Journal of Macroeconomics最新文献

How does the interaction between inequality and social mobility affect the choice of fiscal policy? I analyze this question in a model of democratic politics with imperfect tax enforcement, where the ability of individuals to evade taxes limits the amount of redistribution in the economy. Social mobility creates an insurance motive that increases voluntary compliance, favoring the tax enforcement process. In such an environment, redistributive pressures brought about by an increase in inequality are only implementable in highly mobile societies. On the contrary, when mobility is low, higher inequality reduces tax rates and does not translate into higher redistribution. Descriptive evidence based on a sample of 71 countries for the period 1980–2015 shows correlations among inequality, mobility and redistribution in line with the predictions of the model.

I introduce a tax shock into a “standard” heterogeneous agent model in continuous time (HACT) to quantify the effect of an income tax on inequality. I find that an income tax, collecting 15% of output, reduces the Gini coefficient by up to 16.9% in an economy with a perfect credit market and up to 24.3% in financial autarky. The tax has a modest effect on production labor income inequality, reduces inequality in entrepreneurial income under financial autarky, but raises it when entrepreneurs operate in a perfect credit market. I also explore the effect of the tax on other well-known income inequality measures discussed in the literature.

This paper empirically studies the U.S. multiplier effects of government investment, government consumption and total government purchases on output. We explore dependencies of the multipliers on states of the economy, measured in different ways. Using local projections with instrumental variables, we find that a model without state-dependencies and using total government spending (instead of its components) provides the best fit to post-WWII data. These results are robust to various alternative specifications. We account for the COVID-19 period with a pandemic stringency index and for monetary policy shocks with a shadow interest rate. The government spending multiplier is approximately 0.5.

This study examines how redistributive policy that attempts to reduce inequality by taxing the bequests of the rich and redistributing the revenue to the poor affects economic growth in an overlapping generations model of R&D-based growth with both product development and process innovation. We show that such a policy simultaneously increases growth and reduces inequality in the long-run. When the market structure adjusts, partially reducing inequality in the short-run, the effect of redistributive policy on economic growth depends on the values of the social return to variety parameter. However, when the market structure adjusts fully in the longrun, the redistributive policy decreases the entry of new firms but raises economic growth and reduces inequality.

Declining institutional trust is one of the central problems in modern societies. Identifying its determinants, among which inequality, is fundamental for designing suitable interventions to restore confidence in institutions and preserve the social contract. We study the relationship between the two phenomena for EU-28 countries over the period 2003–2019. We use OLS and IV estimations to show that increasing income inequality is significantly associated with reduced trust in national governments. We also find that citizens’ digital interaction with the public administrations represents a mitigating channel as it contributes to shrinking the adverse effect of inequality on institutional trust, especially for more vulnerable categories in society, such as individuals with low educational attainment and those who are unemployed. These new insights might be particularly helpful for the government's agenda to meet transparency goals and provide more digital public services. From a policy viewpoint, redistribution policies combined with a well-established e-relationship between citizens and governments may be the road to restore trust in institutions.

A key feature of many DSGE frameworks designed to model Quantitative Easing (QE) is that net worth only plays a relevant role on bank’s balance sheets. In reality, however, net worth of borrowers and lenders plays a relevant role in financing investment projects. I show that this equity tandem has important implications. Net worth of non-financial firms acts as a first line of defense, since non-financial firm’s balance sheets are hit in the first place by real sector shocks. Modeling the equity tandem increases the resilience of the model and, therefore, implies smaller gains of unconventional monetary policy. A novel insight from the simultaneous modeling of borrowers and lenders net worth is that by decreasing the cost of external finance a QE policy is redistributing net worth from banks to non-financial firms. Additionally, considering the reverse operation, a credibly announced Quantitative Tightening (QT), helps to stabilize the spread between the return to capital and the deposit rate during the zero lower bound period. However, different anticipated QT paths are shown to have little consequences for output and inflation.

What is the composition of total hours response to a technology shock in countries with different labor market institutions in terms of extensive and intensive margin movements? To answer this question, I identify technology shocks using structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) and decompose the responses of hours into adjustments along the extensive and intensive margins. I compare the adjustments along the two margins between groups of countries with strict and flexible labor market institutions. I find that both margins play a large role in accommodating technology shocks, with adjustments along the intensive margin being more important. Furthermore, countries with flexible labor market institutions display a larger drop in employment, whereas the results for the intensive margin are mixed. Finally, the cross-country differences in fluctuations along the two margins can be linked to the strictness of institutions that target quantity and price adjustments in the labor market.

Households appear to smooth consumption in the face of income shocks much more than implied by life-cycle versions of the standard incomplete market model under reference calibrations. In the current paper we explore in detail the role played by the life-cycle profile of wealth accumulation. We show that a standard model parameterized to match the latter can rationalize between 81 and 100 percent of the consumption insurance against permanent earnings shocks empirically estimated by Blundell, Pistaferri and Preston (2008), depending on the tightness of the borrowing limit.

Is there a magnifying role of the banking sector during depressions? How can a financial perturbation, possibly small-sized, create large impacts on output and enduring recessions? What is the role played by the massive stock of due claims brought about by a financial crisis? We address these questions by putting forth a general equilibrium model endowed with a banking system in which due claims – henceforth named due loans – and occasionally binding credit restrictions coexist and their effects reinforce each other. Under “bad” financially-driven perturbations due loans hike and the concomitant opportunity, holding, regulatory, and impairment costs trigger sizable increases in external finance premia and promote credit restrictiveness. Firms’ net worth collapses as they are called in to finance banks’ problems, and their ability to invest and accumulate capital becomes compromised. The amplification effect can be very large: the full-fledged banking model may only require a perturbation of one-tenth the size of a plain vanilla version to deliver the same output drop at the trough. Effects are non-linear, since credit restrictions remain slack on the boundary of the steady state, and asymmetric, since these restrictions play no role whatsoever under “good shocks.”

While low real interest rates and issuing public debt in fiat money safeguard against rising sovereign debt-to-GDP ratios, evidence shows that high debt often precedes default, and credit spreads may not signal imminent risk.

We offer a simple way to model the trade-offs using local martingales. On the one hand, it acknowledges that large debt overhangs tend to raise default risks. On the other hand, it allows sovereigns to roll over debt regardless of long-term fiscal solvency. The combination allows credit spreads to stay very low for decades, eventually spiral out of control and trigger a default. Hence, neither the reassurance of low spreads nor the alarm from growing overhang should automatically prevail.

To illustrate the trade-offs, we review the ebb and flow of US sovereign debt burdens since World War II. Between record peacetime debt-to-GDP ratios and weakened fiscal discipline, an exemplary double-or-triple-A credit rating for the US no longer seems justified. Moreover, the current outlook is poor, with debt growing much faster than GDP and scant prospects of contraction.