We implement optimal economic outcomes at the lowest social cost by combining reputation and contracting mechanisms to overcome the time-inconsistency problem of monetary policy associated with an inflation bias. We characterize the conditions under which the reputation force alone induces a central bank to behave in a socially optimal way. When these conditions fail, an incentive contract is invoked, whose cost is significantly reduced by the presence of the reputation force. The contract poses a penalty threat that is a concave function of wage growth, which in equilibrium is tied to expected rather than realized inflation, with a global maximum that provides the least upper bound on all threatened penalties. This bound can be used as a uniform penalty threat to achieve optimal economic outcomes and still, for moderate to large shocks, its magnitude can be much smaller than the size of the transfers required by the standard contracts that are linear functions of realized inflation rates. Further, under both the concave and the uniform penalty threats, the central bank will behave in the socially optimal way and no transfer is materialized in equilibrium. Thus our hybrid mechanism solves the time-inconsistency problem while leaving the central bank with complete discretion to respond to new circumstances, without any reputation cost or penalty threatened by the contract actually invoked along the equilibrium path.

In this paper we compare the impact of hardware, software, and communication equipment, widely referred to as information and communication technologies (ICT), on economic growth among the advanced industrialized countries. We use nonparametric techniques that allow us to estimate the output elasticities of ICT and human capital directly for each country and time period in our sample. Our results indicate that countries with high levels of ICT capital have high output elasticities of human capital. In addition, countries with high levels of human capital have high output elasticities of ICT, a result suggesting complementarity between the two.

The relationship between the price of oil and the level of economic activity is a fundamental empirical issue in macroeconomics. Hamilton (1983) showed that oil prices had significant predictive content for real economic activity in the United States prior to 1972, whereas Hooker (1996) argued that the estimated linear relations between oil prices and economic activity appear much weaker after 1973. In the debate that followed, several authors suggested that the apparent weakening of the relationship between oil prices and economic activity is illusory, arguing that the true relationship between oil prices and real economic activity is asymmetric, with the correlation between oil price decreases and output significantly different from the correlation between oil price increases and output—see, for example, Mork (1989) and Hamilton (2003).

This paper analyzes a two-phase endogenous growth model in which the adoption of a backstop technology (e.g., solar) yields a sustained supply of essential energy inputs previously obtained from exhaustible resources (e.g., oil). Growth is knowledge-driven and the optimal timing of technology switching is determined by welfare maximization. The optimal path exhibits discrete jumps in endogenous variables: technology switching implies sudden reductions in consumption and output, an increase in the growth rate, and instantaneous adjustments in saving rates. Due to the positive growth effect, it is optimal to implement the new technology when its current consumption benefits are substantially lower than those generated by old technologies.

In contrast to the standard approach in energy economics, this paper assumes that physical capital accumulation is relatively more energy-intensive than consumption. By means of Gaussian hypergeometric functions, we provide a closed-form representation of the optimal solution paths of our variables in levels, whatever the initial conditions (i.e., global dynamics). We find that, in general, the optimal trajectories are nonmonotonic. P.S. Dasgupta and G.M. Heal [Review of Economic Studies (special number), 3–28 (1974)] pointed out this result (local dynamics) for the optimal consumption in a model with identical technology for both physical capital accumulation and consumption. However, our paper introduces five novelties with respect to their study, namely, global dynamics, the importance of the proportion of nonrenewable energy resources to endowment of physical capital [S(0)/K(0)], the role of technical progress, U-shaped behavior of consumption, and nonmonotonicity of resource extraction.

We motivate and provide an overview to New Monetarist Economics. We then briefly describe the individual contributions to the Macroeconomics Dynamics special issues on money, credit, and liquidity.

Conventional wisdom is that inflation makes people spend money faster, trying to get rid of it like a “hot potato,” and this is a channel through which inflation affects velocity and welfare. Monetary theory with endogenous search intensity seems ideal for studying this. However, in standard models, inflation is a tax that lowers the surplus from monetary exchange and hence reduces search effort. We replace search intensity with a free entry (participation) decision for buyers—i.e., we focus on the extensive rather than intensive margin—and prove buyers always spend their money faster when inflation increases. We also discuss welfare.

Despite the important role that total factor productivity (TFP) has played in the growth literature, few attempts have been made to change the methodology to estimate it. This paper proposes a methodology based on a state-space model to estimate TFP and its determinants. With this methodology, it is possible to reduce the measurement of our ignorance. As a by-product, this estimate yields the capital share in output and the long-term growth rate. When applied to Chile, the estimation shows a capital share around 0.5 and long-term growth of TFP around 1%. Capital accumulation tends to explain the growth rate in the fast growth periods under the econometric estimation more than the traditional growth accounting methodology.

We study counterfeiting of currency in a search-theoretic model of monetary exchange. In contrast to Nosal and Wallace [Journal of Monetary Economics 54, 229–246 (2007)], we establish that counterfeiting does not pose a threat to the existence of a monetary equilibrium; i.e., a monetary equilibrium exists irrespective of the cost of producing counterfeits, or the ease with which genuine money can be authenticated. However, the possibility of counterfeiting fiat money can affect its value, velocity, output, and welfare, even if no counterfeiting occurs in equilibrium. We provide two extensions of the model under which the threat of counterfeiting can materialize: counterfeits can circulate across periods, and sellers set terms of trade in some matches. Policies that make the currency more costly to counterfeit or easier to recognize raise the value of money and society's welfare, but the latter policy does not always decrease counterfeiting.

