Sharing a Risky Cake

Consider an n-person Nash Bargaining problem where players bargain over the division of a cake whose size is stochastic. In such a game, the players are not only bargaining for more cake, but they are also sharing risk. This paper examines and provides the solution to this problem and highlights a few special cases.Risk sharing; uncertainty; Nash bargaining

The macroeconomic impact of microeconomic shocks: beyond Hulten's Theorem

We provide a nonlinear characterization of the macroeconomic impact of microeconomic productivity shocks in terms of reduced-form non-parametric elasticities for efficient economies. We also show how structural parameters are mapped to these reduced-form elasticities. In this sense, we extend the foundational theorem of Hulten (1978) beyond first-order terms. Key features ignored by first-order approximations that play a crucial role are: structural elasticities of substitution, network linkages, structural returns to scale, and the extent of factor reallocation. Higher-order terms magnify negative shocks and attenuate positive shocks, resulting in an output distribution that is asymmetric, fat-tailed, and has a lower mean even when shocks are symmetric and thin-tailed. In our calibration, output losses due to business-cycle fluctuations are an order of magnitude larger than the cost calculated by Lucas (1987). Second-order terms also show how shocks to critical sectors can have large macroeconomic impacts, tripling the estimated impact of the 1970s oil price shocks

Productivity and misallocation in general equilibrium

We provide a general non-parametric formula for aggregating microeconomic shocks in general equilibrium economies with distortions such as taxes, markups, frictions to resource reallocation, and nominal rigidities. We show that the macroeconomic impact of a shock can be boiled down into two components: its “pure” technology effect; and its effect on allocative efficiency arising from the associated reallocation of resources, which can be measured via changes in factor income shares. We also derive a formula showing how these two components are determined by structural microeconomic parameters such as elasticities of substitution, returns to scale, factor mobility, and network linkages. Overall, our results generalize those of Solow (1957) and Hulten (1978) to economies with distortions. To demonstrate their empirical relevance, we pursue different applications, focusing on markup distortions. For example, we operationalize our non-parametric results and show that improvements in allocative efficiency account for about 50% of measured TFP growth over the period 1997-2015. We also implement our structural results and conclude that eliminating markups would raise TFP by about 40%, increasing the economywide cost of monopoly distortions by two orders of magnitude compared to the famous 0.1% estimates of Harberger (1954)

Asymmetric inflation expectations, downward rigidity of wages,and asymmetric business cycles

Household expectations of the inflation rate are much more sensitive to inflation than to disinflation. To the extent that workers have bargaining power in wage determination, this asymmetry in their beliefs can make wages respond quickly to inflationary forces but sluggishly to deflationary ones. I microfound asymmetric household expectations using ambiguity-aversion: households, who do not know the quality of their information, overweight inflationary news since it reduces their purchasing power, and underweight deflationary news since it increases their purchasing power. I embed asymmetric beliefs into a general equilibrium model and show that, in such a model, monetary policy has asymmetric effects on employment, output, and wage inflation in ways consistent with the data. Although wages are downwardly rigid in this environment, monetary policy need not have a bias towards using inflation to grease the wheels of the labor market

Essays in Macroeconomics

This dissertation focuses on three prominent areas of macroeconomic policy: fiscal stimulus, bail-outs and industrial policy, and monetary policy. In each case, I analyze the nature of the problem without intervention first before turning to why and how policy can be used to improve outcomes. In the first chapter, I study how relative demand shocks for different goods and services propagate through the economy to affect aggregate employment – and I use these insights to show how fiscal stimulus should be designed to achieve the greatest bang for buck in terms of employment. In the second chapter, I study how firm entry and exit in one industry can affect other industries and the economy as a whole through input-output relationships. I characterize which firms and industries are systemically important, show that the equilibrium is generically inefficient, and study when and how bailouts can be used to improve welfare. In the final paper, I provide a new microfoundation for downward wage rigidity, show that this microfoundation yields predictions that are consistent with the data, and study how monetary policy should behave given this microfoundation.Economic

Cascading Failures in Production Networks *

Abstract I show how the extensive margin of firm entry and exit can greatly amplify idiosyncratic shocks in an economy with a production network. I show that input-output models with entry and exit behave very differently to models without this margin. In particular, in such models, sales provide a very poor measure of the systemic importance of firms or industries. I derive a new notion of systemic influence called exit centrality that captures how exits in one industry will affect equilibrium output. I show that exit centrality need not be monotonically related to an industry's sales, size, or prices. Unlike the relevant notions of centrality in standard input-output models, exit centrality depends on the industry's role as both a supplier and as a consumer of inputs. Furthermore, I show that granularities in systemically important industries can cause one failure to snowball into a large-scale avalanche of failures. In this sense, shocks can be amplified as they travel through the network, whereas in standard input-output models they cannot

Cascading Failures in Production Networks *

Abstract I show how the extensive margin of firm entry and exit can greatly amplify idiosyncratic shocks in an economy with a production network. I show that canonical input-output models, which lack the extensive margin of firm entry and exit, have some crucial limitations. In these models, the systemic importance of a firm does not respond to productivity shocks, depends only on the firm's role as a supplier, and is equal to or well-approximated by the firm's size. This means that for every canonical input-output model, there exists a non-interconnected model that has the same aggregate response to productivity shocks. I show that when we allow for entry and exit, the systemic importance of a firm responds endogenously to productivity shocks, depends on a firm's role not just as a supplier but also as a consumer, and a firm's systemic influence is no longer well-approximated by its size. Furthermore, I show that nondivisibilities in systemically important industries can cause one failure to snowball into a large-scale avalanche of failures. In this sense, shocks can be amplified as they travel through the network, whereas in canonical input-output models they cannot

Intertemporal Choice: A Nash Bargaining Approach

A compelling, but highly tractable, axiomatic foundation for intertemporal decision making is established and discussed. This axiomatic foundation relies on methods employed in cooperative bargaining theory. Four simple axioms imply that the intertemporal objective function is a weighted geometric average of each period's utility function. This is in contrast to standard practice, which takes the objective function to be a weighted arithmetic average. The analysis covers both finite and infinite time.

Using wavelets to measure core inflation: the case in New Zealand

This paper uses wavelets to develop a core inflation measure for inflation targeting central banks. The analysis is applied to the case of New Zealand – the country with the longest history of explicit inflation targeting. We compare the performance of our proposed measure against some popular alternatives. Our measure does well at identifying a reliable medium-term trend in inflation. It also has comparable forecasting performance to standard benchmarks.