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...

Government spending plays an emportant role in determining economic performance in China. As an example, China's rapid recovery during the recent world financial crisis was due to its aggressive 4-trillion RMB government stimulus program. However, China's government spending programs are also...

China's over 25% aggregate household saving rate is one of the highest in the world. One popular view attributes the high saving rate to fast-rising housing prices in China. However, cross-sectional data do not show a significant relationship between housing prices and household saving rates....

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 living costs in China. This article uses simple economic logic to show that rising housing prices and living costs per se cannot...

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...