Income Tax and Endogenous Business Cycles

This paper investigates the dynamic implication of balanced–budget rules. We introduce public goods to an overlapping generations model with production and assume that public goods in each period are financed by the labor income taxes. We show that in our model, if the cost of providing public goods is financed by lump–sum taxes, endogenous fluctuations would never occur. But in cases where the government adopts proportional taxes, periodic and chaotic equilibria can exist.     

Variable Rational Partisan Business Cycles: theory and some evidence

The Variable Rational Partisan Business Cycle model is developed, where agents face uncertainty regarding the timing and outcome of the next election. The model predicts that partisan influences on the economy persist throughout the government's rule and are further influenced, in the opposite direction, by which party ruled in the previous period. Party popularity also has a causal effect on the business cycle. Finally, the effects from changes in election timing expectations are dependent on which party ruled in the previous period. Empirical results for output and unemployment in Canada, Germany, and United Kingdom yield mixed support for the model. JEL Classification: D72, E32
Le modèle des cycles d'affaires variables fondé sur le comportement du partisan rationnel : théorie et résultats. Le modèle de cycles d'affaires variables fondé sur le comportement du partisan rationnel est développé pour le cas où les agents font face à de l'incertitude quant au moment du déclenchement des élections et quant aux résultats des prochaines élections. Le modèle prédit que les influences partisanes sur l'économie persistent tout au long du mandat du gouvernement, et qu'elles sont influencées, dans la direction opposée, par le type de parti au pouvoir au cours du mandat antérieur. La popularité du parti a un effet de causalité sur le cycle d'affaires. Enfin les effets des changements dans les anticipations du moment du déclenchement des élections dépendent de quel parti était au pouvoir au cours de la période antérieure. Les résultats empiriques de la calibration du modèle pour la production et le chômage au Canada,en Allemagne et au Royaume Uni donnent des résultats mitigés.     

Business Cycles, Heuristic Expectation Formation, and Contracyclical Policies

We develop a simple Keynesian‐type business cycle model in which agents use simple heuristics to predict national income. To be precise, the agents either form (destabilizing) extrapolative expectations or (stabilizing) regressive expectations, a decision which depends on the rules forecasting performance in the recent past. As it turns out, an unending evolutionary competition between the rules may generate endogenous complex business cycles. We also explore the effectiveness of some common governmental intervention strategies. Our model suggests that policy makers may be able to stabilize output fluctuations, yet due to system immanent nonlinearities this may prove to be quite difficult.     

Regulation and Access Pricing: Comparison of Regulated Regimes

The statutory duties of regulators of British utilities include both the encouragement of competition and protection of consumers (through price caps). Competition depends on the terms on which new entrants can gain access to the monopolist's network. Where the incumbent in the retail market also owns the network, the regulator may determine prices in the capped and access markets separately or may make the price cap explicitly dependent on entry in the uncapped market. Contrary to the received wisdom that access charges should be separately regulated we show that higher welfare can be obtained in some circumstances by allowing the incumbent to determine access charges. This is achieved by permitting the incumbent to choose from a menu of retail prices which the regulator makes conditional on the extent of entry in the retail market.     

Credit and Business Cycles

This paper presents two dynamic models of the economy in which credit constraints arise because creditors cannot force debtors to repay debts unless the debts are secured by collateral. The credit system becomes a powerful propagation mechanism by which the effects of shocks persist and amplify through the interaction between collateral values, borrowers' net worth and credit limits. In particular, when fixed assets serve as collateral, I show that relatively small, temporary shocks to technology or wealth distribution can generate large, persistent fluctuations in output and asset prices.
JEL Classification Numbers: E32, E44     

Balance Mechanics and Business Cycles

Abstract

Many mainstream business cycle theories were not able to cope with the financial crisis theoretically. With his concept of balance mechanics, the German economist Wolfgang Stützel developed a framework for comparing different theories of business cycles which helps to understand the reasons for this inadequacy. This paper works out Stützel’s considerations and his four “model cases” of cycles more systematically and shows how the theories of the business cycle Stützel mentioned are related to theories discussed today. Modern business cycle theories did not cover all “model cases” and therefore had a blind spot.     

