Sticky Price Models of the Business Cycle: Can the Contract Multiplier Solve the Persistence Problem?

We construct a quantitative equilibrium model with firms setting prices in a staggered fashion and use it to ask whether monetary shocks can generate business cycle fluctuations. These fluctuations include persistent movements in output along with the other defining features of business cycles, like volatile investment and smooth consumption. We assume that prices are exogenously sticky for a short time. Persistent output fluctuations require endogenous price stickiness in the sense that firms choose not to change prices much when they can do so. We find that for a wide range of parameter values, the amount of endogenous stickiness is small. Thus, we find that in a standard quantitative model, staggered price‐setting, alone, does not generate business cycle fluctuations.     

A Parsimonious Macroeconomic Model for Asset Pricing

I study asset prices in a two‐agent macroeconomic model with two key features: limited stock market participation and heterogeneity in the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption (EIS). The model is consistent with some prominent features of asset prices, such as a high equity premium, relatively smooth interest rates, procyclical stock prices, and countercyclical variation in the equity premium, its volatility, and in the Sharpe ratio. In this model, the risk‐free asset market plays a central role by allowing non‐stockholders (with low EIS) to smooth the fluctuations in their labor income. This process concentrates non‐stockholders' labor income risk among a small group of stockholders, who then demand a high premium for bearing the aggregate equity risk. Furthermore, this mechanism is consistent with the very small share of aggregate wealth held by non‐stockholders in the U.S. data, which has proved problematic for previous models with limited participation. I show that this large wealth inequality is also important for the model's ability to generate a countercyclical equity premium. When it comes to business cycle performance, the model's progress has been more limited: consumption is still too volatile compared to the data, whereas investment is still too smooth. These are important areas for potential improvement in this framework.     

房地产价格波动的微观传导效应研究——基于融资约束的视角

本文利用全国各省区及七十个大中城市房地产价格数据,匹配以上市公司的房屋和土地使用权数据,从微观层面考察融资约束在房地产价格传导机制中所发挥的作用及其经济后果.本文研究表明房地产价格波动对我国企业融资和投资行为具有显著的传导效应,其效应扩散程度主要取决于企业的融资约束状况,当企业所拥有的房地产价值上涨时,融资约束程度高的企业外部债务融资更多,具有更高的投资水平,表现出更强的过度投资倾向.本文进一步考察传导效应的资源配置后果,发现企业的绩效并未有实质性的改善,说明抵押资产价格传导效应可能存在负面经济后果.本文还发现,随着房地产价格的波动,融资约束程度高的企业也体现出更大的投资波动幅度,这说明融资约束有可能放大经济周期性波动程度,证实了Kiyotaki和Moore(1997)的理论推断.     

AN ESTIMATED DYNAMIC STOCHASTIC GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM MODEL OF THE EURO AREA

This paper develops and estimates a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model with sticky prices and wages for the euro area. The model incorporates various other features such as habit formation, costs of adjustment in capital accumulation and variable capacity utilization. It is estimated with Bayesian techniques using seven key macroeconomic variables: GDP, consumption, investment, prices, real wages, employment, and the nominal interest rate. The introduction of ten orthogonal structural shocks (including productivity, labor supply, investment, preference, cost‐push, and monetary policy shocks) allows for an empirical investigation of the effects of such shocks and of their contribution to business cycle fluctuations in the euro area. Using the estimated model, we also analyze the output (real interest rate) gap, defined as the difference between the actual and model‐based potential output (real interest rate). (JEL: E4, E5)     

THE INTERNATIONAL DIMENSION OF PRODUCTIVITY AND DEMAND SHOCKS IN THE US ECONOMY

This paper analyzes the cross‐country effects of productivity and demand disturbances in the United States identified with sign restrictions based on standard theory. Productivity gains in US manufacturing increase US consumption and investment vis‐à‐vis foreign countries, resulting in a trade deficit and higher international prices of US goods, despite the rise in their supply. Financial adjustment works via a higher global value of US equities, real dollar appreciation, and an expansion of US gross foreign liabilities as well as assets. Positive demand shocks to US manufacturing also increase investment and cause a real dollar appreciation, but have limited effects on the trade balance and net foreign assets. Our findings emphasize the importance for macroeconomic interdependence of endogenous fluctuations in aggregate demand across countries in response to business cycle shocks.     

