Working papers results
U.K. Compared to the closed economy, the presence of an exchange rate channel for
monetary policy not only produces new trade-offs for monetary policy, but it also
introduces an additional source of specification errors. We find that exchange rate
shocks are an important contributor to volatility in the model, and that the exchange
rate equation is particularly vulnerable to model misspecification, along with the
equation for domestic inflation. However, when policy is set with discretion, the
cost of insuring against model misspecification appears reasonably small.
systems will have to be retrenched. In particular, retirement age will have to be largely
increased. Yet, is this policy measure feasible in OECD countries? Since the answer
belongs mainly to the realm of politics, I evaluate the political feasibility of postponing
retirement under aging in France, Italy, the UK, and the US. Simulations for the year
2050 steady state demographic, economic and political scenario suggest that retirement
age will be postponed in all countries, while the social security contribution rate will
rise in all countries, but Italy. The political support for increasing the retirement age
stems mainly from the negative income effect induced by aging, which reduces the
profitability of the existing social security system, and thus the individuals net social
security wealth.
action or seek a profitable innovation that may enhance or reduce welfare. The legislator
sets fines calibrated to the harmfulness of unlawful actions. The range of fines defines norm
flexibility. Expected sanctions guide firms' choices among unlawful actions (marginal deter-
rence) and/or stunt their initiative altogether (average deterrence). With loyal enforcers,
maximum norm flexibility is optimal, so as to exploit both marginal and average deterrence.
With corrupt enforcers, instead, the legislator should prefer more rigid norms that prevent
bribery and misreporting, at the cost of reducing marginal deterrence and stunting private
initiative. The greater is potential corruption, the more rigid the optimal norms.
als, which we call generalized fractionalization index, that uses information on similarities
among individuals. We show that the generalized index is a natural extension of the
widely used ethno-linguistic fractionalization index and is alsosimple tocompute. The
paper offers some empirical illustrations on how the new index can be operationalized and
what difference it makes as compared to standard indices. These applications pertain to
the pattern of diversity in the United States across states. Journal of Economic Literature
fiscal policy by considering the Italian case. Empirical analysis has been so
far rather inconclusive on this important topic. We abscribe such evidence
to three problems: identification, regime-switching and maturity effects. All
these aspects are particularly relevant to the Italian case.
We propose a parsimonious model with three factors to
represent the whole yield curve, and we consider yield
differentials between Italian and German Government bonds.
To take into account the possibility of regime-switching, we explicitly include
a hidden two-state Markov chain that represents market expectations. The
model is estimated using Bayesian econometric techniques. We find that government
debt and its evolution significantly influence the yield of government
bonds, that such effects are maturity dependent and regime-dependent. Hence
when investigating the effect of fiscal policy on the term-structure it is of crucial
importance to allow for multiple regimes in the estimation.
Kewords: Fiscal Policy, Term Structure, regime switching, Bayesian estimation
utility from decision problems under exogenous uncertainty to choice in strategic
environments. Interactive uncertainty is modeled both explicitly - using
hierarchies of preference relations, the analogue of beliefs hierarchies
implicitly - using preference structures, the analogue of type spaces la
Harsanyi - and it is shown that the two approaches are equivalent.
Preference structures can be seen as those sets of hierarchies arising when certain
restrictions on preferences, along with the players' common certainty of
the restrictions, are imposed. Preferences are a priori assumed to satisfy only
very mild properties (reflexivity, transitivity, and monotone continuity).
Thus, the results provide a framework for the analysis of behavior in games
under essentially any axiomatic structure. An explicit characterization is
given for Savage's axioms, and it is shown that a hierarchy of relatively
simple preference relations uniquely identifies the decision maker's
utilities and beliefs of all orders. Connections with the literature on beliefs
hierarchies and correlated equilibria are discussed.
Kewords: Subjective probability, Preference hierarchies, Type spaces, Beliefs
hierarchies, Common belief, Expected utility, Incomplete information,
Correlated equilibria
on sellers' investment. We show that a retailer extracts a larger
surplus from the negotiation with an upstream manufacturer the
more it is essential to the creation of total surplus. In turn, this
depends on the rivalry between retailers in the bargaining process.
Rivalry increases when the retail market is more fragmented, when
the retailers are less differentiated and when decreasing returns to
scale in production are larger. The allocation of total surplus affects
also the incentives of producers to invest in product quality, an instance
of the hold up problem. This not only makes both the supplier and
consumers worse off, but it may harm also the retailers.
Kewords: Retailers' power, Hold-up, Supplier's under-investment
Our paper seeks to answer this question by providing evidence on the
age-productivity and age-earnings profiles for a sample of plants in three
manufacturing industries (forest, industrial machinery and electronics) in
Finland. Our main result is that exposure to rapid technological and managerial
changes does make a difference for plant productivity, less so for wages. In
electronics, the Finnish industry undergoing a major technological and
managerial shock in the 1990s, the response of productivity to age-related
variables is first sizably positive and then becomes sizably negative as one
looks at plants with higher average seniority and experience. This declining
part of the curve is not there either for the forest industry or for industrial
machinery. It is not there either for wages in electronics. These conclusions
survive when a host of other plausible productivity determinants (notably,
education and plant vintage) are included in the analysis. We conclude that
workforce aging may be a burden for firms in high-tech industries and less so in
other industries.
We study the joint dynamics of economic and political change. Predictions of the simple model that we formulate in the paper get
considerable support in a panel of data on political regimes and GDP per capita for about 150 countries over 150 years. Democratic cap-
ital - measured by a nation's historical experience with democracy and by the incidence of democracy in its neighborhood - reduces the
exit rate from democracy and raises the exit rate from autocracy. In democracies, a higher stock of democratic capital stimulates growth
in an indirect way by decreasing the probability of a sucessful coup. Our results suggest a virtuous circle, where the accumulation of phys-
ical and democratic capital reinforce each other, promoting economic development jointly with the consolidation of democracy.
model misspecification. The principal tools used to solve robust control problems
are state-space methods (see Hansen and Sargent, 2006, and Giordani and
Soderlind, 2004). In this paper we show that the structural-form methods
developed by Dennis (2006) to solve control problems with rational expectations
can also be applied to robust control problems, with the advantage that they
bypass the task, often onerous, of having to express the reference model in
statespace form. Interestingly, because state-space forms and structural forms
are not unique the two approaches do not necessarily return the same equilibria
for robust control problems. We apply both state-space and structural solution
methods to an empirical New Keynesian business cycle model and find that the
differences between the methods are both qualitatively and quantitatively important.
In particular, with the structural-form solution methods the specification errors generally
involve changes to the conditional variances in addition to theconditional means of the
shock processes.