International Economic Review

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• UNCERTAINTY, LONG‐RUN, AND MONETARY POLICY RISKS IN A TWO‐COUNTRY MACRO MODEL

  We study the currency risk premium and the forward premium bias in a two‐country New Keynesian model with production, no physical capital, and recursive utility. Monetary policy follows an interest rate feedback rule and exogenous total factor productivity (TFP) growth follows a long‐run risk process with stochastic volatility, which we estimate from data. With cross‐country heterogeneity in TFP and monetary policy, reasonable currency risk premia emerge under complete and incomplete markets but the forward premium bias is trivial. We diagnose the challenge faced by this fairly standard production model to explain the forward premium bias.

• INFRAMARGINAL TRAVELERS AND TRANSPORTATION POLICY

  Structural models of traffic congestion, such as the bottleneck model, are used to answer important, policy‐relevant questions. However, existing models typically assume that no travelers are inframarginal regarding when to travel; that is, given equilibrium travel times, no travelers strictly prefer their ex ante departure time to all others. In this article, I address this shortcoming by incorporating inframarginal travelers into these models. This change significantly improves these models' ability to fit the data and changes policy prescriptions. In the case of congestion pricing, it typically changes the optimal toll by at least 25% and significantly worsens the distributional impacts.

• ASSET DIVERSIFICATION VERSUS CLIMATE ACTION

  Asset pricing and climate policy are analyzed in a global economy where consumption goods are produced by both a green and a carbon‐intensive sector. Given that the economy is initially heavily dependent on carbon‐intensive capital, the desire to diversify assets complements the attempt to mitigate economic damages from climate change. In the longer run, however, a trade‐off between diversification and climate action emerges. We derive the optimal carbon price and the equilibrium risk‐free rate, and risk premia. Climate disasters significantly decrease the risk‐free rate but increase risk premia on financial assets, especially if no climate policy is implemented.

• THE COST OF TRADE DISRUPTIONS AT DIFFERENT STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

  We study trade disruptions at different stages of development in a two‐country, three‐sector model of Spain and United Kingdom from 1850 to 2000. The impact of trade disruptions depends on trade openness and the productivity gap between countries. A trade collapse today (more openness, less gap) comparable to the Inter‐War Trade Collapse (IWTC) decreases the capital stock threefold (12% instead of 4%) and lifetime consumption fourfold (1.58% instead of 0.37%). Capital accumulation amplifies the cost of trade disruptions. The IWTC promoted Spanish industrialization, while the opposite would be true today.

• STATISTICAL DISCRIMINATION AND DURATION DEPENDENCE IN A SEMISTRUCTURAL MODEL

  This article develops a job‐search model with unobserved worker heterogeneity and learning about worker types from unemployment duration. The model features negative duration dependence that stems from unobserved heterogeneity, skill depreciation, and statistical discrimination. We estimate job‐finding rates implied by our model using microlevel data from the Current Population Survey. We find that removing interview costs counterfactually, thereby eliminating statistical discrimination, substantially increases the job‐finding rates of the long‐term unemployed. The performance of low‐skill workers at the interview stage with discriminating firms plays a key role in explaining our counterfactual result.

• HIGHER‐ORDER INCOME RISK OVER THE BUSINESS CYCLE

  We explore the consequences of higher‐order risk in a standard incomplete‐markets life‐cycle model. We calibrate the model using a canonical income process with persistent and transitory risk, extended to feature cyclical shock distributions with left‐skewness and excess kurtosis. We estimate this income process for U.S. household data, and find shocks to be highly leptokurtic, with countercyclical variance and procyclical skewness of persistent shocks. In the model, first, higher‐order risk has sizable welfare implications; second, it matters quantitatively for the welfare costs of cyclical idiosyncratic risk; third, it has nontrivial implications for self‐insurance against shocks.

• ENTRY BARRIERS AND GROWTH: THE ROLE OF ENDOGENOUS MARKET STRUCTURE

  We use China's growth experience as a laboratory to study how reductions in administrative and regulatory entry barriers contribute to growth. We develop a model of endogenous productivity and market structure with heterogeneous firms and frictional entry and calibrate it to Chinese manufacturing firms. We show that the reduction of entry barriers brings about 1.05 percentage points of productivity growth over the 1990–2004 period, accounting for 18.3% of the productivity growth in the 2004–7 period. A decomposition exercise shows that entry mainly affects growth through promoting a more competitive market structure, which more than offsets the negative Schumpeterian effect.