The Role of Automatic Stabilizers in the U.S. Business Cycle

Most countries have automatic rules in their tax‐and‐transfer systems that are partly intended to stabilize economic fluctuations. This paper measures their effect on the dynamics of the business cycle. We put forward a model that merges the standard incomplete‐markets model of consumption and inequality with the new Keynesian model of nominal rigidities and business cycles, and that includes most of the main potential stabilizers in the U.S. data and the theoretical channels by which they may work. We find that the conventional argument that stabilizing disposable income will stabilize aggregate demand plays a negligible role in the dynamics of the business cycle, whereas tax‐and‐transfer programs that affect inequality and social insurance can have a larger effect on aggregate volatility. However, as currently designed, the set of stabilizers in place in the United States has had little effect on the volatility of aggregate output fluctuations or on their welfare costs despite stabilizing aggregate consumption. The stabilizers have a more important role when monetary policy is constrained by the zero lower bound, and they affect welfare significantly through the provision of social insurance.     

Uncertainty Shocks in a Model of Effective Demand

Can increased uncertainty about the future cause a contraction in output and its components? An identified uncertainty shock in the data causes significant declines in output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. Standard general‐equilibrium models with flexible prices cannot reproduce this comovement. However, uncertainty shocks can easily generate comovement with countercyclical markups through sticky prices. Monetary policy plays a key role in offsetting the negative impact of uncertainty shocks during normal times. Higher uncertainty has even more negative effects if monetary policy can no longer perform its usual stabilizing function because of the zero lower bound. We calibrate our uncertainty shock process using fluctuations in implied stock market volatility, and show that the model with nominal price rigidity is consistent with empirical evidence from a structural vector autoregression. We argue that increased uncertainty about the future likely played a role in worsening the Great Recession. The economic mechanism we identify applies to a large set of shocks that change expectations of the future without changing current fundamentals.     

Optimal Reserve Prices in Name‐Your‐Own‐Price Auctions with Bidding and Channel Options

Few papers have explored the optimal reserve prices in the name‐your‐own‐price (NYOP) channel with bidding options in a multiple channel environment. In this paper, we investigate a double‐bid business model in which the consumers can bid twice in the NYOP channel, and compare it with the single‐bid case. We also study the impact of adding a retailer‐own list‐price channel on the optimal reserve prices. This paper focuses on achieving some basic understanding on the potential gain of adding a second bid option to a single‐bid system and on the potential benefits of adding a list‐price channel by the NYOP retailer. We show that a double‐bid scenario can outperform a single‐bid scenario in both single‐channel and dual‐channel situations. The optimal reserve price in the double‐bid scenario is no less than that in the single‐bid case. Furthermore, the addition of a retailer‐own list‐price channel could push up the reserve prices in both single‐bid and double‐bid scenarios.     

Idiosyncratic Shocks and the Role of Nonconvexities in Plant and Aggregate Investment Dynamics

We study a model of lumpy investment wherein establishments face persistent shocks to common and plant‐specific productivity, and nonconvex adjustment costs lead them to pursue generalized (S, s) investment rules. We allow persistent heterogeneity in both capital and total factor productivity alongside low‐level investments exempt from adjustment costs to develop the first model consistent with the cross‐sectional distribution of establishment investment rates. Examining the implications of lumpy investment for aggregate dynamics in this setting, we find that they remain substantial when factor supply considerations are ignored, but are quantitatively irrelevant in general equilibrium. The substantial implications of general equilibrium extend beyond the dynamics of aggregate series. While the presence of idiosyncratic shocks makes the time‐averaged distribution of plant‐level investment rates largely invariant to market‐clearing movements in real wages and interest rates, we show that the dynamics of plants' investments differ sharply in their presence. Thus, model‐based estimations of capital adjustment costs involving panel data may be quite sensitive to the assumption about equilibrium. Our analysis also offers new insights about how nonconvex adjustment costs influence investment at the plant. When establishments face idiosyncratic productivity shocks consistent with existing estimates, we find that nonconvex costs do not cause lumpy investments, but act to eliminate them.     

