Download or read book Essays on Topics in Business Cycle Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Agents written by Florian Kuhn and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation investigates several business cycle relationships when economic agents are heterogeneous. The particular focus is on the interactions between the cross-section of agents and the aggregate state of the economy. The first chapter shows that, when occasionally binding capacity constraints limit the production of heterogeneous firms, demand shocks can endogenously generate a number of important business cycle regularities: recessions are deeper than booms are high, firm-level volatility is countercyclical, the aggregate Solow residual is procyclical and the fiscal multiplier is countercyclical. A baseline calibration of a basic New Keynesian DSGE model with capacity constraints shows that this mechanism can explain more than a quarter of the empirically observed asymmetry in output, and matches the cyclicality of firm-level profitability dispersion and of the measured Solow residual. The model implies fluctuations in the fiscal multiplier of around 0.12 between expansions and recessions. Chapter two takes a different approach to firm level uncertainty, exploring how recessions can cause an endogenous rise in firm risk. If heterogeneous firms face real and financial frictions, then a shock to the mean of aggregate productivity endogenously leads to countercyclical profitability risk through firms' heterogeneous responses in price setting. Additionally, the mechanism endogenously generates countercyclical credit spreads and credit spread dispersion. The model explains a large share of the observed fluctuations in profitability dispersion (69%) and in credit spreads (40%) through fluctuations in aggregate TFP holding productivity risk constant. This suggests that the scope for uncertainty shocks to explain recessions may be smaller than previously thought. The third chapter focuses on distributional effects of oil price shocks on the household side. In the model, household behavior replicates two patterns found in household-level data which show that gas consumption increases with income, but on the intensive margin gasoline consumption as a share of the household's budget decreases with income. The model includes gas consumption in household utility on top of a fixed minimum level of gas consumption. Calibrated simulations suggest that a shock to the gas price is almost twice as costly for relatively poor households than for relatively rich households.

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Agents written by Kyooho Kwon and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Chapter 1 develops a heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium model that incorporates both intensive and extensive margins of labor supply. A nonconvexity in the mapping between time devoted to work and labor services distinguishes between extensive and intensive margins. We consider calibrated versions of this model that differ in the value of a key preference parameter for labor supply and the extent of heterogeneity. The model is able to capture the key features of the empirical hours worked distribution, including how individuals transit within this distribution. We then study how the various specifications influence labor supply responses to temporary shocks and permanent tax changes, with a particular focus on the intensive and extensive margin elasticities in response to these changes. We find important interactions between heterogeneity and the extent of curvature in preferences. Chapter 2 builds a model of family labor supply in which individuals choose between full-time work, part-time work, and nonemployment. The model is calibrated to replicate the movements of both male and female workers among these states. The willingness to substitute hours over time (the so-called intertemporal elasticity of labor supply) is critical for many economic analysis. A common strategy for uncovering the value of this willingness is to carry out structural estimation on micro panel data. One general issue in this estimation exercises using micro data is that misspecification of the constraints that individuals face is likely to influence inference about preference parameters. In the model economy, although the individual labor supply problem is a discrete choice problem, individuals are able to adjust hours along the intensive margin by moving between part-time and fulltime work. Intuitively, adjustment along the intensive margin potentially allows one to estimate the true value of the underlying curvature parameter describing the utility from leisure. We explore the extent to which standard labor supply methods can achieve this in our setting. Although these methods deliver precise estimates that are significantly different from zero, the estimates are effectively unrelated to the true underlying values. These methods also deliver elasticity estimates for women, even when the underlying preference parameters are the same for men and women. Chapter 3 investigates the optimal progressive tax code in an incomplete-market economy in which households are linked intergenerationally by altruism and earning ability. The model economy is calibrated to that of the US with the progressive tax code suggested by Gouviea and Strauss (1994). First, I compute the equilibrium with the optimal progressive tax code. Second, I investigate the extent to which the size of government welfare programs affects the optimal progressivity of the income tax code. I find that the optimal tax code for an economy populated with altruistic households is approximately equivalent to a proportional tax of 23.1% with a fixed deduction of approximately $17,000 in 1990 US dollars. For an economy populated with non-altruistic households, however, these numbers are 18.8% and $12,000 respectively. This result implies that inequality is more severe in an economy with intergenerational links so that the policy maker requires a more progressive tax system to provide insurance. Additionally, I find that when the size of the government welfare program is chosen carefully, the additional insurance benefits from the progressive income tax code disappear"--Pages iv-v.

