COORDINATING MACROECONOMIC POLICY IN A SIMPLE AK GROWTH MODEL

Modern theories of government finance stress the importance of an economy’s fiscal deficits in determining the course of monetary policy. Modern growth theory stresses the role of monetary factors in economic growth. This paper explores how these two are interrelated, using a simple AK growth model, one with money, reserve requirements, and government debt. We provide a comprehensive look at the coordination of macroeconomic policy and its effects on long-run growth under three alternative coordinating arrangements. We uncover some unconventional results regarding the relationship between growth and a number of policy variables; these rest squarely on the constraint of the coordination processMonetary and Fiscal Policy; AK growth model; inflation targeting; open market operations; reserve requirements

Patience Cycles

Evidence supports the notion that those who grow up to be patient dobetter than those who do not. Parents can inculcate the virtue of delayedgratiÂ…cation in their children by taking the right actions. We study a modelin which parents, for selÂ…sh reasons, invest resources to raise patient chil-dren. In the model, patience raises the marginal return to human capitalacquisition giving the patient young an incentive to spend more on theirown education at the expense of investment in their own progenyÂ’s patience.This dynamic generates intergenerational patience cycles.patience; delayed gratification; human capital

Choosing to Keep Up with the Joneses and Income Inequality

We study a variant of the conventional keeping-up-with-the-Joneses setup in which heterogeneous-ability agents care both about consumption and leisure and receive an utility premium if their consumption exceeds that of the Joneses'. Unlike the conventional setup in which all agents are assumed to want to participate in the rat race of staying ahead of the Joneses, our formulation explicitly permits the option to drop out. Mean-preserving changes in the spread of the underlying ability distribution, via its effect on the economy-wide composition of rat-race participants and drop-outs, have important consequences for induced distributions of leisure and income, consequences that are unobtainable using conventional keeping-up preferences.keeping up with the Joneses; consumption externalities; leisure; labor supply

Deviant Generations, Ricardian Equivalence, and Growth Cycles

TTwo equilibrium possibilities are known to obtain in a standard overlapping-generations model with dynastic preferences: either the altruistic bequest motive is operative for every generation (in which case, Ricardian equivalence obtains) or it is not, for any generation. Dynamic equilibria, where the bequest motive is occasionally operative, cannot emerge. This paper studies bequest-giving behavior and out-of-steady-state bequest and growth dynamics in a�Ak�model with intra- and inter-generational consumption externalities. These externalities, by their very presence, do not destroy Ricardian equivalence. They may, however, give rise to�deviant generations—generations that do not leave a bequest having received an inheritance, and vice versa—and that seals the fate for Ricardian equivalence. Consumption externalities may also generate interesting indeterminacies and endogenous growth cycles that did not exist otherwise.bequests; Ricardian equivalence; growth cycles; Consumption externality

Rejuveniles and growth

Rejuveniles are grown-ups who cultivate juvenile tastes in products and entertainment . In this note, we study a standard AK growth model of overlapping generations populated by rejuveniles. For our purposes, rejuveniles are old agents who derive utility from keeping up their consumption with that of the current young. We find that such cross-generational keeping up is capable of generating interesting equilibrium growth dynamics, including growth cycles. No such growth dynamics is possible either in the baseline model, one where no such generational consumption externality exists, or for almost any other form of keeping up. Steady-state growth in a world with rejuveniles may be higher than that obtained in the baseline model

Rejuveniles and growth

Rejuveniles are “people who cultivate tastes and mind-sets traditionally associated with those younger than themselves” [Noxon, C., 2006. Rejuvenile. Crown Publishers]. In this paper, we study a standard AK growth model of overlapping generations populated by rejuveniles. For our purposes, rejuveniles are old agents who derive utility from “keeping up” their consumption with that of the current young. We find that such cross-generational keeping up is capable of generating interesting equilibrium growth dynamics, including growth cycles. No such growth dynamics is possible either in the baseline model, one where no such generational consumption externality exists, or for almost any other form of keeping up. Steady-state growth in a world with rejuveniles may be higher than that obtained in the baseline model

Private versus public old-age security

We directly compare two institutions, a family compact—a parent makes a transfer to her parent in anticipation of a possible future gift from her children—with a pay-as-you-go, public pension system, in a life cycle model with endogenous fertility wherein children are valued both as consumption and investment goods. Absent intragenerational heterogeneity, we show that a benevolent government has no welfare justification for introducing public pensions alongside thriving family compacts since the former is associated with inefficiently low fertility. This result hinges critically on a fiscal externality—the inability of middle age agents to internalize the impact of their fertility decisions on old-age transfers under a public pension system. With homogeneous agents, a strong-enough negative aggregate shock to middle-age incomes destroys all family compacts, and in such a setting, an optimal public pension system cannot enter. This suggests the raison d’être for social security must lie outside of its function as a pension system—specifically its redistributive function which emerges with heterogeneous agents. In a simple modification of our benchmark model—one that allows for idiosyncratic frictions to compact formation such as differences in infertility/mating status—a welfare-enhancing role for a public pension system emerges; such systems may flourish even when family compacts cannot

Resurrecting equilibria through cycles in an overlapping generations model of money

Momentary equilibria are defined as points that satisfy agents’ optimality conditions and market clearing at any date. However, some dynamic sequences commencing from such points may not be considered valid equilibria because they asymptotically violate some economic restriction of the model. This paper studies a pure-exchange monetary overlapping generations economy in which young and old agents face exogenous minimum consumption requirements, and money is the only asset. The presence of the minimum consumption requirement on the old is shown to produce multiperiodic monetary equilibria in which real balances cycle forever between “momentary” equilibrium points (those which generate monetary sequences that potentially violate equilibrium strictures asymptotically). The novelty is to show that segments of the intergenerational offer curve that would have been deemed dynamically invalid can, in fact, be used to produce asymptotically valid cyclical paths. Indeed, a limit cycle can bestow dynamic validity on momentary equilibrium points that had erstwhile been classified as dynamically invalid

Patience Cycles

Evidence supports the notion that those who grow up to be patient do better than those who do not. Parents can inculcate the virtue of delayed gratification in their children by taking the right actions. We study a model in which parents, for selfish reasons, invest resources to raise patient children. In the model, patience raises the marginal return to human capital acquisition, giving the patient young an incentive to spend more on their own education at the expense of investment in their own progeny\u27s patience. This dynamic generates intergenerational patience cycles

Private versus public old-age security

We compare two institutions head on, a family compact -- a parent makes a transfer to her parent in anticipation of a possible future gift from her children -- with a pay-as-you-go, social security system in a lifecycle model with endogenous fertility wherein children are valued both as consumption and investment goods. Our focus is strictly on the pension dimension of these competing institutions. We show that an optimally-chosen family compact and a social security system cannot co-exist; indeed, the former may be preferred. A strong-enough negative shock to middle-age incomes destroys family compacts. While such a setting might appear ideal for the introduction of a social security system -- as the experience of Europe, circa 1880s, would suggest -- this turns out not to be the case: if incomes are too depressed to allow family compacts to flourish, they are also too low to permit introduction of an optimal social security system