The paper revisits the literature on real rigidities in New Keynesian models in the context of an economy at the zero lower bound. It identifies strategic interaction among price- and wage-setting agents in the economy as an important determinant of both optimal policy and economic dynamics in deep recessions. In particular, labor market segmentation is shown to have a significant influence on the length of the forward commitment to keep interest rates at zero, the magnitude of the fiscal policy responses as well as inflation volatility in the economy under optimal policy.

Why is a zero lower bound episode long-lasting and disruptive? This paper proposes the interruption of information flow from the central bank’s interest rate decision to the private sector as a channel by which the destabilizing effect of the zero lower bound constraint on the nominal interest rate is amplified. This mechanism is incorporated into the new Keynesian model by modifying its information structure. This paper shows that the information loss at the zero lower bound can increase (a) the duration of the zero lower bound episodes and (b) the size of deflation and output gap loss. The result in this paper demonstrates that enhanced information sharing by the central bank about the state of the economy can be effective at alleviating the cost of the zero lower bound.

In this paper, I explore in an overlapping generations framework, a mechanism motivating a neurobiological poverty trap. Poverty causes stress and depression in individuals susceptible to depression. Poor and depressed individuals discount the future at a higher rate and invest less in the human capital of their children than mentally healthy or rich individuals. This gene–environment interaction generates a vicious cycle in which poor individuals inherit not only susceptibility to depression, but also stress and poverty. I show that a successful one-time intervention has the power to permanently eliminate the neurobiological poverty trap.

This paper considers the political economy of financial development in an overlapping generations model that incorporates credit market imperfections, and shows that income inequality is a determinant of financial and economic development. Individuals have an opportunity to start an investment project at a fixed cost, but their income to finance the cost is unequal. The government proposes a policy financed by taxation that mitigates credit market imperfections, the implementation of which is determined through majority voting. The policy benefits middle-income individuals who can start the investment only after the implementation of the policy. The policy is, however, against the interest of the rich who wish to block such new entry, and that of the poor who wish to avoid the tax burden. Whether the policy obtains majority support depends on income inequality. High income inequality makes the policy hard to implement, which causes financial and economic underdevelopment.

One questionable aspect of price posting with directed search is the strong commitment by sellers to commit to the advertised terms of trade. In this paper I explore the welfare implications of assuming that sellers cannot commit and vary the quality of their output ex post according to realized demand. I show that such lack of commitment translates into lower participation by buyers, lower average quality, and a consumption-equivalent loss of 0.3% of annual GDP.

S. James Press's many contributions to statistical research, lecturing, mentoring students, the statistics profession, etc., are summarized. Then some new developments in Bayesian analysis are described and remarks on the future of Bayesian analysis are presented.

Evolutionary game theory provides a fresh perspective on the prospect that agents with heterogeneous expectations might eventually come to agree on a single expectation corresponding to the efficient markets hypothesis. We establish conditions under which agreement on a unique forecast is stable, but also show that persistent heterogeneous expectations can arise if those conditions do not hold. The critical element is the degree of curvature in the payoff weighting functions agents use to value forecasting performance. We illustrate our results in the context of an asset pricing model where a martingale solution competes with the fundamental solution for agents' attention.

This paper presents a new testing method for the scapegoat model of exchange rates. A number of steps are implemented to determine whether macro-fundamentals are scapegoats for the evolution of exchange rates. Estimation is conducted using a Bayesian Gibbs sampling approach applied to eight countries (five developed and three emerging) versus the USA over the period 2002Q1–2014Q4. The macro-fundamentals that we consider are real GDP growth, the inflation rate, the long-run nominal interest rate, and the current account to GDP ratio. We calculate the posterior probabilities that these macro-fundamentals are scapegoats. For the inflation rate, these probabilities are considerably higher than the imposed prior probabilities of ½ in five out of eight countries (in particular, the Anglo-Saxon economies).

Weekly live cattle prices in various markets would be expected to share common trends, i.e., they cannot be driven by separate nonstationarities because at some point the prices will diverge sufficiently for it to be economic to cross-ship the cattle, or at least the beef. This paper extends previous bivariate work to a multivariate analysis that is capable of modeling the multiple market linkages in prices for many geographical regions. The empirical estimation represents the application of an innovation on Aoki's Linear Systems State Space model that allows determination of long- and short-run dynamics common to multiple series. The common dynamics permit characterization of the multiple markets with a limited number of states (sufficient statistics for the past), resulting in dynamic arbitrage relations between the series. A nonparametric test is used to evaluate the value of expected arbitrage forecasts implied by the structure of the model. The arbitrage relationship also is employed to generate efficient discounts/premiums for either physical delivery or cash settlement of futures contracts. The proposed settlement mechanism accounts for spatial arbitrage opportunities and therefore better represents the true geographical discounts faced by traders in individual markets.

This study presents an overlapping-generations model featuring capital accumulation, collective wage-bargaining, and probabilistic voting over fiscal policy. The study characterizes a Markov-perfect political equilibrium of the voting game within and across generations, and it derives the following results. First, the greater bargaining power of unions lowers the capital growth rate and creates a positive correlation between unemployment and public debt. Second, an increase in the political power of elderly persons lowers the growth rate and shifts government expenditure from unemployed persons to elderly ones. Third, prohibiting debt finance increases the growth rate and benefits future generations; however, it worsens the state of present-day employed and unemployed persons.

Several policies or interventions have been implemented in developing countries with the ultimate goal of improving educational outcomes and human capital. Although many empirical studies have pointed to mixed results of these interventions, the role of uncertainty arising from the state of nature about the educational environment and household characteristics in the efficiency of these interventions still lacks an economic mechanism. This paper aims at developing a theoretical framework that links policy interventions to educational outcomes. We characterize optimal policies and determine the conditions for enhancing social welfare.

