propagation of changes in demand through international trade a case study of china china s economy the second largest in the world is undergoing a fundamental transition its transition from a strong focus on investment and exports towards a larger share of consumption could have important ramifications for china s trading partners using china as a case study this paper deploys a sectoral input output io analysis to take into account higher round spillovers from a reduction in import demand or a shift in the composition of the chinese economy this approach demonstrates strong indirect effects that exceed by far the initial shock from direct trade links reflecting china s integration into a closely knit global value chain the result suggests that the ongoing transition in china will have important effects on the global economy

on the impacts of anticipated carbon policies a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model approach abstract this paper examines the environmental and welfare impacts of pre announced carbon policies using an environmental dynamic stochastic general equilibrium e dsge model we find that pre announcing a rise in the carbon tax rate could reduce co2 emissions but would decrease output and investment during the interim period between the announcement and implementation dates pre announcing an increase in the carbon tax rate from 1 to 5 1 and 3 years in advance could reduce the quarterly aggregate consumption by 0 081 and 0 114 respectively compared to carbon taxation pre announcing a tightening carbon intensity target could reduce co2 emissions even more while pre announcing a tightening carbon capacity target under a cap and trade regime has no such co2 reduction effect in a welfare analysis we show that an unanticipated rise in the carbon tax rate is more preferable to the 1 year 2 year and 3 year ahead announcements the intensity regime produces a greater welfare than the cap and trade regime which is in turn better than the carbon taxation regime

job destruction and propagation of shocks this paper considers propagation of aggregate shocks in a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor market matching and endogenous job destruction cyclical fluctuations in the job destruction rate magnify the output effects of shocks as well as making them much more persistent interactions between capital adjustment and the job destruction rate play an important role in generating persistence propagation effects are shown to be quantitatively substantial when the model is calibrated using job flow data incorporating costly capital adjustment leads to significantly greater propagation

productivity growth consumer confidence and the business cycle abstract the objective of this paper is to provide in the context of a dynamic general equilibrium model an answer to the following five questions 1 to what extent does an economy subject to regular variations in labor productivity growth differ from one where labor productivity is constant 2 what is the impact on major macro indicators of a one time change in labor productivity growth 3 what are the business cycle implications of autonomous non falsifiable changes in growth expectations 4 what is the potential of such expectation changes for explaining the volatility of consumption to output ratio 5 can autonomous changes in growth expectations help us understand recent business cycle episodes

are prices too sticky nominal price rigidity has a negative externality rigidity in one firm s price increases the variability of aggregate real spending which harms all firms this paper investigates whether this externality is large which would imply that stabilization policy can be highly beneficial even if the costs of making prices flexible are small there are three conclusions first both the private cost of price rigidity and the externality are second order in the size of fluctuations second the externality can nonetheless be arbitrarily large third in a simple model the externality is small for plausible parameter values

stock prices news and economic fluctuations comment beaudry and portier 2006 propose an identification scheme to study the effects of news shocks about future productivity in vector error correction models vecms this comment shows that when applied to their vecms with more than two variables the identification scheme does not have a unique solution the problem arises from a particular interplay of cointegration assumptions and longrun restrictions jel e32 e44 g12 g14 in a highly influential paper beaudry and portier 2006 estimate vector error correction models vecms on us data and find that shocks generating a stock market boom but no contemporaneous movement in total factor productivity tfp henceforth called tfp news are closely related to shocks driving long run variations in tfp moreover these tfp news shocks lead to increases in consumption investment output and hours on impact and constitute an important source of business cycle fluctuations these results run counter to basic dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models and have sparked a new literature attempting to generate news driven positive comovement among macroeconomic aggregates 1 this comment shows that in the vecms with more than two variables estimated by beaudry and portier 2006 their identification scheme fails to determine tfp news yet these higher dimension systems are crucial to quantify the business cycle effects of tfp news 2 the identification problem arises from the interplay of two assumptions first the beaudry portier identification scheme called bp restrictions from here on requires that one of the nonnews shocks has no permanent impact on either tfp or consumption second the vecms estimated by beaudry and portier 2006 impose that tfp and consumption are cointegrated this cointegration means that tfp and consumption have the same permanent component which makes one

indivisible labor lotteries and equilibrium abstract this paper considers an economy where labor is indivisible and agents are identical although the discontinuity in labor supply at the individual level disappears as a result of aggregation it is shown that indivisible labor has strong consequences for the aggregate bahavior of the economy it is also shown that optimal allocations involve lotteries over employment and consumption

optimal fiscal policy with labor selection this paper characterizes long run and short run optimal scal policy in the labor selection framework quantitatively the time series volatility of the labor income tax rate is orders of magnitude larger than the tax smoothing results based on walrasian labor markets but is a few times smaller than the results based on search and matching labor markets to understand these results in terms of model primitives we develop a welfare relevant analytic concept of externalities for the selection model which we label tightness this concept of tightness is the source of the decentralized economy s inecient cross sectional wage premia between the average newly hired worker and the marginal newly hired worker compared to the traditional concept of labor market tightness in the search and matching literature this new concept of tightness plays a highly similar role and like in the matching model is crucial for understanding eciency and optimal policy

indivisible labor and the business cycle abstract a growth model with shocks to technology is studied labor is indivisible so all variability in hours worked is due to fluctuations in the number employed we find that unlike previous equilibrium models of the business cycle this economy displays large fluctuations in hours worked and relatively small fluctuations in productivity this finding is independent of individuals willingness to substitute leisure across time this and other findings are the result of studying and comparing summary statistics describing this economy an economy with divisible labor and post war u s time series