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomic Policies in Heterogeneous Agent Models written by Alaïs Martin-Baillon and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is now recognized that the heterogeneity of economic agents plays a crucial role in understanding the fluctuations of an economy. The different chapters of my thesis serve the same question: How does heterogeneity changes the way economic policies should be conducted? Today, heterogeneous-agent macroeconomics is developing in several directions, each shedding different light on the problems we face as economists. My thesis is at the confluence of the different facets of this field. The first chapter of my thesis, participates in the heterogeneous agent macroeconomics that derives analytical solutions in reduced-heterogeneity models. I study how governments should increase or decrease taxes on firms over the business cycle. I show that taking into account firms heterogeneity greatly changes tax policy recommendations. The second chapter of my thesis is part of quantitative heterogeneous agent macroeconomics. We study whether monetary policy should use its ability to redistribute wealth among heterogenous households to achieve its objectives. The third chapter of my thesis participates in field that uses micro data to understand macroeconomics and to design public policies. I estimate firms' propensities to invest to better understand how economic policies can vary firms' investment by varying their income.

Download or read book Interaction and Market Structure written by Domenico Delli Gatti and published by . This book was released on 2000-03-27 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Agents written by Pierre-Alexandre Noual and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation investigates two models of macroeconomics with heterogeneous agents. The first chapter analyzes a setup where agents are ex ante identical, yet receive idiosyncratic income shocks which make them heterogeneous ex post. A private information friction gives rise to incomplete risk-sharing as a constrained-efficient allocation. The second chapter again considers ex post heterogeneous agents: they have identical preferences but face idiosyncratic shocks to their earning capacity. There the focus is not on risk-sharing, but on the aggregate consequences for labor supply.

Download or read book Issues in Macroeconomics written by Chedtha Intaravitak and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: One active area of recent research in macroeconomics is the business cycle dynamics of the economy when agents are heterogenous and markets are incomplete. The literature has shown that standard results of the representative agents/complete market paradigm could profoundly change when we adopt a heterogenous-agents framework and agents cannot fully insure against risks. This volume is an attempt to contribute to this research program from both quantitative and computational perspectives. In particular, I provide a quantitative analysis of some welfare issues, explore the role of monetary policy in the long run, and examine the robustness of a main idea proposed in the literature. Computationally, the currently-used numerical algorithm has been modified to accommodate these extensive applications resulting in a faster routine that can be applied in much richer setups. The first chapter analyses the welfare consequences of eliminating the economic crisis in an economy with substantial agent heterogeneity. The model is calibrated to match the U.S. wealth distribution, employment features, and the size of the investment drop during the U.S. Great Depression. I find a small gain from eliminating the depression-style economic crisis. There are, however, large differences across different groups: very poor and unemployed consumers gain a lot, while richer and employed individuals gain less and sometimes lose from eliminating the economic crisis. The second chapter examines the validity of Sidrauski's (1967) money superneutrality result in this class of models. I show that the superneutrality result no longer holds in this case. Tobin's (1965) effect and heterogeneity in inflation tax account for the non-superneutrality of money. However, the effects of higher money growth rate on real variables are rather small. The change in money growth rate mostly gets reflected in an increase in the aggregate price level. The third chapter explores the robustness of the "approximate aggregation" insight proposed by Krusell and Smith (1998) in a much richer setting. The conclusion shows that approximate aggregation no longer holds. In an economy featuring a crisis state and two assets; capital and money, we can no longer adequately describe macroeconomic aggregates using only the first moment of the wealth distribution.

