Long-run trends in earnings and employment in Hungary, 1972-1996

Transition from socialist to capitalist economy led to enormous changes in earnings and employment. In our study a long-horizon descriptive analysis is presented about the major trends, including the last fifteen years of socialism. Education, gender, calendar time, age and vintage effects are separately analyzed. Aggregate (quasi-) panel analysis is used to assess the role of labor demand and labor supply, concluding that exogenous supply factors explained most of what happened before the transition, while the transition itself was dominated by large labor demand shocks. These demand shocks are in large part structural, as opposed to cyclical, and are highly correlated with vintage, gender and education. The main results are summarized in a list of stylized facts.

Complete Markets, Enforcement Constraints and Intermediation

Alvarez and Jermann (2000) show that the constrained efficient allocations of endowment economies with complete markets and limited commitment can be decentralized with endogenous borrowing limits on the Arrow securities. In a model with capital accumulation, aggregate risk and competitive intermediaries, we show that such a decentralization is not possible unless one imposes an upper limit on the intermediaries' capital holdings. Since there is no empirical evidence of such restrictions, we also characterize the equilibrium with no capital accumulation constraints. We show that this allocation solves a similar system of equations to the one of the constrained optimal solution, a result which considerably simplifies the equilibrium computation. In addition, capital accumulation is higher in this case, since the intermediaries do not internalize that fact that a higher aggregate capital increases the incentives to default. Finally, this also implies that agents may enjoy a higher welfare in the long run in spite of the fact that this allocation is not constrained efficientComplete markets, Enforcement Constraints, Intermediation

Complete Markets, Enforcement Constraints and Intermediation

Production Economies, Enforcement Constraints, Financial Intermediation

Competitive Equilibria with Production and Limited Commitment

This paper studies a production economy with aggregate uncertainty where consumers have limited commitment on their financial liabilities. Markets are endogenously incomplete due to the fact that the borrowing constraints are determined endogenously. We first show that, if competitive financial intermediaries are allowed to set the borrowing limits, then the ones that prevent default will be an equilibrium outcome. The equilibrium allocations in this economy are not constrained efficient due to the fact that intermediaries do not internalize the adverse effects of capital on default incentives. We also isolate and quantifiy this new source of inefficiency by comparing the competitive equilibrium allocations to the constrained efficient ones both qualitatively and quantitatively. We tend to observe higher capital accumulation in the competitive equilibrium, implying that agents may enjoy higher (average) welfare in the long run than in the constrained efficient allocation.Enforcement Constraints, Intermediation, Risk Sharing, Capital Accumulation.

Endogenous incomplete markets, enforcement constraints, and intermediation

Alvarez and Jermann (2000) show that the constrained efficient allocations of endowment economies with imperfect risk sharing due to limited commitment can be decentralized as competitive equilibria with endogenous debt constraints that are not too tight. These are the loosest possible borrowing limits that do not allow for default in equilibrium. However, such a decentralization is not possible in the presence of capital accumulation, since changes in the aggregate capital also affect the incentives to default. In a model with endogenous production, aggregate risk, and competitive intermediaries, we show that a decentralization with endogenous debt constraints is possible if one also imposes an upper limit on the intermediaries’ capital holdings.Complete markets, enforcement constraints, intermediation

Optimal income taxation with asset accumulation

Several frictions restrict the government's ability to tax assets. First of all, it is very costly to monitor trades on international asset markets. Moreover, agents can resort to non-observable low-return assets such as cash, gold or foreign currencies if taxes on observable assets become too high. This paper shows that limitations in asset observability have important consequences for the taxation of labor income. Using a dynamic moral hazard model of social insurance, we �find that optimal labor income taxes typically become less progressive when assets are imperfectly observed. We evaluate the effect quantitatively in a model calibrated to U.S. data

Optimal income taxation with asset accumulation

Several frictions restrict the government's ability to tax assets. First of all, it is very costly to monitor trades on international asset markets. Moreover, agents can resort to non-observable low-return assets such as cash, gold or foreign currencies if taxes on observable assets become too high. This paper shows that limitations in asset observability have important consequences for the taxation of labor income. Using a dynamic moral hazard model of social insurance, we �find that optimal labor income taxes typically become less progressive when assets are imperfectly observed. We evaluate the effect quantitatively in a model calibrated to U.S. data

Technological Revolutions and Debt Hangovers: Is There a Link?

Abstract The Great Recession, the Great Depression, and the Japanese slump of the 1990s were all preceded by periods of major technological innovation. In an attempt to understand these facts, we estimate a model with noisy news about the future. We find that beliefs about long run income adjust with an important delay to shifts in trend productivity. This delay, together with estimated shifts in the trend of productivity in the three cases, are able to tell a common and simple story for the observed dynamics of productivity and consumption on a 20 to 25 year window. Our analysis highlights the advantages of a look at this data from the point of view of the medium run

Efficient risk sharing with limited commitment and storage

We extend the model of risk sharing with limited commitment (Kocherlakota, 1996) by introducing both a public and a private (non-contractible and/or non-observable) storage technology. Positive public storage relaxes future participation constraints and may hence improve risk sharing, contrary to the case where hidden income or effort is the deep friction. The characteristics of constrained-efficient allocations crucially depend on the storage technology’s return. In the long run, if the return on storage is (i) moderately high, both assets and the consumption distribution may remain time-varying; (ii) sufficiently high, assets converge almost surely to a constant and the consumption distribution is time-invariant; (iii) equal to agents’ discount rate, perfect risk sharing is self-enforcing. Agents never have an incentive to use their private storage technology, i.e., Euler inequalities are always satisfied, at the constrained-efficient allocation of our model, while this is not the case without optimal public asset accumulation