Journal of Macroeconomics最新文献

This paper compares the effects of patent protection and subsidy policies on growth and the environment in a model where technology innovation and capital accumulation are both engines of growth. Pollution is a by-product of the intermediate goods, and can be reduced by public abatement activities. The results show that, compared to subsidies, stronger patent protection is a more promising tool for achieving a double dividend, i.e., simultaneously enhancing growth and improving the environment. By contrast, a uniform increase in the subsidy rate on R&D and capital stimulates growth but harms the environment, implying a trade-off relationship between growth and the environment. For sector-specific subsidies, an R&D subsidy is superior to a capital subsidy in terms of environmental protection, but this superiority fades away if the productivity of abatement labor or the public abatement expenditure is higher.

How do the effects of monetary policy depend on the fiscal policy stance? We aim to answer this question using a panel smooth transition local projection model for the euro area. We find that an expansionary monetary policy shock raises inflation and output, but only when fiscal policy is also expansionary. In a regime of contractionary fiscal policy, the responses to a monetary easing are insignificant or negative. Similarly, a monetary tightening only reduces inflation and output when accompanied by contractionary fiscal policy. These results are robust to several alternative model specifications and underline the importance of the fiscal stance for the effects of monetary policy.

The system of business income taxation consists of two instruments, namely a statutory tax rate and a depreciation allowance on investment. We will show in this paper that by acting on both instruments simultaneously it is possible to achieve both a growth and a fiscal net revenue target even in cases when a trade-off prevails when each instrument is used individually.

As will be shown in the paper, depreciation allowances have a more favorable trade-off between growth and net revenue in the long run compared to statutory business income tax rates. Thus, by rising depreciation allowances and the statutory tax rate at the same time, it is possible to both increase growth and fiscal space.

In a model simulation calibrated to the German economy and tax system, an increase of the tax depreciation rate for all investments from 10% to 25% leads to a more than 2 percent GDP increase and more than 6 percent higher private investments in total. Whereas GDP and investment rise steadily over time, the government budget becomes negative in the short run. In the long run, the sign of the fiscal budget effect is determined by the indexation of government consumption to GDP. However, according to our findings, slight adjustments in the statutory business income tax rate could balance out these deficits and generate additional fiscal space.

This paper studies robust policy when the policymaker has Knightian uncertainty about the exact position of the effective lower bound (ELB). First, we characterize optimal discretionary policy when a benevolent policymaker controls the nominal interest rate and the level of government spending. Compared to the full information case, an uncertainty-averse policymaker overestimates the level of the ELB, thereby triggering a more aggressive reduction in the nominal interest rate prior to the liquidity trap. Furthermore, the anticipation of a larger increase in public spending improves the trade-off between inflation and the output gap, and dampens the perceived worst-case level of the ELB. As a result, a less conservative fiscal stabilization is desirable to address the uncertainty concerns of the policymaker by partially substituting for the nominal interest rate at the ELB. Moreover, an inflation-conservative policymaker mitigates the impact of uncertainty on equilibrium outcomes even better than a fiscally active policymaker.

Since the Global Financial Crisis, a lively debate has emerged regarding the monetary policy rule the central bank of a small open economy (SOE) follows and should follow. By identifying the monetary policy rule that best fits historical data and minimizes central bank loss functions, this study contributes to this debate. We estimate a medium-scale micro-founded SOE model under various monetary policy rules using Israeli data from 1994 to 2019. Our results show that simple inflation targeting (IT) rules are more appropriate than hybrid rules targeting the exchange rate. Given central bank goals, shock uncertainty, and limited information, nominal income targeting rules may have been more desirable over the last three decades than IT rules.

