We analyze optimal dynamic taxation when labor supply is indivisible. As in Hansen (1985) and Rogerson (1988), markets are complete, and an employment lottery determines who works. The consumer can buy insurance to diversify this income uncertainty. The optimal wage tax is generally positive except for some special cases when leisure is nonnormal and the government can use debt as a policy instrument in addition to its tax instruments. We derive a HARA class of preferences, for which we characterize the dynamic paths of the wage tax. The optimal paths of the labor tax differ between divisible- and indivisible-labor economies.

Most of empirical studies find evidence of the J-Curve, but recent results cast doubt over its standard explanation. By addressing the countercyclicality of the current account and its dynamic link with the terms of trade, this paper revisits the J-Curve phenomenon using a two-good dynamic optimizing small open economy model allowing for a habit-forming behavior and capital adjustment costs. While the nonmonotonic adjustment of the current account relies on the degree of habit persistence in consumption and the magnitude of capital installation costs after an unanticipated terms of trade worsening, we show that the sizes of the long-run intertemporal elasticity of substitution under time nonseparable preferences and the import content of real consumption and investment matter as well after a temporary perturbation. As a consequence of an intertemporal speculation effect and an inertia effect, the small country reaches the long-term equilibrium with higher foreign assets after a short-lived terms of trade worsening.

This issue contributes to the discussion of the relation between individual and aggregate behavior. The basic feature of all the models presented is that they allow for direct interaction between the individuals. This, it is shown, leads to a number of interesting phenomena that are difficult to account for in standard models. The basic message is that the inclusion of heterogeneous interacting agents allows us to escape from the pitfalls associated with the reduction to a representative individual and furthermore to show that aggregates will, in general, have behavior that is different from that of the component individuals. Lastly, complex aggregate behavior is not necessarily the result of complicated individual reasoning, it can emerge from very simple rule following by individuals.

In an attempt to clean up an unruly literature, we specify the necessary and sufficient conditions for household optimality in a model where money is the only financial asset and provide the relevant proofs. We use our results to analyze when deflationary bubbles can and cannot exist. Our findings are in contrast to the results in several prominent contributions to the literature. We argue for particular specifications of the no-Ponzi-game restrictions on the representative household's and the government's intertemporal budget constraints in a model with money and bonds. Using the restriction on the household we derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for household optimality. The resulting equilibrium terminal conditions are then used to demonstrate that the existence of bonds does not affect when deflationary bubbles can and cannot occur. This result differs from that in other recent works.

Beginning in 2007, this journal will publish a new series of supplements for special issues. This new supplements series is intended to remove some special issues from the regular-issues space budget and thereby help to avoid the crowding-out problem that had previously resulted from having special issues replace regular issues. Because of the rapid growth of excellent special issues proposals, we expect the number of supplements to be published per year to grow rapidly. Initially our objective is to publish one or two such supplement issues each year. The supplement will be published “when ready.” The initial space budget for the annual supplement is 144 printed pages, plus or minus 20% to accommodate the variance in special issue sizes. Hence all special issues must be of length within the following range of printed page: 115–173.

This paper integrates a traditional Dornbusch overshooting model with a macro-economic model of hysteresis in foreign trade. We apply an approach which allows an aggregation of heterogeneous agents and which results in a continuous macroeconomic hysteresis-loop. In our model, short-run exchange rate overshooting generates a persistent current account effect, which feeds back into the exchange rate process and ultimately results in changes of the long-run equilibrium exchange rate. Monetary shocks can lead to hysteresis in both foreign trade and exchange rate processes, invalidating the long-run neutrality of money hypothesis and the purchasing power parity assumption of the conventional overshooting model.

This paper studies the growth effect of money supply in the presence of increasing returns and endogenous labor supply. By using a simple model of endogenous growth with a cash-in-advance constraint, it is shown that the growth effect of money supply depends on the specifications of preference structures as well as of the production technology. Either if the production technology exhibits strong nonconvexity or if the utility function has a high elasticity of intertemporal substitution, then there may exist dual balanced-growth equilibria and the impact of a change in money growth depends on which steady state is realized in the long run. It is also shown that there is no systematic relationship between the growth effect of money supply and local determinacy of the balanced growth path.

This paper focuses on the demand for money in the United States in the context of five popular locally flexible functional forms—the generalized Leontief, the basic translog, the almost ideal demand system, the Minflex Laurent, and the normalized quadratic reciprocal indirect utility function. We pay explicit attention to the theoretical regularity conditions of positivity, monotonicity, and curvature and argue that much of the older empirical literature ignores economic regularity. We treat the curvature property as a maintained hypothesis and provide a comparison in terms of violations of the regularity conditions and in terms of output in the form of a full set of elasticities. We also provide a policy perspective, in that a strong case can be made for abandoning the simple sum approach to monetary aggregation, on the basis of the low elasticities of substitution among the components of the popular M2 aggregate of money.

