Optimal monetary policy and firm entry

This paper characterises optimal monetary policy in an economy with endogenous firm entry, a cash-in-advance constraint and preset wages. Firms must make profits to cover entry costs; thus the markup on goods prices is efficient. However, because leisure is not priced at a markup, the consumption-leisure tradeoff is distorted. Consequently, the real wage, hours and production are suboptimally low. Due to the labour requirement in entry, insufficient labour supply also implies that entry is too low. The paper shows that in the absence of fiscal instruments such as labour income subsidies, the optimal monetary policy under sticky wages achieves higher welfare than under flexible wages. The policy maker uses the money supply instrument to raise the real wage - the cost of leisure - above its flexible-wage level, in response to expansionary shocks to productivity and entry costs. This raises labour supply, expanding production and rm entry

Optimum income taxation and layoff taxes

This paper analyzes optimum income taxation in a model with endogenous job destruction that gives rise to unemployment. It is shown that optimal tax schemes comprise both payroll and layoff taxes when the state provides public unemployment insurance and aims at redistributing income. The optimal layoff tax is equal to the social cost of job destruction, which amounts to the sum of unemployment benefits (that the state pays to unemployed workers) and payroll taxes (that the state does not get when workers are unemployed).Layoff taxes, Optimal taxation, Job destruction.

Gains from international monetary policy coordination: does it pay to be different?

This paper presents a new argument for international monetary policy coordination based on considerations of structural asymmetries across countries. In a two-country world with a traded and a non-traded sector in each country, optimal independent monetary policy cannot replicate the natural-rate allocations. There are potential welfare gains from coordination since the planner under a cooperating regime internalizes a terms-of-trade externality that independent central banks tend to overlook. Yet, with symmetric structures across countries, the gains are quantitatively small. If the size of the traded sector differs across countries, the gains can be sizable and increase with the degree of asymmetry. The planner's optimal policy not only internalizes the terms-of-trade externality, it also creates a terms-of-trade bias in favor the country with a larger traded sector. Further, the planner tries to balance the terms-of-trade bias against the need to stabilize fluctuations in the terms-of-trade gap. JEL Classification: E52, F41, F42Asymmetric Structures, International Policy Coordination, optimal monetary policy, Terms-of-Trade Bias

"Optimal monetary policy when asset markets are incomplete"

This paper considers the properties of an optimal monetary policy when households are subject to countercyclical uninsured income shocks. We develop a tractable incompletemarkets model with Calvo price setting. Incomplete markets creates a new distortion and that distortion is large in the sense that the welfare cost of business cycles is large in our model. Nevertheless, the optimal monetary policy is very similar to the optimal policy that emerges in the representative agent framework and calls for nearly complete stabilization of the price-level.

Fiscal Devaluations

We show that even when the exchange rate cannot be devalued, a small set of conventional fiscal instruments can robustly replicate the real allocations attained under a nominal exchange rate devaluation in a dynamic New Keynesian open economy environment. We perform the analysis under alternative pricing assumptions– producer or local currency pricing, along with nominal wage stickiness; under arbitrary degrees of asset market completeness and for general stochastic sequences of devaluations. There are two types of fiscal policies equivalent to an exchange rate devaluation–one, a uniform increase in import tariff and export subsidy, and two, a value-added tax increase and a uniform payroll tax reduction. When the devaluations are anticipated, these policies need to be supplemented with a consumption tax reduction and an income tax increase. These policies are revenue neutral. In certain cases equivalence requires, in addition, a partial default on foreign bond holders. We discuss the issues of implementation of these policies, in particular, under the circumstances of a currency union.

Uninsured countercyclical risk: an aggregation result and@application to optimal monetary policy

We consider an incomplete markets economy with capital accumulation and endogenous labor supply. Individuals face countercyclical idiosyncratic labor and asset risk. We derive conditions under which the aggregate allocations and price system can be found by solving a representative agent problem. This result is applied to analyze the properties of an optimal monetary policy in a New Keynesian economy with uninsured countercyclical individual risk. The optimal monetary policy that emerges from our incomplete markets economy is the same as the optimal monetary policy in a representative agent model with preference shocks. When price rigidity is the only friction the optimal monetary policy calls for stabilizing the in ation rate at zero.

Constrained Inefficiency and Optimal Taxation with Uninsurable Risks

Should capital and labor be taxed, and if so how when individuals' labor and capital income are subject to uninsurable idiosyncratic risks? In a two period general equilibrium model with production, we first show that reducing investment is welfare improving if households are homogeneous enough ex ante. On the other hand, when the degree of heterogeneity is sufficientlyhigh a welfare improvement is achieved by increasing investment, even if the investment level is already higher than at the e¢ cient allocation obtained when full insurance markets were available. Consequently, the optimal capital tax rate might be negative. We derive a decomposition formula of the e¤ects of the tax which allow us to determine how the sign of optimal tax on capital and labor depends both on the nature of the shocks and the degree of heterogeneity among consumers as well as on the way in which the tax revenue is allocated.

Uninsured countercyclical risk: an aggregation result and application to optimal monetary policy

We consider an incomplete-markets economy with capital accumulation and endogenous labor supply. Individuals face countercyclical idiosyncratic labor and asset risk. We derive conditions under which the aggregate allocations and price system can be found by solving a representative agent problem. This result is applied to analyze the properties of an optimal monetary policy in a new Keynesian economy with uninsured countercyclical individual risk. The optimal monetary policy that emerges from our incomplete-markets economy is the same as the optimal monetary policy in a representative agent model with preference shocks. When price rigidity is the only friction, the optimal monetary policy calls for stabilizing the inflation rate at zero.

Fiscal Policy in a Monetary Union: Gains from Changing Institutions

In a Monetary Union where individual monetary instruments are lost, fiscal policy becomes more important as a national policy. The question addressed in this article is whether fiscal policy should be decided at the country level or by a central decision maker, being in any case the fiscal instruments specific to each country. To answer this question, the focus is on the quantitative effect, since there are costs of implementing a supranational decision maker. While discussing the methodologies used in literature, we hereby propose a different one for quantifying gains from cooperation. We conclude that gains from fiscal coordination are significative, but gains that result from policy changes as a reaction to shocks are, by nature, very small. We also show that, symmetric shocks lead to coordination gains of the same magnitude than asymmetric ones.Coordination, Fiscal Policy, Gains, Nash.

Optimal monetary policy and firm entry. NBB Working Paper 178, October 2009

This paper describes optimal monetary policy in an economy with monopolistic competition, endogenous firm entry, a cash-in-advance constraint and pre-set wages. Firms must make profits in order to cover entry costs; thus a mark-up on goods prices is necessary. Without this mark-up, profits would be zero and no firm would enter the market, resulting in zero production. Therefore, the mark-up should not be removed. In this economy with market entrants, goods are more expensive than in a competitive economy with marginal cost pricing. This leads to a misallocation of resources, because leisure is not sold at a mark-up. Goods and leisure are two sources of utility that households trade off against each other. Thus, they may buy too much leisure instead of consumption goods. The consequence is that labour supply and production are sub-optimally low. Due to the labour requirement at market entry stage, insufficient labour supply also implies too little entry and too few firms in equilibrium. In the absence of fiscal instruments such as labour income subsidies, the optimal monetary policy under sticky wages achieves higher welfare than under flexible wages. The policy-maker uses the money supply instrument to raise the real wage - the cost of leisure - above its flexible-wage level, in response to expansionary shocks. This induces a rise in labour supply, more production of goods and more new firms