when can changes in expectations cause business cycle fluctuations in neo classical settings abstract it is often argued that changes in expectation are an important driving force of the business cycle however it is well known that changes in expectations cannot generate positive co movement between consumption investment and employment in the most standard neo classical business cycle models this gives rise to the question of whether changes in expectation can cause business cycle fluctuations in any neo classical setting or whether such a phenomenon is inherently related to market imperfections this paper offers a systematic exploration of this issue our finding is that expectation driven business cycle fluctuations can arise in neo classical models when one allows for a sufficiently rich description of the production technology however such a structure is rarely allowed or explored in macro models in particular we identify a multi sector setting and a setting with a costly distribution system in which expectation driven business cycles can arise

scale economies and consolidation in hog slaughter comment in a recent article macdonald and ollinger mo estimate cost functions of hog slaughtering plants while the estimates they obtain provide useful information about scale economies and consolidation in hog slaughter incorrect inferences are drawn about substitutability and lack thereof between hogs and other inputs in processing pork the purpose of this comment is to derive the correct measures of input substitutability and to show that the error in using the allen elasticities of substitution to draw inferences

fiscal policy in an unemployment crisis this paper shows that large scal multipliers arise naturally from equilibrium unemployment dynamics in response to a shock that brings the economy into a liquidity trap an expansion in government spending increases output and causes a fall in the unemployment rate since movements in unemployment are persistent the eects of current spending linger into the future leading to an enduring rise in income as an enduring rise in income boosts private demand even a temporary increase in government spending sets in motion a virtuous employment spending spiral with a large associated multiplier this transmission mechanism contrasts with the conventional view in which scal policy may be ecacious only under a prolonged and committed rise in government spending which engineers a spiral of increasing ination

tax smoothing in frictional labor markets we re examine the optimality of tax smoothing from the point of view of frictional labor markets our central result is that whether or not this cornerstone optimal scal policy pre

anticipated and unanticipated wage changes wage risk and intertemporal labor supply in this article i estimate how labor supply responds to anticipated wage growth unanticipated wage growth and wage risk using the 1989 93 panel section of the bank of italy survey of households income and wealth shiw which collects individual expectations of future wages the use of subjective expectations has several advantages first they provide information on the evolution and riskiness of future wages that the econometrician may never hope to observe moreover this avoids the need for specifying instruments for the growth rate of wages finally forecast errors can be directly controlled for thus avoiding inconsistency in short panels

an exploration into pigou s theory of cycles abstract this paper explores a theory of business cycles in which recessions and booms arise due to difficulties encountered by agents in properly forecasting the economy s future needs in terms of capital the idea has a long history in the macroeconomic literature as reflected by the work of pigou industrial fluctuation macmillan london 1926 the contribution of this paper is twofold first we illustrate the type of general equilibrium structure that can give rise to such phenomena second we examine the extent to which such a model can explain the observed pattern of u s recessions frequency depth without relying on technological regress we argue that such a model offer a framework for understanding elements of both the recent u s recession and of the asia downturns of the late 1990s

no news in business cycles this paper uses a structural large dimensional factor model to evaluate the role of news shocks shocks with a delayed eect on productivity in generating the business cycle

business cycles and labor market search the quantitative implications of labor market search for economic fluctuations are evaluated in the context of a real business cycle model incorporating labor market search into the model is found to improve its empirical performance along several dimensions in particular hours now fluctuate substantially more than wages and the contemporaneous correlation between hours and productivity falls in addition the model replicates the observation that output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons overall the empirical results suggest that the labor market search environment embodies a quantitatively important propagation mechanism copyright 1996 by american economic association

on the cyclical behavior of employment unemployment and labor force participation abstract in this paper i evaluate to what extent a real business cycle rbc model that incorporates search and home production decisions can simultaneously account for the observed behavior of employment unemployment and out of the labor force this contrasts with the previous rbc literature which analyzed employment or hours fluctuations either by lumping together unemployment and out of the labor force into a single non employment state or by assuming a fixed labor force once the three employment states are explicitly introduced i find that the rbc model generates highly counterfactual labor market dynamics

news and business cycles in open economies we study the effects of news about future total factor productivity tfp in a small open economy we show that an open economy version of the neoclassical model produces a recession in response to good news about future tfp we propose an open economy model that generates comovement in response to tfp news the key elements of our model are a weak short run wealth effect on the labor supply and adjustment costs to labor and investment we show that our model also generates comovement in response to news about future investment specific technical change and to sudden stops

monetary policy shocks we got news abstract we assess the role of monetary policy news shocks in the context of a medium scale dsge model estimated on us data we estimate several versions of the model and find decisive evidence in favour of the inclusion of monetary policy news shocks over a two quarter horizon according to our results monetary policy news shocks account for a non negligible fraction of the variance of real variables especially at shorter forecast horizons further we document that the importance of monetary policy news shocks goes beyond what was observed in recent years the historical importance of monetary policy news shocks dates back to the 1999 2006 period when the official fomc statements provided information about both the current policy setting and the expected future policy path we also show that adding monetary policy news shocks to the model does not lead to identification problems

anticipated growth and business cycles in matching models in a business cycle model that incorporates a standard matching framework employment increases in response to news shocks even though the wealth effect associated with the increase in expected productivity reduces labor force participation the reason is that the matching friction induces entrepreneurs to increase investment in new projects and vacancies early if there is underinvestment in new projects in the competitive equilibrium then the efficiency gains associated with an increase in employment make it possible that consumption employment output as well as the investment in new and existing projects jointly increase long before the actual increase in productivity materializes if there is no underinvestment then investment in existing projects decreases but total investment consumption employment and output still jointly increase