Monetary Policy And The Distribution Of Income

This paper represents a first attempt at a tractable analysis of how monetary policy influences the income distribution in an economy. It presents a monetary growth model in which inflation affects credit market efficiency, and via this link, influences capital accumulation, and the income distribution. In the model, a fraction of the population is capitalists, who have access to a risky but high return capital production technology. Capital investment must be partially externally financed via workers' savings, and is subject to a costly state verification (CSV) problem. Successful capitalists leave bequests to their offspring which serve as internal finance, more of which promotes credit market efficiency and capital formation. Inflation acts as an unavoidable tax on the capital incomes of the capitalists thereby reducing their bequests and worsening the CSV friction. Computational experiments reveal that in the model economy, irrespective of whether the government rebates the proceeds of the inflation tax to capitalists or workers, inflation decreases the steady-state capital stock, although the capital stock is highest when all transfers go to workers. The regime where workers get the entire transfer is shown to be "superior" in many respects to one where the capitalists get all the transfer. When monetary policy is instead implemented via changes in the reserve requirement, the effects are largely similar except that the regime where seigniorage is rebated to workers is clearly preferred by all workers and all capitalists.bequests; asymmetric information; external finance; capital accumulation; inflation; bankruptcy; income distribution

On the Usefulness of the Constrained Planning Problem in a Model of Money

In this paper, we study a decentralized monetary economy with a specified set of markets, rules of trade, an equilibrium concept, and a restricted set of policies and derive a set of equilibrium (monetary) allocations. Next we set up a simpler constrained planning problem in which we restrict the planner to choose from a set that contains the set of equilibrium allocations in the decentralized economy. If there is a government policy that allows the decentralized economy to achieve the constrained planner's allocation, then it is the optimal policy choice. To illustrate the power of such analyses, we solve such planning problems in three monetary environments with limited communication. The upshot is that solving constrained planning problems is an extremely "efficient" (easy and quick) way of deriving optimal policies for the corresponding decentralized economies.planning problems; overlapping generations; random relocation model

Age-Specific Employment Policies

Many countries around the world are experiencing a significant shift in demographic patterns towards an older population. The age composition of the labor force has also changed dramatically, often accompanied by sharp reductions in the labor force participation rates of older workers. These phenomena in concert pose numerous challenges for the design of public pension programs and labor market policies in general. While governments have traditionally encouraged early retirement by the elderly to free up jobs for the young, such policies now impose an unprecedented tax burden on the current younger generations of working individuals. This has prompted many governments to instead adopt policies that promote old-age labor force participation. The primary goal of this paper is to draw some qualititative insights about these different policy responses within the context of a dynamic general equilibrium model. In order to address the role of the lifecycle for the allocation of workers to jobs, we develop a model of the labor market characterized by search and matching frictions and embed it into an overlapping-generations framework. We explicitly introduce age-targeted labor market policies and endogenize labor force participation across all age groups. Our analysis reveals that the age composition of the labor force may cause an inefficient allocation of workers to jobs in the labor market thereby creating an efficiency-enhancing role for publicly-induced retirement. Interestingly, we also find that public pension programs may improve labor market welfare by "redistributing bargaining power" over the lifecycle. Our work suggests that recent policy initiatives aimed at reducing the work disincentives currently embedded in many public pension programs may further the income redistribution motive of social security, encourage labor market participation among the elderly, and increase total employment. In this vein, we find that complete elimination of the earnings test may

A Positive Theory of the Income Redistributive Focus of Social Security

Many countries around the world have large public pension programs. Traditionally, these programs have been used to induce retirement by the elderly in order to free up jobs for the young and to redistribute income across generations. This paper provides an efficiency rationale for the inter-generational income redistribution focus of such programs in a framework which explicitly accounts for the role of the lifecycle as well as search and matching frictions in the labor market. In our model, public pension programs alter the age composition of the labor force by inducing the jobless elderly to retire. By requiring a long history of labor market attachment in order to receive benefits, these programs raise the future value of current employment for the young which serves to redistribute bargaining power, and hence income, from the young to the old. The paper argues that pension programs through their effect on the wage structure, the age distribution of the labor force and firm entry decisions, can improve the operation of the labor market and might therefore be desirable on efficiency grounds alone (abstracting from equity and insurance motives). It shows that a pension program that is funded from within the economy can lead to higher welfare than having no pension program at all.pensions; search; labor market efficiency; unemployment; lifecycle

What do information frictions do?

