No abstract

We develop a dynamic general equilibrium growth model, where households purchase final goods on cash or credit and have different capital and money endowments, to investigate whether inflation affects trends in income and consumption inequality. We show that, under a strong substitutability between cash and credit goods, inflation has a negative relationship with income inequality, but a U-shaped relationship with consumption inequality. The divergence between income and consumption inequality explains several recent empirical observations. This result has important policy implications, as consumption inequality better reflects the welfare distribution whereas income inequality fails to capture consumption disparities resulting from different consumption and asset distributions across households. In the growth model with heterogeneous households, there is a mixed relationship between growth and income inequality, confirming the existence of the Kuznets curve. The inflation-driven asset reallocation might also produce a Mundell–Tobin effect, enhancing growth.

No abstract

Fiscal Consolidation and Public Wages A New Keynesian model with government production, public compensation, and unemployment is fit to U.S. data to study the effects of public wage reductions. Estimation implies reductions in public wages and government goods purchases have similar effects on total output, and the fiscal balance, yet the former can raise private output slightly, while the latter does not. Exogenous public wage reductions decrease private wages. Model counterfactuals show that sufficiently rigid nominal private wages can reverse the private wage response, as the rigidity dampens the labor reallocation effect from the public to private sector that exerts downward pressure on private wages.

This study develops a small-open-economy version of Benhabib, J., S. Schmitt-Grohé, and M. Uribe. 2001. “Monetary Policy and Multiple Equilibria.” American Economic Review 91: 167–186. We systematically explore the role of international capital mobility and the portfolio balance channel in terms of macroeconomic (in)stability when the government follows a commonly-adopted interest-rate feedback rule. In a one-traded-good model, the steady-state equilibrium, in general, is locally determinate; international capital mobility stabilizes the economy against business cycle fluctuations under a simple interest-rate feedback rule. In a two-good (traded and non-traded goods) model, the relationship between equilibrium (in)determinacy and the aggressiveness of interest rate rules is not monotonic, and crucially depends on households’ portfolio preferences. These results suggest that a unified interest rate rule can end up with very different consequences of macroeconomic (in)stability in an open economy from those in a closed economy.