Review of Economic Dynamics最新文献

Do recessions speed up or impede productivity-enhancing reallocation? To investigate this question, we use U.S. linked employer-employee data to examine how worker flows contribute to productivity growth over the business cycle. We find that in expansions high-productivity firms grow faster primarily by hiring workers away from low-productivity firms. Productivity growth slows during recessions when this job ladder collapses. In contrast, layoffs at low-productivity firms disproportionately increase in recessions, which leads to an increase in productivity growth. We thus find evidence of both sullying and cleansing effects of recessions, but the timing of these effects differs. The cleansing effects are concentrated in downturns while the sullying effects linger well into the economic recovery. Our results imply that slow labor market recoveries will be more damaging to productivity growth than V-shaped recoveries due to lingering sullying effects.

This paper reevaluates the common characterization of commodity-exporting developing economies as having excessively procyclical fiscal policy. We develop a new measure of fiscal procyclicality—the marginal propensity to spend (MPS) an extra dollar of commodity revenues—which we estimate in a panel of countries and compare with optimal policy in a New Keynesian model. Empirically, fiscal policy is procyclical on average (MPS=0.25), but heterogeneous. Countries with fixed exchange rates (ER) are almost acyclical, but countries with flexible ERs are procyclical and the MPS increases with the persistence of commodity price shocks. Optimal policy in the model is similar qualitatively but differs quantitatively in some dimensions. Under fixed ERs, optimal policy is almost acyclical to stabilize the business cycle. However, under flexible ERs, monetary policy stabilizes the business cycle, so fiscal policy is procyclical because commodity price shocks are typically persistent and so should be spent by the permanent income hypothesis.

The Hamilton (H) filter is proposed as an alternative to the Hodrick-Prescott (HP) filter. It is designed to meet all of the objectives desired by users of the HP filter while avoiding its drawbacks (spurious dynamics, ad hoc filter settings, end-of-sample bias). I document a trade-off that has been overlooked: Addressing the HP filter's drawbacks means that the H filter cannot fulfill all of the desired objectives. It modifies different frequencies captured in an estimated cyclical component by inducing phase shifts and by likely altering variances. Typically, these modifications vary across time series. Through both simulation and real data exercises, I illustrate each filter's cyclical properties.

This paper measures option-implied skewness for individual firms and the S&P 500 index between 1980 and 2021, giving real-time measures of conditional micro and macro skewness. There are three key results: 1. Micro skewness is significantly procyclical, while macro skewness is acyclical; 2. Micro skewness leads the business cycle and is strongly linked to credit spreads, suggesting one potential causal channel; 3. Micro skewness is significantly, and not mechanically, correlated with macro volatility, implying that there is a common shock driving them both, which is also linked to the business cycle.

The consensus among central bankers is that higher inflation expectations can drive up actual inflation. We assess this by devising a novel method for identifying shocks to inflation expectations, estimating a semi-structural VAR where an expectation shock is identified as that which causes measured forecasts to diverge from the rational expectation. Surprisingly, using data for the United States we find that a positive inflation expectation shock is contractionary and deflationary: output, inflation, and interest rates all fall. These results are inconsistent with the standard New Keynesian model, which predicts inflation and interest rate hikes.

The conditions that ensure the existence of a unique stable equilibrium — determinacy conditions — for rational expectations models with Markov switching depend on the stability concept, contrasting with standard linear rational expectations models. In this paper, we offer a unified framework for the two commonly used stability concepts: boundedness and mean-square stability. We derive determinacy conditions for both concepts based on simple metrics. Qualitatively, we show that mean-square stable solutions are always at least as many as bounded solutions. We then apply and discuss our results in two monetary models.

We revisit the question about whether a larger public sector stabilizes or destabilizes the economy. Based on results from two causal identification approaches, we show that a higher rate of public-sector employment reduces volatility in, i.e. stabilizes, private-sector employment growth, with at most a slight crowding-out of private employment. Public wages, meanwhile, increase private wages but appear not to be destabilizing. The stabilizing effect of public employment with limited crowding out is at odds with standard search and matching models that contain a public sector, which predict 1:1 crowding out and strong destabilization. To improve the performance of such models, we follow Gomes (2015) and add a product market that can replicate what Gomes calls the Business Cycle Wealth Effect. We also point out that the government procures output directly from the private sector. When the model has these two features, then it can generate stabilizing effects of public employment on private employment, with reduced crowding out.