This note extends the findings of Benhabib and Rusticchini [Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 18, 807–813 (1994)], who provide a class of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models whose solution is characterized by a constant savings rate. We show that this class of models may be interpreted as a standard–representative agent DSGE model with costly adjustment of capital.

Traditional regression models have reported conflicting results on the effectiveness of tax incentives in stimulating business investment. This study investigates the effects of the Bush tax cuts on U.S. investment using intervention analysis in conjunction with regression analysis that controls for relevant variables. Although intervention analysis has the advantage of allowing the behavior of investment to be influenced only by the time path of exogenous shocks such as tax reforms, control variables can test for the robustness of the results. We have found that the two tax reforms enacted in 2001 and 2003 had little impact on marginal investment incentives. The intervention analysis results are further reinforced by the evidence provided by alternative regression models that control for a host of variables. The failure of the tax reforms to stimulate investment spending may be attributable to several factors, such as a global savings glut, cheap global money, inappropriate designs for tax incentives, and budget deficits.

A general equilibrium model with financial frictions in which individuals may encounter unobservable investment opportunities is developed along the lines of Kiyotaki and Moore (2012). I study efficiency properties induced by money and monetary policy when financial frictions prevent optimal equilibrium allocations. By providing closed-form solutions to all prices, allocations, welfare, and, especially, the distribution of individuals with respect to assets, I show that the Friedman rule achieves maximal social welfare, independent of how tight the financial constraints may be. The same level of welfare would be induced by an omniscient central planner able to verify who has an investment opportunity.

The deleterious effect of debt restructuring on banks’ balance sheets and, consequently, on the economy as a whole has been a key policy issue. This paper studies how post-default fiscal policy interacts with this sovereign-bank loop and shape the response of a model economy. Calibration of the model matches characteristics of the Greek economy at the time of the bond exchange. Debt restructuring in place of higher lump-sum taxation or lower nonproductive government spending harms the economy even if no other cost of default is considered. However, the sovereign-debt loop is less costly to the economy than increases in labor or capital taxes to service debt. Even so, if fiscal policy is too responsive, a crowding-out effect inhibits the recovery of capital markets, hence a more conservative fiscal stance is desirable. Thus, how diabolic the post-default sovereign-bank loop is depends to a large extent on the way fiscal policy responds.

Zhang [Tariff and Equilibrium Indeterminacy, available at http://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13099/ (2009)] shows that endogenous tariffs (or energy taxes) and endogenous labor income taxes are equivalent in generating local indeterminacy. Using methods developed by Stockman [Journal of Economic Theory 145 (2010), 1060–1085], we extend Zhang's analysis to prove that endogenous tariffs and endogenous labor income taxes are also equivalent in generating global indeterminacy (chaotic equilibria) under a balanced-budget rule. More precisely, we show that the existence of Euler equation branching in an arbitrarily small neighborhood of a steady state can imply topological chaos in the sense of Devaney. In addition, Euler equation branching occurs regardless of the local uniqueness of the equilibrium around the steady state.

We discuss the problem known in economics as backward dynamics occurring in models of perfect foresight, intertemporal equilibrium described mathematically by implicit difference equations. In a previously published paper [Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 31 (2007), 1633–1671], we showed that by means of certain mathematical methods and results known as inverse limits theory it is possible to establish a correspondence between the backward dynamics of a noninvertible map and the forward dynamics of a related invertible map acting on an appropriately defined space of sequences, each of whose elements corresponds to an intertemporal equilibrium. We also proved the existence of different types of topological attractors for one-dimensional models of overlapping generations. In this paper, we provide an extension of those results, constructing a Lebesgue-like probability measure on spaces of infinite sequences that allows us to distinguish typical from exceptional dynamical behaviors in a measure–theoretical sense, thus proving that all the topological attractors considered in MR07 are also metric attractors. We incidentally also prove that the existence of chaos (in the Devaney–Touhey sense) backward in time implies (and is implied by) chaos forward in time.

We show that the introduction of a constant tariff or subsidy levied on foreign energy can lead to a rich set of endogenous fluctuations around the unique steady state, including stable 2-, 4-, 8-, and 15-cycles, quasiperiodic orbits, and chaos. This is demonstrated in a standard neoclassical growth model with social increasing returns to scale. Numerical exercises could be viewed from a methodological perspective as illustrating that capital income taxes and tariffs are equivalent in generating endogenous fluctuations because Guo and Lansing [Guo, J.T. and K.J. Lansing (2002) Fiscal policy, increasing returns and endogenous fluctuations. Macroeconomic Dynamics 6, 633–664] show that a constant capital tax or subsidy has the same effect on the model dynamics in a one-sector closed economy.

Wage dispersion is a critical factor in determining the impact of a minimum wage and severance payments on job creation and destruction in a general equilibrium model with search frictions. When wage dispersion is low, the minimum wage and severance payments behave as substitutes. However, as dispersion in wages increases, these policies become complements. The model is estimated using data from Chile and used to perform quantitative welfare analysis.

When the returns to scale of a production process vary with the intensity it is operated at, an AK model with constant returns to scale in production arises endogenously due to replication driven by profit maximization. If replication occurs at the efficiency-maximizing scale, as with perfect competition, the result applies also when the number of production processes must be discrete, thus, overcoming the so-called integer problem. When competition is imperfect, there is only convergence toward the AK model for large enough input use, so an economy is more prone to stalling in a steady state without growth, the smaller and less competitive it is.