The choice between private and government provision of a productive public good like infrastructure (public capital) is examined in the context of an endogenously growing open economy. The accumulation of public capital need not require government provision, in contrast to the standard assumption in the literature. Even with an efficient government, the relative costs and benefits of government and private provision depend crucially on the economy's underlying structural conditions and borrowing constraints in international capital markets. Countries with limited substitution possibilities and large production externalities may benefit from governments encouraging private provision of public capital through targeted investment subsidies. By contrast, countries with flexible substitution possibilities and relatively smaller externalities may benefit either from governments directly providing public capital or from regulation of private providers. The transitional dynamics also are shown to depend on the underlying elasticity of substitution and the size of the production externality.

Different theories of expectation formation and learning usually yield different outcomes for realized market prices in dynamic models. The purpose of this paper is to investigate expectation formation and learning in a controlled experimental environment. Subjects are asked to predict the next period's aggregate price in a dynamic commodity market model with feedback from individual expectations. Subjects have no information about underlying market equilibrium equations, but can learn by observing past price realizations and predictions. We conduct a stable, an unstable, and a strongly unstable treatment. In the stable treatment, rational expectations (RE) yield a good description of observed aggregate price fluctuations: prices remain close to the RE steady state. In the unstable treatments, prices exhibit large fluctuations around the RE steady state. Although the sample mean of realized prices is close to the RE steady state, the amplitude of the price fluctuations as measured by the variance is significantly larger than the amplitude under RE, implying persistent excess volatility. However, agents' forecasts are boundedly rational in the sense that fluctuations in aggregate prices are unpredictable and exhibit no forecastable structure that could easily be exploited.

This paper compares the forecasting performance of some leading models of inflation for G-7 countries. We show that bivariate and trivariate models suggested by economic theory or statistical analysis are not much better than univariate ones. Phillips curve specifications fit well into this class. Improvements in both the MSE of the forecasts and turning point prediction are obtained with time-varying coefficients models, which exploit international interdependencies. The performance of the latter class of models is stable throughout the 1990s.

Through their influence on the cross-sectional distribution of productivity across firms and workers, job creation and destruction likely have an impact on the rate at which aggregate productivity changes over time. However, the nature of this effect is not, a priori, clear. Although a broad consensus has emerged suggesting that job destruction enhances productivity by eliminating inefficient production units, theories disagree with regard to the effect of job creation. If job flows represent the reallocation of labor from low- to high-productivity positions, job creation would boost productivity growth. If, instead, they represent changes in employment along a primarily low-skill dimension, the effect would be negative. This paper estimates the influence of job creation and destruction on total factor productivity (TFP) growth using annual data on four-digit U.S. manufacturing. As expected, the results reveal a positive association between job destruction and changes in TFP. Yet, they also indicate that job creation tends to have a negative effect on productivity growth.

In this paper, we investigate incentives, other than altruism, that developed countries have for improving developing country technologies. We propose a simple model of international trade between two regions, in which individuals have preferences over an inferior good and a luxury good. The poor region has a comparative advantage in the production of the inferior good. Even when costly adaptation of the technology to the poor region's characteristics is required—making the technology inappropriate for local use—there are parameter configurations for which the rich region has an incentive to incur this cost. It benefits from a terms-of-trade improvement and from greater specialization in the luxury good. Indeed, there are cases where the rich region would prefer to improve the poor region's technology for producing the inferior good rather than its own. We apply our model to the Green Revolution and provide a quantitative assessment of its welfare effects.

I present an environment for which both outside and inside money are essential as means of payment. The key model feature is that there is imperfect monitoring of issuers of inside money. I use a random-matching model of money where some agents have private trading histories and others have trading histories that can be publicly observed only after a lag. I show via an example that for lags that are neither too long nor too short, there exist allocations that use both types of money that cannot be duplicated when only one type is used. Inside money provides liquidity that increases the frequency of trades, but incentive constraints restrict the amount of output that can be traded. Outside money is immune to such constraints and can trade for higher levels of output.

