Price Stability in Economies with Habit Persistence

This paper shows that the divine‐coincidence does not hold in a sticky price model with external habit if a time‐varying tax rate on labor income is not implemented to fully eliminate the time‐varying distortions associated with external habit and monopoly power in goods market. The required labor income tax rate is inversely related to the risk‐free real interest rate and the markup in the goods market, but it is proportional to the degree of external habit. Under this circumstance, the optimal monetary policy commands a countercyclical interest rate, having a perfect negative correlation with tax rate in the sticky price model with external habit. If a time‐invariant tax is the only fiscal instrument, then the degree of external habit entails a gap between the private marginal rate of substitution between consumption and labor and the social marginal rate of substitution, generating an endogenous trade‐off between the stabilization of welfare‐relevant output gap and inflation. Under this circumstance, price stability is not the optimal policy. The monetary policy authority should optimally try to undo the time‐varying distortions associated with external habit and monopoly power in goods market by deviating from price stability.     

Macroeconomic impact of the Sino–U.S. trade frictions: Based on a two-country,two-sector DSGE model

To examine the impact of the recent Sino–U.S. trade frictions on the macroeconomics of China and the United States, we constructed a two-country, two-sector dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model. This model was used to explore the tariff transmission mechanism in such trade frictions and provide a basic analytical framework for future research on bilateral trade frictions. Based on our benchmark analysis, the tariff shocks affect non-tradable sectors through the tradable sectors, which, in turn, have impacted consumption, investments, prices, and production. Specifically, the tariffs on intermediate and final goods affect the economy from the supply and demand sides, respectively, and as the trade dependence decreases, the economic volatility caused by the tariff shocks also decreases. Moreover, our simulation showed that the impact of the trade frictions on the macroeconomics of the two countries has been asymmetrical, which is consistent with the objective economic realities.     

Durable goods and conformity

A consumer's demand for a durable good is governed not only by his individual preferences but also by preferences of other market participants. This interdependence of preferences arises from the inevitable resale of durable goods. If most people prefer goods with certain features, original buyers conform and choose goods with these features even if they do not like them. Using a matching model, we show there is always conformity in equilibrium. The incentive to conform is strongest for long‐lived durables and for people who trade frequently. If average preferences are sufficiently strong, there is always too little conformity in equilibrium.     

Unobserved investment,endogenous quality,and trade

A seller can make investments that affect a tradable asset’s future returns. The potential buyer of the asset cannot observe the seller’s investment prior to trade, nor does he receive any signal of it, nor can he verify it in any way after trade. Despite this severe moral‐hazard problem, this article shows the seller will invest with positive probability in equilibrium and that trade will occur with positive probability. The outcome of the game is sensitive to the distribution of bargaining power between the parties, with a holdup problem existing if the buyer has the bargaining power. A consequence of the holdup problem is surplus‐reducing distortions in investment level. Perhaps counterintuitively, in many situations, this distortion involves an increase in the expected amount invested vis‐à‐vis the situation without holdup.     

International Control of Subsidies and Countervailing Duties

The range and number of cases of administered protection inthe 1980s suggests that it has begun to play an important rolein shaping international trade flows. As most of such casesare brought by the United States against developing countryexporters, they are also a matter of concern for developingcountries in the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. The internationallynegotiated code on subsidies and countervailing duties is ambiguousin its definition of "legal" subsidies, and thus in the appropriateuse of countervailing duties. Because the code is applied atthe national level, there is considerable pressure by domesticproducers on administering agents to increase the use of suchprotective measures through the adoption of provisional measureswhile the investigation is being conducted, and through theinterpretation of criteria for coverage. Given that the mostsuccessful developing countries have been those which adoptthe most neutral policies toward imported and domestic goods,and between sectors domestically, the very biased applicationof the subsidies and the trade policy distortions common inthe countries examined, together with the frequency of countervailingactions against the subsidies, suggest that developing countrieswould benefit from abandonment of the subsidies.     

Trade costs and multimarket collusion

Contrary to conventional wisdom, this article argues that trade liberalization may facilitate collusion and reduce welfare. With the help of a duopoly model in which firms interact repeatedly in multiple markets, we first show that, if trade costs (i.e., tariffs/transport costs) and discount factors are not too high, efficient cartel agreements necessitate the cross‐hauling of goods, as that entails lower deviation incentives. In this setting, we then demonstrate that reciprocal trade liberalization always raises total output when trade costs are within a range whose lower bound exceeds a threshold level, but may reduce total output (and thus be pro‐collusive) when trade costs are below that threshold level.     

