Multiple transitional growth paths in endogenously growing open economies

This paper extends research in indeterminacy literature to a small open economy, two-sector endogenous growth model. It shows that a continuum of equilibria exist in two situations, (i) the production functions exhibit social constant returns to scale with very small or even negligible externalities; and (ii) the production functions are standard constant returns to scale without externalities but the government implements asymmetric tax policies across sectors.     

Endogenous City Formation with Production Externalities: Existence of Equilibrium

I show that equilibria exist in closed city‐system models with production externalities if firms' production possibilities vary continuously with the source of the externality, are constant returns to scale in own inputs, include inaction, and satisfy free disposal; if firms have to employ their own inputs to produce output; if there is a finite number of firm types; and if some standard conditions on preferences and endowments are satisfied. This is the first model to include production externalities in the fully general equilibrium framework required for endogenous city formation. Thus, this result provides formal support for the conjecture that production externalities lead to urban agglomeration.     

Public pricing of final and intermediate goods in the presence of externalities

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of externalities on pricing decisions by a public or a private regulated firm selling both final and intermediate goods. The externalities generate feedbacks in demand that affect both consumers and producers. The model is very general in that it does not impose constant returns to scale on private production, allows for distributional effects of both the publicly determined prices and private sector profits, and captures the general equilibrium effects of public pricing. Socially optimal pricing rules are derived, and the relation of the results with previous models of pricing in the presence of externalities is investigated.     

收益递增、运输成本与贸易模式

本文建立一个两国模型,研究存在运输成本和收益递增场合贸易的模式与利得分配,探讨成本递减作为贸易保护理由的条件,拓广Ethier(1982a)的分析。模型中制成品的生产可选用现代技术或传统技术,前者带来规模收益递增。基本结论是:模型参数及初始条件决定贸易均衡的类型以及贸易利益的得失。若收益递增越强、运输成本越低、制成品支出份额越高或相对经济规模越大则越容易形成专业化的生产与贸易格局,且专业化的格局类似于李嘉图模式(无运输成本、收益不变)的分析,即各国出口其具有比较优势的产品;出口收益递增产品的一方总是从贸易中获利,另一方可能获利也可能受损。建议政府大力扶持收益递增产业,积极推动工艺创新。     

Imperfect competition and capital accumulation: the role of price normalization

We consider a capital-accumulation model with infinitely lived households and two production sectors. The intermediate-good sector is characterized by perfect competition, a constant-returns-to-scale technology, and production externalities. The final-good sector is a monopoly operating under constant returns to scale. We analyze the general equilibrium in the sense of Gabszewicz and Vial [Journal of Economic Theory (1972) 4: 381–400] for this economy and different price-normalization rules. It is shown that the qualitative behavior of the equilibrium paths depends crucially on the chosen normalization rule. In particular, whether equilibria are monotonic or oscillating and whether indeterminacy occurs or not may depend on the choice of the numeraire.     

Measuring technical progress in matching models of the labour market

Technical Progress in matching models of the labour market has not received serious attention. This article examines the impact on the results of these models when an attempt is made to allow time to enter in a realistic fashion, and finds that recently published results on the possibility of multiple equilibria are overturned. Also, different parametric representations of the matching technology are compared, with problems of more general forms not satisfying regularity conditions being identified. While the possibility of Pareto-improving government intervention due to multiple equilibria arising out of increasing returns to scale cannot be supported, the results suggest a role for government intervention in the labour market.     

Public capital and patterns of growth in the presence of threshold externalities

This paper studies the relation between public capital accumulation and long-run economic growth. We emphasize three phenomena that may be accompanied by the presence of public capital: increasing returns, rivalry, and threshold externalities. We formulate a simple growth model that captures these features of public capital in a tractable manner. Assuming that investment for public capital financed by income taxation, we show that the threshold externalities may generate multiple equilibria, so that the pattern of growth and the realization of a specific steady-growth equilibrium are quite sensitive to the rate of income tax as well as to expectations of agents.     

Non-scale Models of Economic Growth

Growth models that incorporate non-rivalry and/or externalities imply that the size of an economy may influence its long-run growth rate. Such implied scale effects run counter to empirical evidence. This paper develops a general growth model to examine conditions under which balanced growth is void of scale effects. The model is general enough to replicate well known exogenous, as well as endogenous, (non-) scale models. We derive a series of propositions that show that these conditions for non-scale balanced growth can be grouped into three categories that pertain to (i) functional forms, (ii) the production structure, and (iii) returns to scale.     