It is customary to suggest that the asymmetry in the transmission of oil price shocks to real output is well established. Much of the empirical work cited as being in support of asymmetry, however, has not directly tested the hypothesis of an asymmetric transmission of oil price innovations. Moreover, many of the papers quantifying these asymmetric responses are based on censored oil price VAR models that have recently been shown to be invalid. Other studies are based on dynamic correlations in the data and do not distinguish between cause and effect. Recently, several new methods of testing and quantifying asymmetric responses of U.S. real economic activity to positive and negative oil price innovations have been developed. We put this literature into perspective, contrast it with more traditional approaches, highlight directions for further research, and reconcile some seemingly conflicting results reported in the literature.

The welfare cost of anticipated inflation is quantified in a matching model of money calibrated to 23 different OECD countries for several sample periods. In most economies, in the common period 1978–1998, a representative agent would give up only a fraction of 1% of consumption to avoid 10% inflation. The welfare cost of inflation varies across countries, from a fraction of 0.1% in Japan, to more than 2% in Australia, reaching 6% with bargaining. The model fits money demand data of several countries poorly, however. The fit generally improves with longer sample periods. The results are fairly robust to variations in choice of calibrated parameters and calibration targets.

This paper considers a Ramsey model of linear taxation for an economy with capital and two kinds of labor. If the government cannot distinguish between the return from capital and the return from entrepreneurial labor, then there will be positive capital income taxation, even in the long run. This happens because the only way to tax entrepreneurial labor is by also taxing capital. Furthermore, under fairly general conditions, the optimal tax on observable labor income is higher than the capital tax, although both are strictly positive. Thus, even though both income taxes are positive, imposing uniform income taxation would lead to additional distortions in the economy.

An asset market segmentation model is constructed to study the distributional effects of monetary policy when economic individuals can choose means of payment among alternatives. In equilibrium, monetary policy has two distributional effects: a direct effect and an indirect effect through the choice of means of payment. When the government injects money, some purchase a greater variety of goods with cash whereas others purchase a greater variety of goods with credit. Credit can dampen fluctuations in consumption arising from monetary policy. The optimal money growth rate can be positive or negative. The Friedman rule is not optimal in general.

Unit root tests suggest that shocks to relative income across U.S. states are permanent, which contradicts the stochastic convergence hypothesis. We suggest that this finding is due to the well-known low-power problem of unit root tests in the presence of high persistence (i.e., low speed of convergence) and small samples. First, interval estimates of the largest autoregressive root for the relative income in the 48 U.S. contiguous states are quite wide, including many alternatives that are persistent but stable. Second, interval estimates of the half-life of relative income shocks that are robust to high persistence and small samples suggest that in most cases shocks die out within zero to ten years. Third, estimation of a fractionally integrated model for the relative income process suggests strong evidence of mean reversion in the data. These findings provide ample support for the stochastic convergence hypothesis.

This paper analyzes the effects of technological risk on long-run growth when labor supply is elastic and production gives rise to a pollution externality. We show that the randomness of production, as well as the endogeneity of labor supply, affects the equilibrium solutions for the social planner and for the market economy. We analyze the effects of environmental policy, discuss conditions for an optimal policy, and find that the response of labor supply to changes in the model parameters and to variations in the policy instruments crucially depends on the volatility of output.

This article presents a solution algorithm for linear rational expectation models under imperfect information, in which some decisions are made based on smaller information sets than others. In our solution representation, imperfect information does not affect the coefficients on crawling variables, which implies that, if a perfect-information model exhibits saddle-path stability, for example, the corresponding imperfect-information models also exhibit saddle-path stability. However, imperfect information can significantly alter the quantitative properties of a model. Indeed, this article demonstrates that, with a predetermined wage contract, the standard RBC model remarkably improves the correlation between labor productivity and output.

This article analyzes an economy where both nonrenewable resources and a costly energy resource are essential inputs in production. The extraction of the nonrenewable resources leads to emissions that increase the probability of a catastrophe. We find that, in contrast to the constant-probability case, the endogenous probability of a catastrophe implies that some nonrenewable resources might optimally be left in the ground. The larger the effect of the fossil energy use on the probability of a catastrophe, the fewer nonrenewable resources should be extracted and the earlier should be the switch to the renewable substitute. The richer a country, the earlier it should shift to the energy substitute. In the trade-off between higher consumption and a higher probability of catastrophe, even small probability changes are likely to be more important for the planner than higher consumption.

Rocheteau, Rupert, and Wright [Scandinavian Journal of Economics 109 (2007), 837–855] show that the relationship between inflation and unemployment can be positive or negative, depending on the primitives of the model. The key features are indivisible labor, nonseparable preferences, and bargaining. Their results are derived only for a special case of bargaining, take-it-or-leave-it offer by buyers. Instead of bargaining, this paper considers competitive search. I show that the results of Rocheteau et al. can be generalized to an environment where both buyers and sellers have nonseparable preferences. In addition, the relationship between inflation and unemployment is robust to allowing free entry by sellers, which cannot be studied in Rocheteau et al. (2007).

Vote-buying is widely used by parties in developing countries to influence the outcome of elections. We examine the impact of vote-buying on growth. We consider a model with a poverty trap where redistribution can promote growth. We show that vote-buying contributes to the persistence of poverty as taxed wealthy people buy votes from poor people. We then show that there exists a democratic constitution that breaks vote-buying and promotes growth. Such a constitution involves rotating agenda setting, a taxpayer-protection rule, and repeated voting. The latter rule makes vote-buying prohibitively costly.

This paper reviews some of the literature on the macroeconomic effects of oil price shocks with a particular focus on possible nonlinearities in the relation and recent new results obtained by Kilian and Vigfusson [http://www-personal.umich/~lkilian/kvsubmission.pdf (2009)].