Emerging Market Business Cycles: Recent Advances

Higher variability of consumption relative to output and strong countercyclicality of the trade balance are important regularities of emerging market business cycles. This paper surveys the recent advances in the literature with a goal to understanding the main drivers of these regularities. The literature suggests that trend shocks or countercyclical interest rate shocks are useful modeling tools, but these shocks need to be amplified through inherent frictions to capture these two regularities with realistic calibrations. Informational frictions in expectation formation and search-matching frictions in the labor market appear to provide powerful amplification to trend shocks and countercyclical interest rate shocks, respectively.     

WTO与电子商务--透视《服务贸易总协定》(GATS)

本的目的是：在世界贸易组织（WTO）工作计划,特别是在《服务贸易总协议》（GATS）背景下,对于当前关于电子商务的讨论作一综述。本还有助于理解多边贸易体系与新兴电子贸易体系之间的关系。     

Monetary Policy Rules and Business Cycles

Basic features of business cycle properties under both exogenous and endogenous monetary policy rules are examined in calibrated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with nominal rigidities (the nominal wage contract model, the monopolistic competition model with price adjustment costs and a combination of these models). The experiments show that the difference in business cycle features under exogenous and endogenous monetary policy rules is as large as the change generated by introducing nominal rigidities (and monetary disturbances). This result suggests that, for monetary business cycle research, developing a proper way to incorporate endogenous monetary policy rules may be as important as developing new transmission mechanisms of monetary policy disturbances.     

Time Delays and Business Cycles: Hilferding's model revisited

This paper develops a Marxian model of the business cycle based on Hilferding's theory of disproportionality in capital accumulation in a two-sector economy. The disproportionality arises from the existence of time delays in production generated by the differential capital intensity in the two sectors. The time delays produce an asymmetric price structure that causes overproduction and crisis. The model is constructed using delay-differential equations. Numerical simulations show that the model produces an economy-wide business cycle phenomenon. The domain of the time delay parameter is investigated, and shows that the model produces a wide variety of dynamics from monotonic convergence to explosive oscillations. Moreover, the solution shows that intersectoral investment flows transmit the instability in capital accumulation and that longer time delays produce higher cycle amplitudes.     

Labor-Market Search and International Business Cycles

The objective of this paper is to explain the observed international fluctuations by modifying the traditional modelling of the labor market in the two-country real business cycles model. Our intuition is that labor-market search can be useful to understand the propagation of international fluctuations. Changes in the expected returns to search induce responses in search and recruiting activities, the effects of which are propagated through time via changes in the stock of employment. Given that the technology shock spills over to the other country, domestic and foreign firms start searching at the same time in anticipation. Employment then increases simultaneously and displays a hump-shaped profile in the two countries. This partially curtails the capital outflow from the country which does not benefit from the shock. Introducing in a search framework a non-separability between consumption and leisure in the utility function allows both to solve the consumption puzzle and to complete the explanation of the international comovement puzzle. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E32, F41, J40.     

International Business Cycles and Exchange Rates

Models of international real business cycles are not able to account for the high volatility of exports, imports, the trade balance, and the terms of trade. By introducing exogenous exchange rate movements in addition to standard technological shocks, the model presented here comes much closer to replicating the relatively high volatility observed in the data while also improving other moments.     

Business Cycles: Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications

This paper looks at recent advances in the study of aggregate fluctuations. The emphasis is on three prominent areas of research: the stochastic growth model, economies which exhibit macroeconomic complementarities and models that emphasize heterogeneity. Each section of the paper outlines the theory, examines relevant empirical evidence and then discusses some policy implications of the analysis.     