• ENDING WASTEFUL YEAR‐END SPENDING: ON OPTIMAL BUDGET RULES IN ORGANIZATIONS

  What can organizations do to minimize wasteful year‐end spending? I introduce a two‐period model to derive optimal budget roll‐over and audit rules. A principal tasks an agent with using a budget to fulfill the organization's spending needs, which are private information of the agent. The agent can misuse funds for private benefit. The optimal rules allow the agent to roll‐over a share of the unused funds, but not necessarily the full share, and in most cases to audit only sufficiently large spending. The optimal audit rule can change once fund roll‐over is allowed. Strategically underfunding the agent can be optimal.

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• THE INS AND OUTS OF SELLING HOUSES: UNDERSTANDING HOUSING‐MARKET VOLATILITY

  This article documents the role of inflows (new listings) and outflows (sales) in explaining the volatility and comovement of housing‐market variables. An “ins versus outs” decomposition shows that both flows are quantitatively important for housing‐market volatility. The correlations between sales, prices, new listings, and time‐to‐sell are stable over time, whereas the signs of their correlations with houses for sale are found to be time‐varying. A calibrated search‐and‐matching model with endogenous inflows and outflows and shocks to housing demand matches many of the stable correlations and predicts that the correlations with houses for sale depend on the source and persistence of shocks.

Featured documents

• REDUCING INEQUALITIES AMONG UNEQUALS

  This article establishes an equivalence between four incomplete rankings of distributions of income among agents who are vertically differentiated with respect to some nonincome characteristic (health, household size, etc.). The first ranking is the possibility of going from one distribution to the ...

• FISCAL STIMULUS WITH LEARNING‐BY‐DOING

  Using a Bayesian structural vector autoregression analysis, we document that an increase in government purchases raises private consumption, the real wage, and total factor productivity (TFP) while reducing inflation. These three facts are hard to reconcile with both neoclassical and New Keynesian...

• LEARNING IN A HEDONIC FRAMEWORK: VALUING BROWNFIELD REMEDIATION

  Incomplete information in property value hedonic models can bias estimates of marginal willingness to pay (MWTP). Using brownfield remediation as an application, this article recovers hedonic values from a dynamic neighborhood choice framework that allows households to learn about brownfield...

• BARGAINING WITH OPTIMISM: IDENTIFICATION AND ESTIMATION OF A MODEL OF MEDICAL MALPRACTICE LITIGATION

  We study a model of bargaining with optimism where players have heterogeneous beliefs about the final resolution. Beliefs and bargaining surplus are identified from the settlement probability and the distribution of accepted transfers. Using data from medical malpractice lawsuits in Florida, we...

• BANKRUPTCY AND DELINQUENCY IN A MODEL OF UNSECURED DEBT

  This article documents and interprets a fact central to the dynamics of informal consumer debt default. We observe that for individuals 60– 90 days late on payments, (i) 85% make payments during the next quarter, and (ii) 40% reduce their debt. To understand these facts, we develop a quantitative...

• SINGLE MOMS AND DEADBEAT DADS: THE ROLE OF EARNINGS, MARRIAGE MARKET CONDITIONS, AND PREFERENCE HETEROGENEITY

  Why do some men father children outside of marriage without providing support? Why do some women have children outside of marriage when they receive little support from fathers? Why is this behavior more common among Blacks than Whites? We estimate a dynamic equilibrium model of marriage,...

• LEARNING MATTERS: REAPPRAISING OBJECT ALLOCATION RULES WHEN AGENTS STRATEGICALLY INVESTIGATE

  Individuals form preferences through search, interviews, discussion, and investigation. In a stylized object allocation model, we characterize the equilibrium learning strategies induced by different allocation rules and trace their welfare consequences. Our analysis reveals that top trading cycles ...

• SEQUENTIAL OR SIMULTANEOUS ELECTIONS? A WELFARE ANALYSIS

  Should all voters vote on the same day or should elections be staggered? Using a model of voting and social learning, we illustrate that sequential elections place too much weight on early states but also provide late voters with valuable information. Simultaneous elections equally weigh states but ...

• THE RETURN TO COLLEGE: SELECTION AND DROPOUT RISK

  This article studies the effect of graduating from college on lifetime earnings. We develop a quantitative model of college choice with uncertain graduation. Departing from much of the literature, we model in detail how students progress through college. This allows us to parameterize the model...

• INCENTIVE EFFICIENT PRICE SYSTEMS IN LARGE INSURANCE ECONOMIES WITH ADVERSE SELECTION

  We decentralize incentive efficient allocations in large adverse selection economies by introducing a competitive market for mechanisms, that is, for menus of contracts. Facing a budget constraint, informed individuals purchase (lottery) tickets to enter mechanisms, whereas firms sell tickets and...