Returns to scale in a matching model: evidence from disaggregated panel data

The returns to scale in the matching function play an important role in models with endogenous search effort. Due to positive externalities, increasing returns to scale in matching can support high or low activity equilibrium in the labour market. In this study, we examine this issue using panel data from Finnish employment offices. The study finds that the results from the Cobb–Douglas and translog specification are qualitatively different. The CD specification of the matching function exhibits constant returns to scale. The translog specification, in turn, exhibits increasing returns to scale. The elasticity estimate for returns, using the preferred specification and minimum and maximum sample values for job seekers and vacancies, fall in the range of 1.1 to 1.6.     

Thematic Clubs and the Supremacy of Network Externalities

We explore the issue of minorities' survival in the presence of positive network externalities. We rely on a simple example of thematic clubs to illustrate why and how such survival problems might appear, first considering the case of simple‐network effects (fully anonymous externalities) and then the case of cross‐network effects (type‐dependent externalities). In both cases, the analysis is framed as a simple noncooperative game with a continuum of players and binary action sets. There is a unique and interior Nash equilibrium under mild network effects and two corner equilibria under strong network effects, with one club driven out. A utilitarian planner would accentuate the clustering effects of network externalities, and call for the disappearance of the minority club more often than the noncooperative solution. A simple myopic learning algorithm capturing the progression of network lock‐in effects is studied.     

Search, Money, and Prices

It is well known that models in which money is used as a medium of exchange to lubricate trading, frictions display multiplicity of equilibria. I show that the amount of activity varies as the value of money differs across these equilibria when production opportunities involve random fixed costs. When money has high value, trade is more profitable; therefore, there will be more agents engaged in trade relative to equilibria in which money has lower value. The higher-activity equilibria display higher production not only because more is produced and exchanged per transaction but also because more transactions occur per period. This Diamond-style result is obtained without increasing returns in the matching technology.     

Inefficient Local Regulation of Local Externalities

The consequences of commitment failure have been missing from debates about the decentralized regulation of automobile emissions and other sources of local consumption externalities. Even when the direct external effects of such products are limited to a single jurisdiction, the presence of increasing returns‐to‐scale production causes one jurisdiction's choice of regulatory standard to affect the prices and availability of goods elsewhere. Decentralized regulatory equilibria may be inefficient as a result. Because of a commitment failure, production may be split between standards—and consumers denied the full range of products—when it is efficient to have standards that allow products to be consumed everywhere. Coordination failures may cause similar inefficiencies. The results question the usefulness of the principle of subsidiarity as commonly employed.     

EXTERNAL ECONOMIES IN TAIWAN'S MANUFACTURING INDUSTRIES

This paper presents estimates of indexes of internal returns to scale and external economies for two-digit manufacturing industries in Taiwan. Estimating the returns to scale indexes involves using both SUR and 3SLS estimation procedures. The data strongly support the presence of external increasing returns to scale. The findings indicate no evidence of internal increasing return in all two-digit manufacturing industries. According to the endogenous growth literature, the existence of externalities in production bears important economic implications in some aspects of economic growth, even though the data cannot distinguish the transmission mechanism.     

State-dependent pricing, inflation, and welfare in search economies

We investigate the welfare effects of inflation in economies with search frictions and menu costs. We first analyze an economy where there is no transaction demand for money balances: Money is a mere unit of account. We determine a condition under which strictly positive inflation is desirable. We relate this condition to a standard efficiency condition for search economies. Second, we consider a related economy in which there is a transaction role for money. In the absence of menu costs, the Friedman rule is optimal. In the presence of menu costs, the optimal inflation rate is negative for our numerical examples provided menu costs are small. A deviation from the Friedman rule can be optimal depending on the extent of the search externalities.     

Contracts, search, and organizational diversity

In this paper we develop a search model that allows for Pareto-ranked multiple equilibria and investigate its implications on organizational diversity. The novel feature of the model is that multiple equilibria are obtained by the self-contained feedback mechanism between optimal contracting choices and the reservation value, which is in sharp contrast to existing literature that emphasizes the increasing returns to scale in the matching function. Our results provide some new insights on why there may exist significant differences in the internal organization of firms across countries, and even in the same country and industry.     

