China’s average household saving rate is one of the highest in the world. One popular view attributes the high saving rate to fast rising housing prices and other costs of living in China. This article uses simple economic logic to show that rising housing prices and living costs per se cannot...

Most empirical studies based on U.S. data suggest that the fiscal multiplier is less than 1 (e.g., Barro and Redlick, 2011). However, Keynes argued that the multiplier would be the largest when markets have failed to the greatest extent in coordinating economic activities (such as during the...

We document that "persistent and lagged" inflation (with respect to output) is a world-wide phenomenon in that these short-run inflation dynamics are highly synchronized across countries. In particular, the average cross-country correlation of inflation is significantly and systematically...

We investigate the global dynamics of RBC models with production externalities. We confirm that purely local analysis does not tell the full story. With externalities smaller than required for local indeterminacy, local analysis shows the steady state to be a saddle, implying a unique...

This paper shows that incomplete information can be a rich source of sunspots equilibria. This is demonstrated in a standard dynamic general equilibrium model of monopolistic competition … la Dixit-Stiglitz. In the absence of fundamental shocks, the model has a unique certainty (fundamental)...

This paper provides a dynamic optimization model of durable good inventories to study the interactions between investment demand and production of capital goods. There are three major findings: First, capital suppliers' inventory behavior makes investment demand more volatile in equilibrium;...

Price rigidity is the key mechanism for propagating business cycles in traditional Keynesian theory. Yet the New Keynesian literature has failed to show that sticky prices by themselves can effectively propagate business cycles in general equilibrium. We show that price rigidity in fact can (by...

This paper proposes a solution method to solve linear difference models with lagged expectations. Variables with lagged expectations expand the model's state space greatly when N is large; and getting the system into a canonical form solvable by the traditional methods involves substantial manual...

Labor hoarding is a widely believed empirical behavior of firms and a prominent explanation for procyclical labor productivity. Conventional wisdom attributes labor hoarding to labor adjustment costs. This paper argues that the conventional wisdom is inadequate for understanding labor hoarding...

This paper reconsiders the welfare costs of inflation and the welfare gains from financial intermediation in a heterogeneous-agent economy where money is held as a store of value (as in Bewley, 1980). The dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model recaptures some essential features of the...