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Working Paper
On the aggregate welfare cost of Great Depression unemployment
The potential benefit of policies that eliminate a small likelihood of economic crises is calculated. An economic crisis is defined as an increase in unemployment of the magnitude observed during the Great Depression. For the U.S., the maximum-likelihood estimate of entering a depression is found to be about once every 83 years. The welfare gain from setting this small probability to zero can range between 1 and 7 percent of annual consumption in perpetuity. For most estimates, more than half of these large gains result from a reduction in individual consumption volatility. ; This paper ...
Working Paper
Minimum consumptions requirements: theoretical and quantitative implications for growth and distribution
The authors study the impact of a minimum consumption requirement on the rate of economic growth and the evolution of wealth distribution. The requirement introduces a positive dependence between the intertemporal elasticity of substitution and household wealth. This dependence implies a transition phase during which the growth rate of per-capita quantities rise toward their steady-state values and the distributions of wealth, consumption, and permanent income become more unequal. The authors calibrate the minimum consumption requirement to match estimates available for a sample of Indian ...
Conference Paper
Inflation, financial markets and capital formation - commentary
Working Paper
Postwar trends in metropolitan employment growth: decentralization and deconcentration
A key finding to emerge from this study is that the widely studied suburbanization or decentralization of employment and population is only part of the story of postwar urban evolution. Another important part of the story is a postwar trend of relatively faster growth of jobs and people in the smaller and less-dense MSAs (deconcentration). The authors find that postwar growth in employment (and to a lesser extent population) has favored metropolitan areas with smaller levels of employment (population) density. These trends are shared by major regions of the country and by manufacturing and ...
Journal Article
Taxes, homeownership, and the allocation of residential real estate risks
Home equity is the predominant form of savings for most Americans because it helps them save on taxes. However, homeownership also determines how the risks of fluctuations in the value of residential real estate are borne. In this article, Satyajit Chatterjee looks at how the tax benefit of homeownership has moved households toward undiversified investments in risky residential real estate by making it costly for them to rent their homes. He also points out the often overlooked risk-allocation consequences of proposed changes in the U.S. tax code.
Working Paper
A tractable circular city model with an application to the effects of development constraints on land rents
Superseded by working paper 13-37.> A tractable production-externality-based circular city model in which both firms and workers choose location as well as intensity of land use is presented. The equilibrium structure of the city has either (i) no commuting ("mixed-use" form) or (ii) a central business district (CBD) of positive radius and a surrounding residential ring. Regardless of which form prevails, the intra-city variation in all endogenous variables displays the negative exponential form: x(r) = x(0)exr (where r is the distance from the city center and x depends only on preference ...
Working Paper
Entry and exit, product variety and the business cycle
Working Paper
Spinoffs and the market for ideas
We present a theory of spinoffs in which the key ingredient is the originator?s private information concerning the quality of his new idea. Because quality is privately observed, by the standard adverse-selection logic, the market can at best offer a price that reflects the average quality of ideas sold. This gives the holders of above-average-quality ideas the incentive to spin off. We show that only workers with very good ideas decide to spin off, while workers with mediocre ideas sell them. Entrepreneurs of existing firms pay a price for the ideas sold in the market that implies zero ...
Working Paper
Foreclosures and house price dynamics: a quantitative analysis of the mortgage crisis and the foreclosure prevention policy
This paper is superseded by WP 15-15 <p>The authors construct a quantitative equilibrium model of the housing market in which an unanticipated increase in the supply of housing triggers default mortgages via its effect on house prices. The decline in house prices creates an incentive to increase the consumption of housing space, but leverage makes it costly for homeowners to sell their homes and buy bigger ones (they must absorb large capital losses). Instead, leveraged households find it advantageous to default and rent housing space. Since renters demand less housing space than homeowners, ...
Working Paper
Urban density and the rate of invention
Economists, beginning with Alfred Marshall, have studied the significance of cities in the production and exploitation of information externalities that, today, we call knowledge spillovers. This paper presents robust evidence of those effects. We show that patent intensity?the per capita invention rate?is positively related to the density of employment in the highly urbanized portion of MAs. All else equal, a city with twice the employment density (jobs per square mile) of another city will exhibit a patent intensity (patents per capita) that is 20 percent higher. Patent intensity is ...