On characterizing equilibria of economies with externalities and taxes as solutions to optimization problems

Summary We characterize equilibria of general equilibrium models with externalities and taxes as solutions to optimization problems. This characterization is similar to Negishi's characterization of equilibria of economies without externalities or taxes as solutions to social planning problems. It is often useful for computing equilibria or deriving their properties. Frequently, however, finding the optimization problem that a particular equilibrium solves is difficult. This is especially true in economies with multiple equilibria. In a dynamic economy with externalities or taxes there may be a robust continuum of equilibria even if there is a representative consumer. This indeterminacy of equilibria is closely related to that in overlapping generations economies.An earlier version of this paper, entitled Externalities and Taxes in General Equilibrium, was presented at the North American meetings of the Econometric Society, June 1988, at the University of Minnesota. We are grateful to David Backus, Kenneth Judd, Patrick Kehoe, and Rodolfo Manuelli for helpful conversations. National Science Foundation grants SES 86-18325 and SES 87-08616 provided financial support.The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System.     

On the plausibility of sunspot equilibria

This paper presents a one-sector business cycle model with variable capacity utilization and externalities that stem from aggregate economic activity. It uses a new formulation of the endogenous capital utilization rate in which utilization costs appear in the form of variable maintenance expenses. Indeterminacy arises at approximate constant returns to scale. This result challenges the viewpoint that indeterminacy is empirically implausible. Sunspot driven model fluctuations duplicate a number of stylized facts of the business cycle. Plausible parameter space contains regions in which stationary sunspot equilibria are stable under learning.     

Fiscal policy and indeterminacy in models of endogenous growth

This paper investigates the dynamic behavior of two-sector models of endogenous growth with sector-specific external effects, and government expenditure financed by distortionary taxation. When this type of external effect is combined with a sufficient degree of capital taxation in a Lucas-Uzawa endogenous growth model, continua of equilibria will emerge in the region of the balanced growth paths. By contrast, indeterminacy is not possible when either sector-specific external effects or factor taxation are added to the model in isolation. In the second part of the paper, we demonstrate that if labor supply is endogenous, indeterminacy can be consistent with much lower degrees of increasing returns to scale. Furthermore, certain types of fiscal policy will be associated with multiple balanced growth paths and the existence of a poverty trap. Finally, in the last part of the paper, we demonstrate that if physical capital is employed in both sectors of the economy, indeterminacy will emerge for varying combinations of factor taxation and external effects, even when returns to scale are constant at the social level.     

Indeterminacy in dynamic models: When Diamond meets Ramsey

We consider an aggregate two-periods overlapping generations model with endogenous labor, consumption in both periods of life, homothetic preferences and productive external effects coming from the average capital and labor. We show that under realistic calibrations of the parameters, in particular a large enough share of first period consumption over the wage income, local indeterminacy of equilibria cannot occur with capital externalities alone. It can nevertheless occur when there are only, even very small, vanishing labor externalities provided that the elasticity of capital-labor substitution and the wage elasticity of the labor supply are large enough. We also show that if labor externalities are slightly stronger, but still small enough to be plausible, and the elasticity of labor supply is larger, local indeterminacy occurs in a Cobb-Douglas economy. Finally, we show that a locally indeterminate steady state is generically characterized by an under-accumulation of capital. It follows therefore that while agents live over a finite number of periods, the conditions for the existence of locally indeterminate equilibria are very similar to those obtained within infinite horizon models and that from this point of view, Diamond meets Ramsey.     

GROWTH AND BUBBLES WITH CONSUMPTION EXTERNALITIES*

This paper explores the role of consumption externalities in an overlapping generations economy with capital accumulation. If consumers in each generation are concerned with other agents’ consumption behaviours, there exist intergenerational as well as intragenerational consumption externalities. It is the presence of intergenreational consumption externalities that may produce fundamental effects both on equilibrium dynamics and on steady‐state characterization of the economy. This paper demonstrates this fact in the context of a simple model of endogenously growing, overlapping‐generations economy with or without asset bubbles.