Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Author:Atkeson, Andrew 

Report
The End of Privilege: A Reexamination of the Net Foreign Asset Position of the United States

The US net foreign asset position has deteriorated sharply since 2007 and is currently negative 65 percent of US GDP. This deterioration primarily reflects changes in the relative values of large gross international equity positions, as opposed to net new borrowing. In particular, a sharp increase in equity prices that has been US-specific has inflated the value of US foreign liabilities. We develop an international macro finance model to interpret these trends, and we argue that the rise in equity prices in the United States likely reflects rising profitability of domestic firms rather than ...
Staff Report , Paper 639

Report
The Impact of Vaccines and Behavior on U.S. Cumulative Deaths from COVID-19

The CDC reports that 1.13 million Americans have died of COVID-19 through June of 2023. I use a model of the impact over the past three years of vaccines and private and public behavior to mitigate disease transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States to address two questions. First, holding the strength of the response of behavior to the level of daily deaths from COVID-19 fixed, what was the impact of vaccines on cumulative mortality from COVID-19 up through June 2023? And second, holding the pace of deployment of vaccinations fixed, what would have been the impact of ...
Staff Report , Paper 649

Conference Paper
The optimal degree of monetary policy discretion

Proceedings

Working Paper
Optimal social insurance, incentives, and transition

We study transition in a model in which the process of moving workers from matches in the state sector to new matches in the private sector takes time and involves uncertainty. When there are incentive problems in this rematching process, the optimal scheme may involve forced layoffs, involuntary unemployment, and a recession.
Working Papers , Paper 546

Discussion Paper
Policies to stimulate innovation

Economic Policy Paper , Paper 11-5

Report
Modeling the transition to a new economy: lessons from two technological revolutions

Many view the period after the Second Industrial Revolution as a paradigmatic example of a transition to a new economy following a technological revolution and conjecture that this historical experience is useful for understanding other transitions, including that after the Information Technology Revolution. We build a model of diffusion and growth to study transitions. We quantify the learning process in our model using data on the life cycle of U.S. manufacturing plants. This model accounts quantitatively for the productivity paradox, the slow diffusion of new technologies, and the ongoing ...
Staff Report , Paper 296

Report
On the optimal choice of a monetary policy instrument

The optimal choice of a monetary policy instrument depends on how tight and transparent the available instruments are and on whether policymakers can commit to future policies. Tightness is always desirable; transparency is only if policymakers cannot commit. Interest rates, which can be made endogenously tight, have a natural advantage over money growth and exchange rates, which cannot. As prices, interest and exchange rates are more transparent than money growth. All else equal, the best instrument is interest rates and the next-best, exchange rates. These findings are consistent with the ...
Staff Report , Paper 394

Report
Paths of development for early- and late-bloomers in a dynamic Heckscher-Ohlin model

We show that in a dynamic Heckscher-Ohlin model the timing of a country?s development relative to the rest of the world affects the path of the country?s development. A country that begins the development process later than most of the rest of the world?a late-bloomer?ends up with a permanently lower level of income than the early-blooming countries that developed earlier. This is true even though the late-bloomer has the same preferences, technology, and initial capital stock that the early-bloomers had when they started the process of development. This result stands in stark contrast to ...
Staff Report , Paper 256

Report
Industry evolution and transition: the role of information capital

In this paper, we build a model of the transition following large-scale economic reforms that predicts both a substantial drop in output and a prolonged pause in physical investment as the initial phase of the optimal transition following the reform. We model reform as a change in policy which induces agents to close existing enterprises using old technologies of production and to open up new enterprises adopting new technologies of production. The central idea of our paper is that it is costly to close old enterprises and open new enterprises because, in doing so, information capital built ...
Staff Report , Paper 162

Working Paper
The optimal degree of discretion in monetary policy

How much discretion is it optimal to give the monetary authority in setting its policy? We analyze this mechanism design question in an economy with an agreed-upon social welfare function that depends on the randomly fluctuating state of the economy. The monetary authority has private information about that state. In the model, well-designed rules trade off society's desire to give the monetary authority flexibility to react to its private information against society's need to guard against the standard time inconsistency problem arising from the temptation to stimulate the economy with ...
Working Papers , Paper 626

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Jel Classification

G12 3 items

I0 3 items

C01 2 items

E10 2 items

E17 2 items

E44 2 items

show more (24)

FILTER BY Keywords

Monetary policy 11 items

COVID-19 8 items

Asset pricing 5 items

Behavior 3 items

Foreign exchange 3 items

Interest rates 3 items

show more (78)

PREVIOUS / NEXT