Download or read book Essays in Heterogeneous Agent Macroeconomics written by Nobuhide Okahata and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In these essays, I study the implications of macroeconomic policies under the environment with rich heterogeneities of economic agents. The analyses in these essays highlight that income and wealth inequality among agents could change the responses of macroeconomic policies and large aggregate shocks from those in the representative agent models. These results could modify our understanding of economic dynamics and the effect of macroeconomic policies. As an illustration, I focus on the monetary policy in a closed economy model and capital controls in an open economy model. I also develop a new nonlinear and global numerical solution method to analyze a class of heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic models. In the first chapter, ''An Alternative Solution Method for Continuous-Time Heterogeneous Agent Models with Aggregate Shocks'', I propose an alternative solution method for continuous-time heterogeneous agent models with aggregate shocks by extending the Backward Induction method developed initially for discrete-time models by Reiter (2010). The existing methods commonly used in the literature essentially rely on the local linearization and are only applicable to the problems where certainty equivalence with respect to aggregate shocks holds. On the other hand, the proposed method is nonlinear and global with respect to both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks and thus suitable to investigate models where large aggregate shocks exist or nonlinearity matters. I apply this method to solve a Krusell and Smith (1998) economy and evaluate its performance along two dimensions: accuracy and computation speed. I find that the proposed method is accurate even with large aggregate shocks and high curvature without surrendering computation speed (the baseline economy is solved within a few seconds). This new method is also applied to a model with recursive utility and an Overlapping Generations (OLG) model, and it is able to solve both models quickly and accurately. In the second chapter, ''Consumption Inequality and Monetary Policy in a Heterogeneous-Agent New Keynesian Model'', I consider a continuous-time heterogenous-agent New Keynesian model with the wealth effect of the labor supply and study quantitative implications of additional insurance mechanisms available to the households. Our numerical experiment illustrates cross-sectional consumption inequality increases after a contractionary monetary policy shock which is consistent with the previous empirical result while it contradicts with predictions of the model without the wealth effect of the labor supply. Furthermore, consumption response to contractionary monetary policy shock is dampened, and a cross-sectional average of utilities decreases while the opposite is true in the model without wealth effect. These results suggest that propagation of monetary policy shock to the aggregate variables and welfare depends critically on additional insurance instruments available to agents. The third chapter, ''Capital Controls under Income Heterogeneity'', studies the welfare implication of capital controls under the small open economy model with the idiosyncratic income risks and the borrowing constraints. A calibrated model computes the change in welfare for different levels of capital controls. Compared to the recent studies, welfare gain of capital controls becomes small under agent income heterogeneity. For the economy with low borrowing capacity, capital controls become more effective compared to the baseline case.

Download or read book Essays on Monetary Economies with Heterogeneous agents written by Hoonsik Yang and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays in monetary economics. Although the topic of each chapter differs, the approach is shared: I extend a random matching model of money by augmenting the set of money holdings, and compute socially desirable allocations in the spirit of mechanism design analysis. The augmentation is not just technically improving the model, but making the model rich enough to think about the economic problem that each chapter delves into. I document some interesting properties of the desirable allocations, and highlight the differences generated by the extension.Chapter 1. "A beneficial role of government bonds"I study a random matching model of money to show that the existence of bonds can be beneficial to a society, compared to having only money. In the model, anonymous agents randomly meet in pairs to produce and consume, hence money becomes essential. I compare two identical economies except the availability of bonds, in the sense that people can use any available assets as payments. Following the mechanism design approach, I define implementable allocations and the optimum. Under the notion of the implementability, social planner can devise trading mechanisms that induce people to hold both assets without exogenously given advantages of money as means of payment. I find that having both bondsand money in the economy can improve social welfare over having only money. This role of bonds is associated with a beneficial effect of inflation produced by lump-sum transfers, and it is achieved differently from the previously documented mechanism.Chapter 2. "Optimal intervention in a random-matching model of money" (joint with Wataru Nozawa)Wallace [2014] conjectures that there generically exists an inflation-financed transfer scheme that improves welfare over no intervention in pure-currency economies. We investigate this conjecture in the Shi-Trejos-Wright model with different upper bounds on money holdings. The choice of an upper bound affects the results as some potentially beneficial transfer schemes cannot be studied under small upper bounds. Numerical optima are computed for different degrees of discounting rate and risk aversion. As the upper bound on money holdings increases, optima are more likely to have positive money creation (and inflation),and this result is in line with the conjecture.Chapter 3. "Optimal inflation in a model of inside money: A further result" (joint with Wataru Nozawa)We extend the Deviatov and Wallace [2014] model of inside money in which they find some examples where inflation is beneficial. Their model is restrictive in that it cannot address policies that provide interests on cash (Friedman rule). With a higher upper bound on money holdings than what they use, such policies can be engineered without inflation and resulting allocations are potentially better than what they find, in which case positive inflation is not a property of good allocation. We investigate this possibility and confirm their results in a more generalized setting for some parameters. At optima for the examples, interest on cash is not provided and positive inflation arises in a similar manner to their work. Welfareat optimum increases monotonically with respect to discount factor and public monitoring capacity of a society, but other variables change in a more complex way.

