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Why do Americans work so much more than Europeans?
Prescott, Edward C. (2003)
Americans now work 50 percent more than do the Germans, French, and Italians. This was not the case in the early 1970s when the Western Europeans worked more than Americans. In this paper, I examine the role of taxes in accounting for the differences in labor supply across time and across countries, in particular, the effective marginal tax rate on labor income. The population of countries considered is that of the G-7 countries, which are major advanced industrial countries. The surprising finding is that this marginal tax rate accounts for the predominance of the differences at points in ...
Staff Report , Paper 321

Report
Credit Frictions in the Great Recession
Pastorino, Elena; Lopez, Pierlauro; Midrigan, Virgiliu; Kehoe, Patrick J. (2020-12-15)
Although a credit tightening is commonly recognized as a key determinant of the Great Recession, to date, it is unclear whether a worsening of credit conditions faced by households or by firms was most responsible for the downturn. Some studies have suggested that the household-side credit channel is quantitatively the most important one. Many others contend that the firm-side channel played a crucial role. We propose a model in which both channels are present and explicitly formalized. Our analysis indicates that the household-side credit channel is quantitatively more relevant than the ...
Staff Report , Paper 617

Report
Default and the maturity structure in sovereign bonds
Ramanarayanan, Ananth; Arellano, Cristina (2008)
This paper studies the maturity composition and the term structure of interest rate spreads of government debt in emerging markets. In the data, when interest rate spreads rise, debt maturity shortens and the spread on short-term bonds is higher than on long-term bonds. To account for this pattern, we build a dynamic model of international borrowing with endogenous default and multiple maturities of debt. Short-term debt can deliver higher immediate consumption than long-term debt; large long-term loans are not available because the borrower cannot commit to save in the near future towards ...
Staff Report , Paper 410

Report
Nature or nurture? learning and female labor force dynamics
Veldkamp, Laura; Fogli, Alessandra (2007)
In the last century, the evolution of female labor force participation has been S-shaped: It rose slowly at first, then quickly, and has leveled off recently. Central to this dramatic rise has been the entry of women with young children. We argue that this S-shaped dynamic came from generations of women learning about the relative importance of nature (endowed ability) and nurture (time spent child-rearing) in determining children's outcomes. Each generation updates the beliefs of their parents, by observing others' outcomes. When few women participate in the labor force, most outcomes are ...
Staff Report , Paper 386

Report
A decade lost and found: Mexico and Chile in the 1980s
Kehoe, Timothy J.; Kehoe, Patrick J.; Soto, Raimundo; Bergoeing, Raphael (2001)
Chile and Mexico experienced severe economic crises in the early 1980s. This paper analyzes four possible explanations for why Chile recovered much faster than did Mexico. Comparing data from the two countries allows us to rule out a monetarist explanation, an explanation based on falls in real wages and real exchange rates, and a debt overhang explanation. Using growth accounting, a calibrated growth model, and economic theory, we conclude that the crucial difference between the two countries was the earlier policy reforms in Chile that generated faster productivity growth. The most crucial ...
Staff Report , Paper 292

Report
Financial collapse and active monetary policy: a lesson from the Great Depression
Corbae, Dean; Cooper, Russell W. (2001)
We analyze financial collapses, such as the one that occurred during the U.S. Great Depression, from the perspective of a monetary model with multiple equilibria. The multiplicity arises from the presence of a strategic complementarity due to increasing returns to scale in the intermediation process. Intermediaries provide the link between savers and firms who require working capital for production. Fluctuations in the intermediation process are driven by variations in the confidence agents place in the financial system. From a positive perspective, our model matches closely the qualitative ...
Staff Report , Paper 289

Report
How Deadly is COVID-19? Understanding the Difficulties with Estimation of its Fatality Rate
Atkeson, Andrew (2020-03-31)
To understand how best to combat COVID-19, we must understand how deadly is the disease. There is a substantial debate in the epidemiological literature as to whether the fatality rate is 1% or 0.1% or somewhere in between. In this note, I use an SIR model to examine why it is difficult to estimate the fatality rate from the disease and how long we might have to wait to resolve this question absent a large-scale randomized testing program. I focus on uncertainty over the joint distribution of the fatality rate and the initial number of active cases at the start of the epidemic around January ...
Staff Report , Paper 598

Report
\\"Tobin's Q\\" and the rate of investment in general equilibrium
Sargent, Thomas J. (1979)
Staff Report , Paper 40

Report
On the equilibrium concept for overlapping generations organizations
Prescott, Edward C.; Ríos-Rull, José-Víctor (2000)
A necessary feature for equilibrium is that beliefs about the behavior of other agents are rational. We argue that in stationary OLG environments this implies that any future generation in the same situation as the initial generation must do as well as the initial generation did in that situation. We conclude that the existing equilibrium concepts in the literature do not satisfy this condition. We then propose an alternative equilibrium concept, organizational equilibrium, that satisfies this condition. We show that equilibrium exists, it is unique, and it improves over autarky without ...
Staff Report , Paper 282

Report
Taxes, Regulations, and the Value of U.S. Corporations: A Reassessment
McGrattan, Ellen R. (2023-07-12)
This paper reassesses the conclusions of McGrattan and Prescott (2005), which derived the quantitative implications of growth theory for U.S. corporate valuations. In addition to having two more decades of data, the analysis incorporates recent changes in policies that affect corporate investments, taxes, and legal-form choice. Secular trends identified in the earlier period remain, with little change in the tangible capital-output ratio or profit share of output. Corporate valuations remain high relative to the postwar average, in line with the theoretical prediction. Critical to this ...
Staff Report , Paper 647

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