Researchers have incorporated labor or credit market frictions in isolation within simple neoclassical models to open up a role for institutions, inject realism into their models and examine the impact of these distortions on output and employment. We present an overlapping generations model with production in which a labor market friction (moral hazard) coexists with a credit market friction (costly state verification). The simultaneous presence and interaction of these two frictions is studied. Our main results are: (i) while credit market frictions affect real activity and employment both in the short and long run, labor market frictions typically have only short-run effects unless they also affect the volume of investment per worker, (ii) the two frictions amplify each other to produce higher long-run unemployment than would result from only labor market frictions, (iii) these distortions have the ability to prolong the effect of temporary shocks, and (iv) the dynamical properties of economies with both frictions are, somewhat surprisingly, qualitatively similar to their frictionless counterpartsfrictions, contracts, growth

Public and Private Expenditures on Health in a Growth Model

This paper introduces endogenous longevity in an otherwise standard overlapping generations model with capital. In the model, a young agent may increase the length of her old age by incurring investments in health funded from her wage income. Such private health investments are assumed to be more "productive" if accompanied by complementary tax-financed public health programs. The presence of such a complementary public input in private longevity is shown to expose the economy to aggregate endogenous fluctuations and even chaos, and such volatility is impossible in its absence. In particular, the model is capable of generating dramatic reversals in life expectancy as has been observed in many countries.chaos; longevity; public health

On Myopia as Rationale for Social Security

This paper revisits the role played by myopia in generating a theoretical rationale for pay-as-you-go social security in dynamically efficient economies. Contrary to received wisdom, if the real interest rate is exogenously fixed, enough myopia may justify public pensions but never alongside positive private savings. With sufficient myopia, co-existence of positive optimal pensions and positive private saving is possible if the real interest rate on saving evolves endogenously, as in a model with a neoclassical technology.myopia, pensions, social security, dynamic efficiency

What Do Information Frictions Do?

Researchers have incorporated labor or credit market frictions in isolation within simple neoclassical models to open up a role for institutions, inject realism into their models and examine the impact of these distortions on output and employment. We present an overlapping generations model with production in which a labor market friction (moral hazard) coexists with a credit market friction (costly state verification). The simultaneous presence and interaction of these two frictions is studied. Our main results are: (i) while credit market frictions affect real activity and employment both in the short and long run, labor market frictions typically have only short-run effects unless they also affect the volume of investment per worker, (ii) the two frictions amplify each other to produce higher long-run unemployment than would result from only labor market frictions, (iii) these distortions have the ability to prolong the effect of temporary shocks, and (iv) the dynamical properties of economies with both frictions are, somewhat surprisingly, qualitatively similar to their frictionless counterparts.moral hazard; costly state verification; contracts; dynamics; growth models

Social Security and Intergenerational Redistribution

Many countries around the world have large public pension programs with significant cross-cohort redistribution. This paper provides a rationale for such programs in a lifecycle framework with search and matching frictions in the labor market. In the model, public pension programs alter the age composition of the labor force by inducing the jobless elderly to retire. This improves the allocation of workers to jobs, raises firm entry and may also improve welfare. By requiring a long history of labor market attachment as a precondition to receiving benefits, these programs raise the future value of current employment for the young. This redistributes bargaining strength and income from the young to the old.search; labor market efficiency; unemployment; lifecycle; pensions