Inflation taxes, financial intermediation, and home production

This paper examines the welfare costs of inflation in the presence of financial market frictions. The results suggest that financing constraints on firms' working capital expenditures significantly increase the welfare costs relative to the standard Cooley-Hansen (1989) cash-in-advance framework. These costs are reduced, but remain above those computed by Cooley and Hansen, when a financial intermediary is introduced that engages in asset transformation by creating liquid, interest-bearing deposit accounts and using the proceeds to finance working capital loans to firms. Explicitly modeling home production activities tends to reduce the distortion that inflation induces in employment and market output, but results in higher estimates of the welfare losses. Both of these effects are magnified when households must also finance their gross investment in home capital by borrowing from the financial intermediary. This credit friction indirectly taxes home production and tends to move resources back into the market, thereby mitigating the adverse effects of inflation on employment and output, while exacerbating the welfare costs.Inflation (Finance) ; Welfare ; Housing - Finance

Bank intermediation and persistent liquidity effects in the presence of a frictionless bond market

An “expansionary” monetary policy that increases the growth rate of bank reserves is generally believed by policy makers to induce a “liquidity effect”, or a persistent decline in short-term nominal interest rates, that stimulates real activity. Christiano, et al. (1991,1995,1997) have incorporated this feature of the economy into equilibrium business cycle models by introducing a commercial bank that acquires deposits from households and channels those funds to firms, which use them to fund their working capital expenses. Bank deposits are the only interest-bearing financial asset available to households, and bank loans are the only source of working capital finance available to firms. To obtain a liquidity effect in response to an unanticipated reserves injection, those models rely on an information friction whereby households precommit to a liquid asset position prior to the monetary shock. In practice, the capital markets are a major source of working capital finance, and U.S. data indicate that bank financing as a share of total short-term working capital finance is countercyclical. This paper extends this literature by introducing a bond market that allows for nonintermediated loans directly from households to firms, and examines the information friction that could induce liquidity effects and countercyclicality in the degree of bank intermediation of working capital finance. The results indicate: (i) “sticky prices” are neither necessary nor sufficient to induce a liquidity effect; (ii) deposit precommitment by households along with a presetting of the deposit rate by banks does induce persistent liquidity effects, but results in excess volatility of consumption and investment; (iii) minimizing the deposit precommitment, while maintaining the preset deposit rate induces a weaker liquidity effect that is more in line with the data, without the excess volatility in consumption and investment; and (iv) the share of bank intermediation in working capital finance is countercyclical in all cases, including the absence of an information friction.Bonds ; Liquidity (Economics) ; Banks and banking

Productivity shocks in a model with vintage capital and heterogeneous labor

We construct a vintage capital model in which worker skills lie along a continuum and workers can be paired with different vintages (as technology evolves) under a matching rule of "best worker with the best machine." Labor reallocation in response to technology shocks has two key implications for the wage premium. First, it limits both the magnitude and duration of change in the wage premium following a (permanent) embodied technology shock, so empirically plausible shocks do not lead to the kind of increases in the wage premium observed in the U.S. during the 1980s and early 1990s (though an increase in labor force heterogeneity does). Second, positive disembodied technology shocks tend to push up the wage premium as well, and while this effect is small, it does mean that a higher premium does not provide unambiguous information about the underlying shock. Labor reallocation also means that if embodied technology comes to play a larger role in long-run growth, investment and savings tend to fall in steady state, with little effect on output and employment, enabling the household to increase consumption without sacrificing leisure. The short run effects are more conventional: permanent shocks to disembodied technology induce a strong wealth effect that reduces savings and induces a consumption boom while permanent shocks to embodied technology induce dominant substitution effects and an expansion characterized by an investment boom.Productivity

The role of capital service-life in a model with heterogenous labor and vintage capital

We examine how the economy responds to both disembodied and embodied technology shocks in a model with vintage capital. We focus on what happens when there is a change in the number of vintages of capital that are in use at any one time and on what happens when there is a change in the persistence of the shocks hitting the economy. The data suggest that these kinds of changes took place in the U.S. economy in the 1990s, when the pace of embodied technical progress appears to have accelerated. We find that embodied technology shocks lead to greater variability (of output, investment and labor allocations) than disembodied shocks of the same size. On the other hand, a decrease in the number of vintages in use at any time (such as is likely to occur when the pace of technical progress accelerates) tends to reduce the volatility of output and also to differentiate the initial response of the economy to the two shocks.Technology ; Technological innovations ; Labor productivity

The wage premium puzzle and the quality of human capital

The wage premium for high-skilled workers in the United States, measured as the ratio of the 90th-to-10th percentiles from the wage distribution, increased by 20 percent from the 1970s to the late 1980s. A large literature has emerged to explain this phenomenon. A leading explanation is that skill-biased technological change (SBTC) increased the demand for skilled labor relative to unskilled labor. In a calibrated vintage capital model with heterogenous labor, this paper examines whether SBTC is likely to have been a major factor in driving up the wage premium. Our results suggest that the contribution of SBTC is very small, accounting for about 1/20th of the observed increase. By contrast, a gradual and very modest shift in the distribution of human capital across workers can easily account for the large observed increase in wage inequality.Labor supply ; Wages

Bank Intermediation and Persistent Liquidity Effects in the Presence of a Frictionless Bond Market

An "expansionary" monetary policy that increases the growth rate of bank reserves is generally believed by policymakers to induce a "liquidity effect", or a persistent decline in short-term nominal interest rates, that stimulates real activity. Christiano, et al. (1991,1995,1997) have incorporated this feature of the economy into equilibrium business cycle models by introducing a commercial bank that acquires deposits from households and channels those funds to firms, which use them to fund their working capital expenses. Bank deposits are the only interest-bearing financial asset available to households, and bank loans are the only source of working capital finance available to firms. To obtain a liquidity effect in response to an unanticipated reserves injection, those models rely on an information friction whereby households precommit to a liquid asset position prior to the monetary shock. In practice, the capital markets are a major source of working capital finance, and U.S. data indicate that bank financing as a share of total short-term working capital finance is countercyclical.This paper extends this literature by introducing a bond market that allows for nonintermediated loans directly from households to firms, and examines the information friction that could induce liquidity effects and countercyclicality in the degree of bank intermediation of working capital finance. The results indicate that: (i) "sticky prices" are neither necessary nor sufficient to induce a liquidity effect; (ii) deposit precommitment by households along with a presetting of the deposit rate by banks does induce persistent liquidity effects, but results in excess volatility of consumption and investment; (iii) minimizing the deposit precommitment, while maintaining the preset deposit rate induces a weaker liquidity effect that is more in line with the data, without the excess volatility in consumption and investment; and (iv) the share of bank intermediation in working capital finance is countercyclical in all cases, including the absence of an information friction. ( JEL Classifications: E4,E5. Keywords: financial intermediation, liquidity, monetary policy. )

Input and Output Inventories in General Equilibrium

We build and estimate a two‐sector (goods and services) dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with two types of inventories: materials (input) inventories facilitate the production of finished goods, while finished goods (output) inventories yield utility services. The model is estimated using Bayesian methods. The estimated model replicates the volatility and cyclicality of inventory investment and inventory‐to‐target ratios. Although inventories are an important element of the model’s propagation mechanism, shocks to inventory efficiency or management are not an important source of business cycles. When the model is estimated over two subperiods (pre ‐ and post‐1984), changes in the volatility of inventory shocks, or in structural parameters associated with inventories play a minor role in reducing the volatility of output