开放式基金与税收政策

<正> 投资基金发展至今天,已经成为世界范围的一种重要的投资渠道和理财工具,它是随着股票和债券市场的不断发展而形成的一个种类繁多的大家族。根据基金单位是否增加或赎回,投资基金可分为开放式基金和封闭式基金。开放式基金目前已代表基金业发展的主流。但在我国则处于刚刚起步阶段。我国的第一只开放式基金“华安创新”于2001年9月正式成立,紧接着南方稳健成长证券投资基金和华夏基金也于同年11月首次对外发行。开放式基金作为资本市场中的重要组成部分,它的发展必将给市场带来影响,也给税收的征收与管理带来新的课题。     

Dynamics of Business Cycles in Asia: Differences and Similarities

The paper documents the extent of similarities and differences of business cycle characteristics of the Asian countries and compares the cyclical regularities in this region with those of the G‐7 countries. The Asian economies are generally more volatile than the G‐7 countries, but the amplitude of economic fluctuations in the Asian countries tends to decrease over time. Comovement and persistence properties of business cycles in the Asian countries are very similar to those of the G‐7 economies. The authors find that while the patterns of business cycle fluctuations in the main macroeconomic aggregates display important similarities, the behavior of fiscal and monetary policy variables exhibits significant differences across the Asian countries. Moreover, there is a high degree of comovement between the individual country business cycles and different measures of the Asian business cycle, indicating that there is a regional business cycle specific to the Asian countries.     

Remittances and Business Cycles: Comparison of South Asian Countries

ABSTRACT

South Asia is one of the world's principal remittance-receiving regions. This study examines the home and host business cycles of migrant remittance flows to the region. Employing the Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) technique, the remittance behaviour of the region's four main countries is compared. Remittances to India and Pakistan show a mainly acyclical behaviour with respect to the output of the four host regions, and a countercyclical behaviour with respect to home output. In contrast, remittances to the two smaller economies of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka are found to be mainly procyclical. The study shows that the macroeconomic remittance behaviour varies with respect to the importance of remittance flows in the home economy. Moreover, remittance behaviour seems to respond more to home economy specificities than to those of the different regions that host the migrants from the developing countries.     

Business Cycles Between Developed and Developing Economies

This paper compares the stylized facts of international real business cycles between developed and developing countries. A two-sector two-country real business cycles model is constructed to examine the cyclical behaviors of domestic as well as international macroeconomic variables, and to evaluate the model's consistency with empirical observations. The model predicts correctly that consumption, investment, and saving are procyclical, while the trading balance/output ratio is countercyclical. There exist, however, some discrepancies between the model and the data.     

Non-Walrasian Labor Markets and Real Business Cycles

The standard real business cycle literature mainly focuses on Walrasian models designed to fit the U.S. institutional framework. Differences between the United States and Europe, mostly evident in the labor market, suggest that a purely Walrasian model may be inappropriate for the study of European business cycles. I present a stochastic version of the dynamic general equilibrium model of Daveri and Maffezzoli (2000, “A Numerical Approach to Fiscal Policy, Unemployment and Growth in Europe,” Econometrics and Applied Economics Working Paper 2000-4, IEP, Università Bocconi), where unemployment is generated by monopolistic unions, and calibrate it to reproduce several long-run features of the Italian and U.S. economies. This framework is then compared with an indivisible labor model built on Hansen (1985, Journal of Monetary Economics16, 309–328) and Rogerson and Wright (1988, Journal of Monetary Economics22, 501–515). I focus on the impulse response functions, the standard business cycle statistics, and the ability to reproduce the cyclical components of the main macroeconomic variables. The main results are as follows: (i) the impulse response functions of the monopoly union (MU) model show a higher degree of overall persistence; (ii) the business cycle statistics are similar; (iii) the MU model enjoys a statistically significant advantage in reproducing the Italian business cycle, but not that of the United States. Journal of Economics Literature Classification Numbers: E32, E24, J23, J51.