and coordination failures. This is demonstrated in a dynamic general equilibrium model that has no major distortions except imperfect competition. In the absence of fundamental shocks, the model has a unique certainty (fundamental) equilibrium. But there is also a continuum of stochastic (sunspots) equilibria that are not mere randomizations over fundamental equilibria. Markup is always counter-cyclical in sunspots equilibria, which is consistent with empirical evidence. The paper provides a justification ...
Working Paper
Financial development and economic volatility: a unified explanation
Empirical studies showed that firm-level volatility has been increasing but the aggregate volatility has been decreasing in the US for the post-war period. This paper proposes a unified explanation for these diverging trends. Our explanation is based on a story of financial development - measured by the reduction of borrowing constraints because of greater access to external financing and options for risk sharing. By constructing a dynamic stochastic general-equilibrium model of heterogenous firms facing borrowing constraints and investment irreversibility, it is shown that financial ...
Working Paper
Imperfect competition and indeterminacy of aggregate output
This paper shows imperfect competition can lead to indeterminacy in aggregate output in a standard DSGE model with imperfect competition. Indeterminacy arises in the model from the composition of aggregate output. In sharp contrast to the indeterminacy literature pioneered by Benhabib and Farmer [3] and Gali [19], indeterminacy in our model is global; hence it is more robust to structural parameters. In addition, sunspots in our model can be autocorrelated. The paper provides a justification for exogenous variations in desired markups, which play an important role as a source of cost-push ...
Working Paper
Discount Shock, Price-Rent Dynamics, and the Business Cycle
The price-rent ratio in commercial real estate is highly volatile, and its variation comoves with the business cycle. To account for these two facts, we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model that explicitly introduces a rental market and incorporates the liquidity constraint on an individual firm's production as a key ingredient. Our estimation identifies the discount shock as the most important factor in driving price-rent dynamics and linking the dynamics in the real estate market to those in the real economy. We illustrate the importance of the liquidity premium and endogenous total ...
Working Paper
Understanding the puzzling effects of technology shocks
The research led by Gali (AER 1999) and Basu et al. (AER 2006) raises two important questions regarding the validity of the RBC theory: (i) How important are technology shocks in explaining the business cycle? (ii) Do impulse responses to technology shocks found in the data reject the assumption of flexible prices? This paper argues that the conditional impulse responses of the U.S. economy to technology shocks are not grounds to reject the notion that technology shocks are the main driving force of the business cycle and the assumption of flexible prices, in contrary to the conclusions ...
Working Paper
Do credit constraints amplify macroeconomic fluctuations?
Previous studies on financial frictions have been unable to establish the empirical significance of credit constraints in macroeconomic fluctuations. This paper argues that the muted impact of credit constraints stems from the absence of a mechanism to explain the observed persistent comovements between housing prices and business investment. We develop such a mechanism by incorporating two key features into a DSGE model: we identify shocks that shift the demand for collateral assets and we allow productive agents to be credit-constrained. A combination of these two features enables our model ...
Working Paper
Interest-Rate Liberalization and Capital Misallocations
We study the consequences of interest-rate liberalization in a two-sector general equilibrium model of China. The model captures a key feature of China's distorted financial system: state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have greater incentive to expand production and easier access to credit than private firms. In this second-best environment, interest-rate liberalization can improve capital allocations within each sector, but can also exacerbate misallocations across sectors. Under calibrated parameters, the liberalization policy can reduce aggregate productivity and welfare unless other policy ...
Working Paper
Inflation Disagreement Weakens the Power of Monetary Policy
Households often disagree in their inflation outlooks. We present novel empirical evidence that inflation disagreement weakens the power of forward guidance and conventional monetary policy. These empirical observations can be rationalized by a model featuring heterogeneous beliefs about the central banks’ inflation target. An agent who perceives higher future inflation also perceives a lower real interest rate and thus would like to borrow more to finance consumption, subject to borrowing constraints. Higher inflation disagreement would lead to a larger share of borrowing-constrained ...