Cooperative Advertising and Pricing in a Dynamic Stochastic Supply Chain: Feedback Stackelberg Strategies

Cooperative (co‐op) advertising is an important instrument for aligning manufacturer and retailer decisions in supply chains. In this, the manufacturer announces a co‐op advertising policy, i.e., a participation rate that specifies the percentage of the retailer's advertising expenditure that it will provide. In addition, it also announces the wholesale price. In response, the retailer chooses its optimal advertising and pricing policies. We model this supply chain problem as a stochastic Stackelberg differential game whose dynamics follows Sethi's stochastic sales‐advertising model. We obtain the condition when offering co‐op advertising is optimal for the manufacturer. We provide in feedback form the optimal advertising and pricing policies for the manufacturer and the retailer. We contrast the results with the advertising and price decisions of the vertically integrated channel, and suggest a method for coordinating the channel.     

Optimal Dynamic Upgrading in Revenue Management

We consider a revenue management problem involving a two compartment aircraft flying a single leg, with no cancellations or over‐booking. We apply the practice of transforming a choice revenue management model into an independent demand model. Within this assumed independent model, there are two sets of demands, business and economy, each with multiple fare class products. A business passenger can only be accepted into business. An economy passenger can be accepted into economy or upgraded into business. We define a two‐dimensional dynamic program (DP) and show that the value function is sub‐modular and concave in seat availability in the two compartments. Thus the bid prices are non‐decreasing with respect to these state variables. We use this result to propose an exact algorithm to solve the DP. Our numerical investigation suggests that in contrast to standard backward induction, our method could be included in production revenue management systems. Further, when the economy compartment is capacity constrained, we observe a substantial monetary benefit from optimal dynamic upgrading compared to the static upgrading procedures currently used in practice.     

Nuclear Power‐Related Facilities and Neighboring Land Price: A Case Study on the Mutsu‐Ogawara Region,Japan

From the perspective of risk, nuclear‐power‐related facilities (NPRFs) are often regarded as locally undesirable land use. However, construction of NPRFs contributes to social infrastructural improvement and job creation in the host communities. This raises a question: How large are these positive and negative effects? To approach this question from an economic viewpoint, we estimated the hedonic land price function for the Mutsu‐Ogawara region of Japan from 1976 to 2004 and analyzed year‐by‐year fluctuations in land prices around the NPRFs located there. Land prices increased gradually in the neighborhood of the nuclear fuel cycle facilities (NFCFs) in Rokkasho Village, except for some falling (i) from 1982 to 1983 (the first official announcement of the project of construction came in 1983), (ii) from 1987 to 1988 (in 1988, the construction began and opposition movements against the project reached their peak), and (iii) from 1998 to 1999 (the pilot carry‐in of spent fuels into the reprocessing plant began in 1998). Land prices around the Higashidori Nuclear Power Plant decreased during the period 1981–1982, when the Tohoku Electric Power Corp. and Tokyo Electric Power Corp. announced their joint construction plan. On the other hand, we obtained some results, even though not significant, indicating that land prices around Ohminato and Sekinehama harbors changed with the arrival and departure of the nuclear ship Mutsu, which suffered a radiation leak in 1974.     

HOUSING FINANCE AND MONETARY POLICY

We document three facts concerning how the structure of housing finance affects the monetary transmission mechanism: first, the characteristics of residential mortgage markets differ markedly across industrialized countries; second, the impact of monetary policy shocks to residential investment and house prices is significantly stronger in those countries with larger flexibility/development of mortgage markets; third, the transmission to consumption is stronger only in those countries where mortgage equity release is common and mortgage contracts are predominantly of the variable‐rate type. We then build a two‐sector DSGE model with financial constraints to rationalize those facts.     

Business Cycle Accounting

We propose a simple method to help researchers develop quantitative models of economic fluctuations. The method rests on the insight that many models are equivalent to a prototype growth model with time‐varying wedges that resemble productivity, labor and investment taxes, and government consumption. Wedges that correspond to these variables—efficiency, labor, investment, and government consumption wedges—are measured and then fed back into the model so as to assess the fraction of various fluctuations they account for. Applying this method to U.S. data for the Great Depression and the 1982 recession reveals that the efficiency and labor wedges together account for essentially all of the fluctuations; the investment wedge plays a decidedly tertiary role, and the government consumption wedge plays none. Analyses of the entire postwar period and alternative model specifications support these results. Models with frictions manifested primarily as investment wedges are thus not promising for the study of U.S. business cycles.     