This study investigates the growth and welfare effects of monetary policy in a Schumpeterian economy featuring cash-in-advance (CIA) constraints and two engines of growth: innovation from R&D and human capital accumulation from endogenous fertility. Our theoretical analysis considers the cases of various CIA constraints. When the CIA constraint is only on consumption, higher inflation retards economic growth by weakening human capital accumulation. When the CIA constraint is only on R&D, higher inflation would generate a negative or U-shaped effect on economic growth, depending on the interplay between inflationary effects on innovation and human capital accumulation. When the CIA constraint is only on manufacturing, the growth effect of inflation could be positive (negative) if the positive growth effect from technological progress dominates (is dominated by) the negative effect from human capital accumulation. Our quantitative analysis finds a generally negative inflation-growth relationship in the calibrated economy. Moreover, the welfare effect of inflation is also negative, implying that the Friedman rule is optimal.

Empirical evidence on the relationship between aid and economic growth is mixed and inconclusive. This paper proposes a theory to explain these contradictory findings. We build an endogenous growth model with a productive public good and homogeneous agents who allocate their time to both work and the appropriation of public resources. Aid increases public resources, raising the provision of the productive public good, but promotes rent-seeking. As recent empirical evidence suggests, a hump-shaped relationship between aid and growth emerges: too much aid is counterproductive for growth, particularly when institutions are weak. Aid transmits growth from the donor to the recipient country but harms income convergence and even prevents convergence among ex-ante identical countries when aid exceeds a certain threshold. Institutional improvements raise such a threshold. Thus, countries with lower income and lower institutional quality should receive less aid, unless an institutional reform is taken as a previous step to receive that aid.

Developing economies often borrow abroad in foreign currency, which exposes them to the problem of “original sin.” Although the literature on the issue is relatively extensive, there is limited discussion about the role of fiscal frameworks, such as fiscal rules, in addressing original sin. Using a panel of 59 developing countries from 1990-2020 and applying the entropy balancing method, this study reveals that fiscal rules play a crucial role in reducing government debt in foreign currency, and that the effects are statistically and economically significant and robust. Furthermore, we find that the effectiveness of fiscal rules in curbing original sin is enhanced by factors such as the strengthening of the rule itself, improved fiscal discipline before the reform’s adoption, financial development, financial openness, exchange rate flexibility, the level of economic development, and sound institutions. Finally, transmission channels analysis reveals that the effect of fiscal rules on original sin is driven by fiscal and monetary policy credibility.

A Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) aggregator of domestic and foreign goods is assumed in virtually any model of international macroeconomics with multiple traded goods. If baskets of traded goods are allocated optimally across countries, the CES aggregator links trade flows to exchange rate dynamics implying a condition for optimal allocation of individual traded goods across countries. The condition holds irrespectively of assumptions about preferences or endowment processes. This paper analyzes optimal allocation of traded goods empirically for 9 OECD countries and finds that it is mostly rejected by data. The finding casts doubts on the ability of international macroeconomic models to jointly explain dynamics of consumption and exchange rates.

In this paper, we study the relationship between economic uncertainty, households’ credit situations, and educational outcomes. Using the System Generalized Methods of Moments (SYS-GMM) on educational and economic data from the World Bank and IMF, we find that economic uncertainty and households’ access to credit have positive impacts on higher education. Further analyses suggest that economic uncertainty and households’ access to credit have heterogeneous effects on educational outcomes at the tertiary level, by gender and development status. Specifically, we find that economic uncertainties expand enrollments in developed countries and contract them in developing economies. In addition, access to credit has a more pronounced positive impact on educational outcomes in developing nations compared to developed ones. Furthermore, our analysis indicates that household credit coupled with economic uncertainty decreases women’s educational outcomes in higher education, posing a serious threat to gender equality in higher education. Lastly, we find that monetary policy appears to play a role in these results. These findings remain robust to alternative proxies of economic uncertainty and approach such as the Instrumental Variable (IV) regression method, which uses a political database on government changes and ideological gaps between cabinets as instruments. In general, the findings emphasize the enduring influence of economic uncertainties, typically associated with business cycles, on long-term aspects such as education.