Download or read book Emergent Macroeconomics written by Domenico Gatti and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-12-05 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This valuable book contributes substantively to the current state-of-the-art of macroeconomics. It provides a method for building models in which business cycles and economic growth emerge from the interactions of a large number of heterogeneous agents. Drawing from recent advances in agent-based computational modeling, the authors show how insights from dispersed fields can be fruitfully combined to improve our understanding of macroeconomic dynamics.

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomics and Dynamic Factor Models written by Ziyi Guo and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Agents written by Min Fang (Economist) and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation consists of essays addressing the macroeconomic outcomes of heterogeneous agent general equilibrium models with micro-level frictions. Each chapter employs both empirical and quantitative macroeconomic methods. The first chapter studies the impact of elevated volatility on the effectiveness of monetary policy on aggregate investment under firm-level capital adjustment costs. I argue that monetary policy is less effective at stimulating investment during periods of elevated volatility in firm-level TFP than during normal times. Empirically, I document that high volatility weakens investment responses to monetary stimulus. I then develop a heterogeneous firm New Keynesian model with lumpy investment to interpret these findings. In the model, non-convex capital adjustment costs create a sizable extensive margin of investment which is more sensitive to changes in both interest rate and volatility than the intensive margin. When volatility is high, firms tend to stay inactive at the extensive margin, so monetary stimulus motivates less investment at the extensive margin. I find that the quantitative implications of the model are primarily shaped by the specifications of the capital adjustment costs. Unlike much of the prior literature, I use the dynamic moments of investment to identify this key model element. Based on this parameterization, high volatility reduces the effectiveness of monetary stimulus for investment by 30%. This reduction is about half of what I find in the data. Therefore, the effect of monetary policy depends on both the lumpy nature of firm-level investment and fluctuations in volatility. The second chapter studies the role of migration and housing constraints in determining income inequality within and across Chinese cities. Combining microdata and a spatial equilibrium model, we quantify the impact of the massive spatial reallocation of workers and the rapid growth of housing costs on the national income distribution. We first show several stylized facts detailing the strong positive correlation between migration inflows, housing costs, and imputed income inequality among Chinese cities. We then build a spatial equilibrium model featuring workers with heterogeneous skills, housing constraints, and heterogeneous returns from housing ownership to explain these facts. Our quantitative results indicate that the reductions in migration costs and the disproportionate growth in productivity across cities and skills result in the observed massive migration flows. Combining with the tight land supply policy in big cities, the expansion of the housing demand causes the rapid growth of housing costs, and enlarges the inequality between local housing owners and migrants. The counterfactual analysis shows that if we redistribute land supply increment by migrant flow and increase land supply toward cities with more migrants, we could lower the within-city income inequality by 14% and the national income inequality by 18%. Meanwhile, we can simultaneously encourage more migration into higher productivity cities"--Pages vii-viii.