COLLATERAL CONSTRAINTS IN A MONETARY ECONOMY

This paper reviews the role of collateral constraints in transforming small monetary shocks into large persistent output fluctuations. We do this by introducing money in the heterogeneous‐agent real economy of Kiyotaki and Moore (1997). Money enters in a cash‐in‐advance constraint and money supply is managed via open‐market operations. We find that a monetary shock generates persistent movements in aggregate output, the amplitude of which depends upon whether or not debt contracts are indexed. If only nominal contracts are traded, money shocks can trigger large output fluctuations. In this case a money expansion triggers a boom, whereas money contractions generate recessions. In contrast, if contracts are indexed then amplification is not only smaller; it can also generate the reverse results. When the possibility of default and renegotiation is considered, the model can generate asymmetric business cycles with recessions milder than booms. Finally, monetary shocks generate a highly persistent dampening cycle rather than a smoothly declining deviation. (JEL: E32, E43, E44, E52)     

What's News in Business Cycles

In the context of a dynamic, stochastic, general equilibrium model, we perform classical maximum likelihood and Bayesian estimations of the contribution of anticipated shocks to business cycles in the postwar United States. Our identification approach relies on the fact that forward‐looking agents react to anticipated changes in exogenous fundamentals before such changes materialize. It further allows us to distinguish changes in fundamentals by their anticipation horizon. We find that anticipated shocks account for about half of predicted aggregate fluctuations in output, consumption, investment, and employment.     

The Granular Origins of Aggregate Fluctuations

This paper proposes that idiosyncratic firm‐level shocks can explain an important part of aggregate movements and provide a microfoundation for aggregate shocks. Existing research has focused on using aggregate shocks to explain business cycles, arguing that individual firm shocks average out in the aggregate. I show that this argument breaks down if the distribution of firm sizes is fat‐tailed, as documented empirically. The idiosyncratic movements of the largest 100 firms in the United States appear to explain about one‐third of variations in output growth. This “granular” hypothesis suggests new directions for macroeconomic research, in particular that macroeconomic questions can be clarified by looking at the behavior of large firms. This paper's ideas and analytical results may also be useful for thinking about the fluctuations of other economic aggregates, such as exports or the trade balance.     

Evaluating Application Service Provisioning Using System Dynamics Methodology

Despite the hype surrounding the value‐added potential of e‐business for contemporary firms, the recent technology downturn was marked by poor customer satisfaction from investment in e‐business initiatives. An apparent mismatch between customer expectations and vendor offerings suggested a lack of appropriate methods and techniques for evaluating e‐business. This article draws from a longitudinal research study on the deployment, hosting and integration of application service provisioning (ASP), an e‐business model targeted mainly at small and medium‐sized businesses (SMBs). Using system dynamics as a methodology that addresses the inherent complexity of the ASP model, the article demonstrates how a series of complex inter‐relationships between key performance indicators (KPIs) will impact the business value for customers from ASP vendor products and services. The lessons from this research will be particularly relevant for existing and future ASP vendors and customers.     

OIL AND THE MACROECONOMY: A QUANTITATIVE STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS

We model an open economy where macroeconomic variables fluctuate in response to oil supply shocks, as well as aggregate demand and supply shocks generated domestically and abroad. We use several robust predictions of the model to identify five fundamental shocks underlying the fluctuations of the (real) oil price, the US activity and the global business cycle. The estimates show that supply shocks generated in the global economy explain the largest fraction of the oil price fluctuations, about four times more than canonical oil supply shocks. The correlation between oil prices and the US activity varies with the type of shock.     

Pricing Decisions During Inter‐Generational Product Transition

How should companies price products during an inter‐generational transition? High uncertainty in a new product introduction often leads to extreme cases of demand and supply mismatches. Pricing is an effective tool to either prevent or alleviate these problems. We study the optimal pricing decisions in the context of a product transition in which a new‐generation product replaces an old one. We formulate the dynamic pricing problem and derive the optimal prices for both the old and new products. Our analysis sheds light on the pattern of the optimal prices for the two products during the transition and on how product replacement, along with several other dynamics including substitution, external competition, scarcity, and inventory, affect the optimal prices. We also determine the optimal initial inventory for each product and discuss a heuristic method.