The optimal currency basket under vertical trade

This paper explores the theory of optimal currency basket in a small open economy general equilibrium model with sticky prices. In contrast to existing literature, we focus on an economy with vertical trade, where the currencies in the basket may play different roles in invoicing trade flow. In a simple two-currency basket, one currency is used to invoice imported intermediate goods and is called “import currency”, while the other currency is used to invoice exported finished goods and is called “export currency”. We find that the optimal weights of the import currency and the export currency depends critically on the structure of vertical trade. Moreover, if a country decides to choose a single-currency peg, the choice of pegging currency also depends on how other competing economies respond to external exchange rate fluctuations.     

International Spillover Effects and Monetary Policy Activism

This paper examines how the preferences of a large economy’s central bank affect the trade‐off between output and inflation volatility faced by the central bank of a small open economy by analyzing the impact of a global cost‐push shock. We demonstrate that under the assumption of producer currency pricing, the trade‐off faced by the small open economy is likely to worsen as the foreign central bank becomes more focused on output stabilization relative to inflation stabilization; but the opposite is true in the case of local currency pricing.     

Exchange Rate Pass‐Through,Domestic Competition,and Inflation: Evidence from the 2005–08 Revaluation of the Renminbi

Import competition from China is pervasive in the sense that for many good categories, the competitive environment that U.S. firms face in these markets is strongly driven by the prices of Chinese imports, and so is their pricing decision. This paper quantifies the effect of the government‐controlled appreciation of the Chinese renminbi vis‐à‐vis the USD from 2005 to 2008 on the prices charged by U.S. domestic producers. In a panel spanning the period from 1994 to 2010 and including up to 519 manufacturing sectors, import price changes of Chinese goods pass into U.S. producer prices at an average rate of 0.7, while import price changes that can be traced back to exchange rate movements of other trade partners only have mild effects on U.S. prices. Further analysis points to the importance of trade integration, variable markups, and demand complementarities on the one side, and to the importance of imported intermediate goods on the other side as drivers of these patterns. Simulations incorporating these microeconomic findings reveal that a substantial revaluation of the renminbi would result in a pronounced increase in aggregate U.S. producer price inflation.     

Pollution and reforms of domestic and trade taxes towards uniformity

This paper builds a small open economy trade model where there is pollution from the production and consumption of goods. In the presence of production and consumption pollution, we examine a piecemeal consumer-price-neutral reform of the tariff and consumption tax and a piecemeal producer-price-neutral reform of the export and production taxes on a specific good. The paper identifies sufficient conditions under which the above tax reforms improve welfare and increase government tax revenues.     

Best foot forward or best for last in a sequential auction?

Should a seller with private information sell the best or worst goods first? Considering the sequential auction of two stochastically equivalent goods, we find that the seller has an incentive to impress buyers by selling the better good first because the seller's sequencing strategy endogenously generates correlation in the values of the goods across periods. When this impression effect is strong enough, selling the better good first is the unique pure‐strategy equilibrium. By credibly revealing to all buyers the seller's ranking of the goods, an equilibrium strategy of sequencing the goods reduces buyer information rents and increases expected revenues in accordance with the linkage principle.     

Der volkwirtschaftliche Wert der Versicherung — eine Input-Output-Analyse der Versicherungswirtschaft

What is the value of insurance to a society and its economy? What are the interdependencies and interrelations between the insurance sector and other sectors of the economy? By applying the tool of input-output-analysis we are able to measure on the one hand the flow of goods and services from other sectors to the insurance sector and on the other hand the flow of insurance to other sectors of the German economy. The results show that the output-multiplier, representing the demand induced by an increased demand for insurance, is surprisingly large. In the course of our study we are further able to give a detailed picture of the input-factors needed to produce insurance and also to quantify how much insurance other sectors of the economy for their intermediate consumption.     