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomic Policies and Household Heterogeneity written by Gergő Motyovszki and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is composed of three independent chapters, but all centered around the broader topic of how macroeconomic policies interact with various aspects of household heterogeneity. Monetary Policy and Inequality under Labor Market Frictions and Capital-Skill Complementarity We provide a new channel through which monetary policy has distributional consequences at business cycle frequencies. We show that an unexpected monetary easing increases labor income inequality between high and less-skilled workers. In particular, this effect is prominent in sectors intensive in less-skilled labor, that exhibit high degree of capital-skill complementarity (CSC) and are subject to matching inefficiencies. To rationalize these findings we build a New Keynesian DSGE model with asymmetric search and matching (SAM) frictions across the two types of workers and CSC in the production function. We show that CSC on its own introduces a dynamic demand amplification mechanism: the increase in high-skilled employment after a monetary expansion makes complementary capital more productive, encouraging a further rise in investment demand and creating a multiplier effect. SAM asymmetries magnify this channel. Monetary-Fiscal Interactions and Redistribution in Small Open Economies Ballooning public debts in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic can present monetary-fiscal policies with a dilemma if and when neutral real interest rates rise, which might arrive sooner in emerging markets: policymakers can stabilize debts either by relying on fiscal adjustments (AM-PF) or by tolerating higher inflation (PM-AF). The choice between these policy mixes affects the efficacy of the fiscal expansion already today and can interact with the distributive properties of the stimulus across heterogeneous households. To study this, I build a two agent New Keynesian (TANK) small open economy model with monetary-fiscal interactions. Targeting fiscal transfers more towards high-MPC agents increases the output multiplier of a fiscal stimulus, while raising the degree of deficitfinancing for these transfers also helps. However, precise targeting is much more important under the AM-PF regime than the question of financing, while the opposite is the case with a PM-AF policy mix: then deficit-spending is crucial for the size of the multiplier, and targeting matters less. Under the PM-AF regime fiscal stimulus entails a real exchange rate depreciation which might offset "import leakage" by stimulating net exports, if the share of hand-to-mouth households is low and trade is price elastic enough. Therefore, a PM-AF policy mix might break the Mundell-Fleming prediction that open economies have smaller fiscal multipliers relative to closed economies. Weak Wage Recovery and Precautionary Motives after a Credit Crunch During the economic recovery following the financial crisis many advanced economies saw subdued wage dynamics, in spite of falling unemployment and an increasingly tight labour market. We propose a mechanism which can account for this puzzle and work against usual aggregate demand channels. In a heterogeneous agent model with incomplete markets we endogenize uninsurable idiosyncratic risk through search-and-matching (SAM) frictions in the labour market. In this setting, apart from the usual precautionary saving behaviour, households can self-insure also by settling for lower wages in order to secure a job and thereby avoid becoming borrowing constrained. This channel is especially pronounced for asset-poor agents, already close to the constraint. We introduce a credit crunch into this framework modelled as a gradual tightening of the borrowing constraint (and utilizing a continuous time approach, known as HACT). The perfect foresight transition dynamics feature falling wages despite a tightening labour market and expanding employment. As households suddenly find themselves closer to the borrowing constraint, the increased precautionary motive drives them to accept lower wages in the bargaining process, while firms respond to this by posting more vacancies, leading to a tighter labour market and falling unemployment. If the household deleveraging pressure is persistent enough after the credit crunch, it can explain the weak wage recovery in spite of already stronger aggregate demand.

Download or read book Three Essays in Macroeconomics written by Chacko George and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays on topics in macroeconomics. In the first chapter, I construct a macroeconomic model with a heterogeneous banking sector and an interbank lending market. Banks differ in their ability to transform deposits from households into loans to firms. Bank size differences emerge endogenously in the model, and in steady state, the induced bank size distribution matches two stylized facts in the data: bigger banks borrow more on the interbank lending market than smaller banks, and bigger banks are more leveraged than smaller banks. I use the model to evaluate the impact of increasing concentration in US banking on the severity of potential downturns. I find that if the banking sector in 2007 was only as concentrated as it was in 1992, GDP during the Great Recession would have declined by 40% less it did, and would have recovered twice as fast. In the second chapter, my co-author and I investigate the impact of firm capacity constraints on aggregate production and productivity when the economy is driven by aggregate and idiosyncratic demand shocks. We are motivated by three observed regularities in US GDP: business cycles are asymmetric, in that large absolute changes in output are more likely to be negative than positive; capacity and capital utilization are procyclical, and increase the procyclicality of measured productivity; the dispersion of firm productivity increases in recessions. We devise a model of demand shocks and endogenous capacity constraints that is qualitatively consistent with these observations. We then calibrate the model to aggregate utilization data using standard Bayesian techniques. Quantitatively, we find that the calibrated model also exhibits significant asymmetry in output, on the order of the regularities observed in GDP. The third chapter explores the role of distance in equilibrium selection. I consider a model economy with multiple steady state equilibria where a high productivity and a low productivity technology are available for use in production. The high productivity technology requires a fixed set up cost for production. Sectors are linked by localized production complementarities. I consider selection under a learning rule in which agents imitate their most successful neighbor. As distance between neighbors decreases, the possible profits from industrialization increase, and the likelihood that the learning rule process converges to a steady state matching the H equilibrium increases. The result suggests that, in the presence of localized technology spillovers, there may be important gains to economic growth from infrastructure development.