Different theories of expectation formation and learning usually yield different outcomes for realized market prices in dynamic models. The purpose of this paper is to investigate expectation formation and learning in a controlled experimental environment. Subjects are asked to predict the next period's aggregate price in a dynamic commodity market model with feedback from individual expectations. Subjects have no information about underlying market equilibrium equations, but can learn by observing past price realizations and predictions. We conduct a stable, an unstable, and a strongly unstable treatment. In the stable treatment, rational expectations (RE) yield a good description of observed aggregate price fluctuations: prices remain close to the RE steady state. In the unstable treatments, prices exhibit large fluctuations around the RE steady state. Although the sample mean of realized prices is close to the RE steady state, the amplitude of the price fluctuations as measured by the variance is significantly larger than the amplitude under RE, implying persistent excess volatility. However, agents' forecasts are boundedly rational in the sense that fluctuations in aggregate prices are unpredictable and exhibit no forecastable structure that could easily be exploited.

This paper develops methods to solve for optimal discretionary policies and optimal commitment policies in rational expectations models. These algorithms, which allow the optimization constraints to be conveniently expressed in second-order structural form, are more general than existing methods and are simple to apply. We use several New Keynesian business cycle models to illustrate their application. Simulations show that the procedures developed in this paper can quickly solve small-scale models and that they can be usefully and effectively applied to medium- and large-scale models.

The nonlinearity of macroeconomic processes is becoming an increasingly important issue at both the theoretical and empirical levels. This trend holds for labor market variables as well. The reallocation theory of unemployment relies on nonlinearities. At the same time there is mounting empirical evidence of business cycles asymmetries. Thus the assumption of linearity/nonlinearity becomes crucial for the corroboration of labor market theories. This paper turns the microscope on the assumption of linearity and investigates the presence of asymmetries in aggregate and disaggregate labor market variables. The assumption of linearity is tested using five statistical tests for U.S. and Canadian unemployment rates and growth rates of the employment sectoral shares of construction, finance, manufacturing, and trade. An AR(p) model was used to remove any linear structure from the series. Evidence of nonlinearity is found for the sectoral shares with all five statistical tests in the U.S. case but not at the aggregate level. The results for Canada are not clear-cut. Evidence of unspecified nonlinearity is found in the unemployment rate and in the sectoral shares. Overall, important asymmetries are found in disaggregated labor market variables in the univariate setting. The linearity hypothesis was also examined in a multivariate framework. Evidence is provided that important asymmetries exist and a linear VAR cannot capture the dynamics of employment reallocation.

We generalize some recent results developed in static policy games with multiple players, to a dynamic context. We find that the classical theory of economic policy, static or dynamic, can be usefully applied to a strategic context of difference games: if one player satisfies the Golden Rule, then either all other players' policies are ineffective with respect to the dynamic target variables shared with that player. Or no Nash Feedback Equilibrium can exist, unless they all share target values for those variables. We extend those results to the case in which there are also nondynamic targets, to show that policy effectiveness (a Nash equilibrium) can continue to exist if some players satisfy the Golden Rule but target values differ between players in their nondynamic targets. We demonstrate the practical importance of these results by showing how policy effectiveness (a policy equilibrium) can appear or disappear with small variations in the expectations process or policy rule in a widely used model of monetary policy with the possibility of target independence.

We evaluate two leading explanations for inventories, the (S,s) and stockout avoidance motives, examining each within dynamic stochastic general equilibrium environments. We find that the (S,s) model is far more consistent with the cyclical behavior of aggregate inventories in the postwar United States when fluctuations arise from technology shocks, rather than preference shocks, whereas the converse is true for the stockout avoidance model. The (S,s) model succeeds in explaining the average magnitude of inventories in the U.S. economy and in reproducing the cyclical regularities involving inventories and other aggregate series. The stockout avoidance model does not. Even with idiosyncratic risk added to strengthen it, the stockout avoidance motive is insufficient to generate stocks near the data without destroying model performance along other important margins. Moreover, it appears incapable of sustaining inventories alongside capital. These findings suggest a fundamental flaw in reduced-form inventory models where stocks are loosely rationalized by this motive.

This paper studies stylized business-cycle properties of household production in four industrialized countries (Canada, the United States, Germany, and Japan). We employ a dynamic small open-economy business-cycle model that incorporates a household production sector. We use the model to generate data on home output, hours worked in the home sector, and hours spent on leisure. We find that in each country, home output is more volatile than market output, whereas home sector hours are about as volatile as those in the market sector. In each country, leisure is the least volatile series. Leisure hours and home hours are countercyclical in all countries, and home output is not highly correlated with market output. Home sector variables are generally less persistent than market variables and cross-country correlations related to home production tend to be lower than those related to market production. These findings demonstrate that despite some well-known structural differences in labor markets, the cyclical features of home sector variables are similar across the countries we consider.