Financial Markets Where Traders Neglect the Informational Content of Prices

We model a financial market where some traders of a risky asset do not fully appreciate what prices convey about others' private information. Markets comprising solely such “cursed” traders generate more trade than those comprising solely rationals. Because rationals arbitrage away distortions caused by cursed traders, mixed markets can generate even more trade. Per‐trader volume in cursed markets increases with market size; volume may instead disappear when traders infer others' information from prices, even when they dismiss it as noisier than their own. Making private information public raises rational and “dismissive” volume, but reduces cursed volume given moderate noninformational trading motives.     

Inflation and Welfare in a Competitive Search Equilibrium with Asymmetric Information

We study an economy characterized by competitive search and asymmetric information. Money is essential. Buyers decide their cash holdings after observing the contracts posted by firms and experience match-specific preference shocks which remain unknown to sellers. Firms are allowed to post general contracts. In the baseline model with indivisible goods, we show that, when the number of potential buyers is fixed, inflation decreases markups. This, in turn, increases aggregate output and ex ante welfare. When goods are divisible the negative effect of inflation on markups holds for unconstrained agents but is ambiguous for constrained agents. Still, optimal monetary policy implies a positive nominal rate. When there is buyers' free entry, asymmetric information causes a congestion effect that can be corrected by monetary policy.     

Endogenous tradability and some macroeconomic implications

While nontraded goods play an important role in many open economy macroeconomic models, these models have difficulty explaining the low volatility in the relative price of nontraded goods. In contrast to macroeconomic convention, this paper argues that the share of nontraded goods is endogenous, a time-varying product of macroeconomic shocks and trade costs that are heterogeneous across goods. A simple open economy model demonstrates that trade cost heterogeneity and a time-varying margin of tradedness dramatically reduces the volatility of nontraded prices. This also reduces the ability of real exchange rate adjustments to dampen current account imbalances.     

Competition for attention in the Information (overload) Age

The Information Age has a surfeit of information received relative to what is processed. We model multiple sectors competing for consumer attention, with competition in price within each sector. Sector advertising levels follow a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) form, and within‐sector prices are dispersed with a truncated Pareto distribution. The “information hump” shows highest ad levels for intermediate attention levels. Overall, advertising is excessive, although the allocation across sectors is optimal. The blame for information overload falls most on product categories with low information transmission costs and low profits.     

Intermediate inputs and sectoral comovement in the business cycle

The post-war US business cycle is characterized by positive comovement of employment and output across sectors. It has been argued that multi-sector growth models are inconsistent with this observation when changes in relative productivities are the main source of fluctuations. We suggest that the input-output structure of an economy, in particular the pervasive use of intermediate inputs, can induce positive comovement in sectoral employment and output following changes in relative productivities. We calibrate a model of the US economy for the durable and nondurable goods producing sectors, and show that sectoral employment and output move together if intermediate inputs are used in production. The model is also consistent with the observation that the relative price of nondurable goods is procyclical.     

An offer you can't refuse: early contracting with endogenous threat

A seller has private information on the future gains from trade with a buyer, but the buyer has the option to invest to produce the good internally. Both the buyer and the seller can efficiently trade ex post under complete information. Despite the lack of information, the buyer sometimes gains by making an early contract offer to the seller. The early contract divides the different types of sellers according to their information, which renders the threat of producing the good in‐house credible and enables the buyer to extract a larger share of the gains from trade. Several extensions are investigated.     

Trade and domestic tax reforms in the presence of a public good and different neutrality conditions

This paper develops a perfectly competitive general-equilibrium model of a small open economy with production of private traded goods and of a public good which is financed by revenues from trade and domestic taxes. Within this framework we consider the effects on public good provision and on welfare of the following tax reforms: (i) a producer-price-neutral reduction in export taxes and a corresponding increase in production taxes, (ii) a consumer-price-neutral reduction in tariffs and a corresponding increase in consumption taxes, and (iii) a partial tax-revenue-neutral reform in trade and domestic taxes.     

中国经济部门价格指数波动差异性研究

在整体价格指数运行的背后,部门价格指数波动显示较大差异。本文将中国经济部门分为贸易品、非贸易品和食品部门三大类别,分别考察了三部门的菲利普斯曲线属性,发现各部门价格指数对产出缺口的弹性,以及部门成本冲击的持续性和方差显著不同,在货币政策作用下调整的幅度和时间也有较大差异。这使得货币政策在关注整体价格指数运行的同时,需对各部门价格指数的相对变动做进一步研究;同时,中央银行应根据不同部门价格指数波动的参数特征设置不同的反应权重。