International Economic Review最新文献

The evidence suggests that monetary policy transmission is asymmetric over the business cycle. Interacting financing frictions with a preference for liquidity provides an explanation for this fact. Our model reproduces a set of asset market and business cycle facts. Accounting for the joint dynamics of asset prices and business cycle fluctuations is key; in a variant of the model that is unable to produce realistic macrofinance implications, monetary asymmetries disappear. Resorting to nonlinear techniques is therefore not sufficient to detect monetary asymmetries. Nonlinearities in the transmission mechanism also critically depend on the macrofinance implications of monetary policy models.

I develop a general equilibrium framework to analyze the welfare consequences of product regulations and their international harmonization. In my model, raising product standards reduces a negative consumption externality, but also increases the marginal and fixed costs of production. When product standards are set noncooperatively, the effects of standards on other countries' wages and number of firms are not internalized, giving rise to an international inefficiency. The World Trade Organization's nondiscrimination principle of national treatment only partly addresses this inefficiency. Welfare losses from abandoning national treatment average 2.8%, whereas the maximum welfare gains from efficient cooperation average 11.8%.

We propose a regularized generalized method of moments (RegGMM) approach to estimating time-varying coefficient models via a ridge fusion penalty with a high-dimensional set of moment conditions. RegGMM only requires a mild condition on the oscillations between consecutive parameter values, accommodating abrupt structural breaks and smooth changes throughout the sample period. RegGMM offers an alternative solution for estimating the time-varying stochastic discount factor model when pricing U.S. equity cross-sectional returns. Our time-varying estimate paths for factor risk prices capture changing performance across multiple risk factors and depict potential regime-switching scenarios. Finally, RegGMM demonstrates superior asset pricing and investment performance gains compared to alternative methods.

In the decade leading to the Great Recession, the United States experienced rising house prices and current account deficits, whereas China and other fast-growing Asian economies saw rising house prices accompanied by current account surpluses. To explain these differences, we study a transition path in a two-country life-cycle model with housing once the two economies become financially integrated. We allow for asymmetries in productivity growth, the loan-to-value ratio, the life-cycle wage profile, and the population structure across countries. Our findings highlight that differences in the life-cycle pattern of the wage income profile are key to obtaining our results.

This article builds a general equilibrium overlapping generations (OLG) model with heterogeneous agents to study the welfare implications of investment housing tax concessions in Australia. Removing these concessions substantially reduces the landlord rate and the use of debt. There is a steady-state welfare gain equivalent to a 0.13% increase in lifetime consumption if the additional tax revenue from removing the concessions is used to finance a lump-sum transfer to all households. That welfare gain rises to 1.45% if the extra tax revenue is used to provide a transfer to the housing-poor in the form of rental assistance. Over the transition, around 70% of existing households experience a welfare gain and there are important distributional effects in both cases.

About 40% of workers find their jobs through referrals. We distinguish between two types of referrals based on whether the referrer works at the hiring firm (internal referrals) or not (external referrals). Interestingly, jobs found through internal (external) referrals pay more (less) than those found through formal methods. An equilibrium labor market model is then built by introducing an incentive-compatible mechanism through which workers can share job opening information. A nondegenerate wage distribution arises in equilibrium with a wage premium (penalty) for internal (external) referrals. When calibrated, our model can capture these salient features of the U.S. labor market.

China has expanded the yearly quota on newly admitted college students by more than seven times since 1999. How did this massive education expansion affect firms' export and innovation choices? I document that after this expansion impacted the labor market, manufacturing firms' innovation increased considerably, especially among exporting firms, accompanied by sizable skill upgrading of exports. I then develop a multi-industry spatial equilibrium model, featuring skill intensity differences across industries and heterogeneous firms' innovation and export choices. Quantitatively, the college expansion explained 72% of increases in China's manufacturing research and development (R&D) intensity between 2003 and 2018 and also triggered export skill upgrading.

We study the impact of unilateral economic disintegration, such as Brexit, on national and international policies. We introduce firm mobility and business-tax policies into a general-equilibrium trade model and analyze the effects of disintegration on tax policies of asymmetric countries. Although the disintegrating country taxes less, business taxes converge in the remaining economic area. We highlight important differences with existing two-country models. Moreover, we predict a realignment of trade policies with a deeper integration inside the union and lower tariffs worldwide. The leaving country's endogenous integration response with other countries may fully compensate for the disintegration-induced welfare losses.

We present a directed search model of intermediaries' dynamic inventory and revenue management. Search frictions hinder instantaneous replenishment, prompting intermediaries to utilize dynamic inventory-based pricing and ordering strategies. In equilibrium, when inventory is high, an intermediary posts a lower retail price to speed up sales and depresses wholesale price to slow down purchases. We characterize the evolution dynamics of inventory holdings and their steady-state distribution, and extend the model to multiunit wholesale orders, product differentiation, and heterogeneous intermediaries. Using data from used-car dealers, we quantitatively evaluate the welfare consequence of used-car dealers' inventory management practice.

One important feature of capital tax reforms is the uncertainty regarding their duration. In a standard heterogeneous firm framework with financial frictions, we model policy uncertainty by assuming that reforms may be either repealed or maintained with some probability every period. We illustrate the effects of policy uncertainty in the context of the 2003 Bush tax cuts (2003 Job Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act), which lowered shareholder taxes. We show that policy uncertainty regarding dividend and capital gains taxes can explain why the Bush tax cuts had no statistically significant effect on investment, in line with the empirical evidence.