Download or read book Essays on Economies with Heterogeneous Labor written by Brandon Charles Lehr and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thesis, I study two different economies that consist of heterogeneous labor. By allowing for differences among individuals where previous analyses restricted attention to homogeneous labor, I am able to understand the impact of such a consideration on issues of optimal policy and potential equilibria. The first chapter, Optimal Social Insurance with Individual Private Insurance and Moral Hazard, characterizes optimal social insurance in an economy where competitive firms also provide insurance to workers facing uncertain outcomes. An ex-ante heterogeneous population of workers exerts effort to increase the likelihood of high outcome events. This chapter is novel in its joint consideration of two sources of heterogeneity, two potential sources of insurance, and an endogenous ex-post distribution of outcomes. The introduction of ex-ante heterogeneity in the presence of optimal private insurance changes the optimal prescription for social insurance away from zero. Moreover, the relative source of the variation in outcomes due to ex-ante heterogeneity and ex-post shocks plays a significant role in the welfare loss associated with setting optimal social insurance without recognizing the presence of private insurance. The second chapter, Efficiency Wages with Heterogeneous Agents, builds a model of efficiency wages with heterogeneous workers in the economy who differ with respect to their disutility of labor effort. In such an economy, two types of pure strategy symmetric Nash equilibria in firm wage offers can exist: a no-shirking equilibrium in which all workers exert effort while employed and a shirking equilibrium in which within each firm some workers exert effort while others shirk. The type of equilibrium that prevails in the economy depends crucially on the extent of heterogeneity among the workers. In addition, it is shown that the characterization of the economy is independent of allowing for variable labor hours and the subsequent adverse selection problem it introduces, as there does not exist a pure strategy symmetric separating Nash equilibrium. Finally, in the third chapter I correct the proof of the main proposition in the analysis of an efficiency wage model with a continuum of heterogeneous agents constructed by Albrecht and Vroman (1998).

Download or read book Essays in Heterogeneous Agent Macroeconomics written by Andrew S. Glover and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics with Heterogeneity and Inequality written by Zhigang Ge and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract Chapter 1. Heterogeneous Entrepreneurial Ability and Wealth Inequality Models with entrepreneurship can reproduce high wealth concentration at the top. The key assumption is the borrowing constraint, that is, households are unable to borrow enough assets to start a business or invest optimally in the business. However, some empirical evidences show that borrowing constraint does not matter for the majority of households in the US. This paper seeks to generate high wealth concentration at the top without assuming borrowing constraint. The baseline model that introduces heterogeneity in entrepreneurial ability is able to match the wealth distribution while the model assuming same entrepreneurial ability fails. Besides wealth distribution, the baseline model generates other moments that are consistent with the data. Chapter 2. Taxing Top Earners: The Role of Entrepreneurs This paper studies the optimal top marginal income tax rate in a quantitative framework with entrepreneurial choice, financing constraints, and realistic earnings and wealth distributions. I find that the revenue-maximizing top tax rate is approximately 41 percent -- close to the recent levels in the US. In contrast, when calibrated with only workers to match realistic earnings and wealth distributions, the model predicts a revenue-maximizing top tax rate of 81 percent -- close to the established view. There are two channels through which the baseline model has a lower revenue-maximizing top tax rate. First, the wealth distribution channel: increasing the top tax rate decreases wealth accumulation and leads to a less skewed wealth distribution in the long run (there are more top entrepreneurs with low wealth and less top entrepreneurs with high wealth). With financing constraints, there is a similar change in the business earnings distribution, implying a fall in the average business earnings at the top. Second, the general equilibrium effect on labor earnings of workers: in the model with entrepreneurs, increasing the top tax rate reduces the capital stock much more than labor supply, which decreases the capital-labor ratio and thus the equilibrium wage rate in the model economy. Finally, I find that the welfare-maximizing top marginal income tax rate is close to the revenue-maximizing one. Chapter 3. Household Heterogeneity and Consumption Amplification Macroeconomic models with household heterogeneity in wealth can generate larger consumption response to aggregate shocks compared to a representative-agent economy. In other words, there is consumption amplification associated with wealth heterogeneity. However, I find that in a Krusell-Smith type real business cycle (RBC) model, this amplification effect is only significant at the onset of a recession and gradually dies out as the recession proceeds. The finding is of interest because part of the motivation for the widely adoption of models with wealth heterogeneity is their different and empirically plausible implications for consumption dynamics compared with representative-agent models. I then introduce household heterogeneity in housing and find that the model with housing has more persistent amplification effect on consumption during the recession.

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Agents and International Macro finance written by Uroš Herman and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: