Economic fluctuations and growth.
Hall, Robert E.
The Economic Fluctuations and Growth (EF&G) Program goes back
to the beginning of Martin Feldstein's presidency of the NBER,
although originally it was simply called the Economic Fluctuations
Program. It has been my honor to serve as its director from its
founding, 32 years ago. To the public, the Program's most
conspicuous activity has been to maintain the NBER's chronology of
the U.S. business cycle, generally accepted as the standard for
identifying the beginning and ending of each recession. As I write, many
eyes are on the program's Business Cycle Dating Committee, which I
also chair, as evidence grows that the recession that began in December
2007 may have come to an end recently or is about to come to an end. The
following graph shows the two main indicators the committee considers in
deciding on the dates of turning points in economic activity, real GDP and payroll employment:
[GRAPHIC OMITTED]
Both measures are stated as indexes that reached 1.00 in December
2007, the month determined to be the peak of the business cycle by the
committee on November 28, 2008. That month was the exact peak of
employment, but real GDP reached a slightly higher value in the second
quarter of 2008. Both measures plunged in late 2008 as the financial
crisis took hold. Real GDP began to grow in the summer of 2009 but
employment continued to decline. The percentage drop in employment in
the current recession was the largest since the government began the
collection of the data in 1939, although not nearly as large as the
decline in the Great Depression in 1929 to 1933, according to annual
data from earlier sources. The huge difference between the recent
behavior of output and employment reflects the unprecedented growth of
productivity in 2009. In determining the date for the trough in economic
activity, the committee will be deciding how to weigh output and
employment in its definition of economic activity.
EF&G is the largest of the Bureau's research programs,
with 149 Research Associates and 45 Faculty Research Fellows (as of
February 2010). At recent Program Meetings, the papers have included two
on the effects of the small probability of large disasters: Francois
Gourio, "Disasters Risk and Business Cycles" (15399); and
Robert Barro, Emi Nakamura, Jon Steinsson, "Crises and Recoveries
in an Empirical Model of Consumption Disasters." Housing economics
has played a major role in the meetings, too, with: Veronica Guerrieri,
Daniel Hartley, and Erik Hurst, "Endogenous Gentrification and
Housing Price Dynamics"; Jack Favilukis, Sydney Ludvigson, and
Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, "The Macroeconomic Effects of Housing
Wealth, Housing Finance, and Limited Risk-Sharing in General
Equilibrium"; and James Kahn, "What Drives Housing
Prices?" Volatility in financial markets has an important new role
in macroeconomics, as seen in YiLi Chien, Harold Cole, and Hanno Lustig,
"Is the Volatility of the Market Price of Risk due to Intermittent
Portfolio Re-Balancing?" (15382) and Ricardo Lagos, Guillaume
Rocheteau, and Pierre-Olivier Weill, "Crises and Liquidity in
Over-the- Counter Markets" (15414). The novel role of fiscal policy
in today's economy was the subject of Christopher Erceg and Jesper
Linde, "Is There a Fiscal Free Lunch in a Liquidity Trap?"
Most of the EF&G Program's activities take place in its
nine research groups. Each group has two or three leaders, who determine
the membership of the group and its methods of operation, timing of its
meetings, and content of its programs. Most groups meet at the NBER
Summer Institute in July and many also meet during the academic year.
Impulse and Propagation Mechanisms Group--Lawrence Christiano and
Martin Eichenbaum, Leaders
Recently, this group has focused on an important area of research
stimulated by the financial crisis of 2008: understanding the role of
financial market frictions. Gadi Barlevy in "A Leverage-based Model
of Speculative Bubbles" George-Marios Angeletos and Jennifer
La'O (14982), Zheng Liu, Pengfei Wang, and Tao Zha in "Asset
Priced Channels and Macroeconomic Fluctuations," and Luca Dedola
and Giovanni Lombardo in "Financial Friction, Financial Integration
and the International Propagation of Shocks" all study models in
which informational frictions give rise to important capital market
frictions. The first two papers are theoretical in nature, exploring new
ideas and frameworks. The others are more quantitative in nature,
exploring the significance of different financial market frictions in
dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models.
Motivated by recent events as well, other researchers in this group
are exploring the efficacy of different policies in economies where a
zero bound on the nominal interest rate is binding, and in economies in
which the spread on interest rates to borrowers and lenders experiences
large changes. In "Conventional and Unconventional Monetary
Policy" Vasco Curdia and Michael Woodford extend the basic New
Keynesian model of the monetary transmission mechanism to allow for a
spread between the interest rate available to savers and borrowers. This
spread can vary for either exogenous or endogenous reasons. Woodford
discusses policy rules that provide good approximations to optimal
policy in such environments. In "Where Should Liquidity be Injected
during a Financial Crisis?" Ricardo Reis formalizes the notion of a
liquidity shortage and then studies the tactical aspects of monetary
policy when such a shortage arises.
Lawrence Christiano, Martin Eichenbaum, and Sergio Rebelo (15394)
analyze the circumstances under which fiscal policy has a large and
socially beneficial effect. Standard macro models imply that the effect
of fiscal policy on output is positive but relatively small. However,
these effects can be very large if the zero-bound constraint on the
nominal interest rate is binding. A key determinant of the size of the
multiplier is the state of the world in which new government spending comes on line. If it comes on line in future periods when the nominal
interest rate is zero, then there is a large effect on current output.
If it comes on line in future periods where the nominal interest rate is
positive, then the current effect on government spending is smaller.
This finding supports the view that, for fiscal policy to be effective,
government spending must come online in a timely manner.
Capital Markets and the Economy--Janice Eberly and Deborah Lucas,
Leaders
The capital markets group studies interactions between the real and
financial economy. The recent financial crisis has sparked new and
interesting research on the sources of the crisis, how such a crisis
might be prevented or foreseen, the potential impact on the
macroeconomy, and policy responses.
The group has discussed several papers related to market dynamics
that are similar to bank runs, but occur outside the banking sector.
Julio Rotemberg (14222) presented a novel model of how payments clearing
among interconnected agents are settled, and how the amount of liquidity
needed to clear the payments depends on the payments system among the
agents.
Two additional papers by Zhiguo He and Wei Xiong (15482) and by
Viral Acharya, Douglas Gale, and Tanju Yorulmazer (15674) consider the
effect of financing longer-term investments by rolling over short-term
assets, as in many financial institutions. The papers consider the risks
associated with this maturity transformation and the roles played by
volatility, liquidity, and maturity, as well the potential role of
financial regulation in mitigating these risks.
The group discussed two related empirical papers. The first,
"Banking Crises and Crisis Dating" by John Boyd, Gianni Dc
Nicolo, and Elena Loukoianova, carefully considers the roots of measured
banking crises and finds that the crises arise from underlying systemic
bank shocks. Since the shocks pre-date the crises, using the shocks to
date the origins of the crisis changes one's view of the dynamics
and causes of financial crises. A second paper, by Manuel Adelino,
Kristopher Gerardi, and Paul Willen (15159), looks at data during the
financial crisis, starting in 2007, and shows that because of re-default
risk and self-cures (mortgages becoming current again), renegotiating
delinquent mortgages is not very attractive to investors. Hence,
payment-reducing loan modifications have been uncommon in both
securitized and non-securitized pools of mortgages.
Finally, this group considered several theoretical treatments of
the recent financial crisis. In "Securitization, Transparency, and
Liquidity" Marco Pagano and Paolo Volpin argue that there are cases
where the release of coarse information is preferred by bond issuers
enhancing primary market liquidity, at the cost of secondary market
liquidity. In "Bursting Bubbles: Consequences and Cures"
Narayana Kocherlakota, now the President of the Federal Reserve Bank of
Minneapolis, discussed a framework in which asset market bubbles can
arise, because the asset can be used as collateral for borrowing. He
shows that the consequences of bursting the bubble can be dramatic and
persistent in the real and financial economy.
The Labor Market in Macroeconomics--Richard Rogerson, Robert
Shimer, and Randall Wright, Leaders
The labor market is central to many issues in macroeconomics,
including business cycles, unemployment, inequality, and growth. This
group considers models of the labor market, data analysis, and the use
of models to carry out substantive policy analysis.
Modern models of the labor market stress the underlying dynamics in
job and worker flows. High-quality data on these flows is central to
developing better models of these processes and assessing their
consequences for a variety of substantive and policy issues. Therefore,
this group has always emphasized the analysis of new datasets that can
shed additional light on the empirical properties of these flows. A
recent example of this is the work of Steven Davis, Jason Faberman, and
John Haltiwanger, "The Establishment-Level Behavior of"
Vacancies and Hiring." Recent models of labor market flows stress
the role of vacancy creation in understanding labor market outcomes, and
this is the first paper to provide systematic evidence on the
relationship between vacancy posting and hiring. The paper uses data
from the recent JOLTS dataset and the facts that it presents will play a
key role in guiding the development and calibration of models of labor
market dynamics.
Understanding the nature and causes of labor market fluctuations
associated with business cycles remains a key issue in economics, and
research on this issue has always featured prominently in the
group's meetings. A recent example is my paper, "Reconciling
Cyclical Movements in the Marginal Value of Time and the Marginal
Product of Labor" which shows that a standard macroeconomic model
appended to capture labor market frictions, in the spirit of work
pioneered by Diamond, Mortensen, and Pissarides, can reconcile observed
labor market fluctuations in a framework where all bilateral gains from
trade are realized. It does not follow that fluctuations are optimal
from the perspective of society--high unemployment is socially
inefficient.
Another long-standing issue in the analysis of aggregate labor
market outcomes concerns the elasticity of aggregate labor supply, and
in particular, the apparent inconsistency between low labor-supply
elasticities that are estimated from micro data and the much larger
values implicit in many aggregate models. The elasticity of aggregate
labor supply has important implications both for the propagation of
shocks in business cycle models and for assessing the implications of
fiscal policy instruments, such as tax and transfer programs. Work by
Richard Rogerson and Johanna Wallenius (13017) argues that there is no
inconsistency. They present a model of life- cycle labor supply in which
standard procedures used to infer elasticities using micro data would
find a small elasticity even though the aggregate elasticity is large.
Central to this finding is the fact that individuals adjust their
lifetime labor supply along two margins: how much to work while
employed, and what fraction of their lives to spend in employment. An
important implication of the analysis is that tax and transfer policies
generate large responses in aggregate hours worked.
Forecasting and Empirical Methods in Macroeconomics and
Finance--Mark W. Watson and Kenneth D. West, Leaders
The forecasting and methods group focuses on the development and
assessment of econometric methods for use in empirical macroeconomics
and finance, placing special emphasis on problems of prediction. It
meets jointly with a group on forecasting under the Committee on
Econometrics and Mathematical Economics umbrella, with support from the
National Science Foundation.
Group meetings tend to involve two types of papers: one type with
models or forecasts of one or more variables, using novel or technically
advanced methods; a second type in which the authors develop and
evaluate a new methodology for estimation, inference, or prediction.
Many of the papers that are presented fit in both categories.
In the first category, Jens H. E. Christensen, Francis X. Diebold,
and Glenn D. Rudebusch (13611) study the term structure of nominal
government debt, showing that a combination of a standard parametric
specification and an arbitrage-free specification leads to improvement
in predictive performance.
In the second category, Serena Ng, Emanuel Moench, and Simon
Potter, in "Dynamic Hierarchical Factor Models," develop and
apply a procedure that allows a hierarchy across cross-section units
prior to estimation; this is natural, for example, in applications with
global, country, and regional factors. In real-time forecasting of real
activity, Elena Andreou, Andros Kourtellos, and Eric Ghysels, in
"Should Macroeconomic Forecasters Look at High-Frequency Financial
Data?" show that quarterly forecasts improve if monthly data are
used.
Methods and Application for Dynamic Equilibrium Models--Jesus
Fernandez-Villaverde and Frank Schorfheide, Leaders
The dynamic equilibrium group conducts research on a range of
subjects related to the construction, computation, estimation, and
evaluation of dynamic models and their applications in empirical
research. These types of models have become one of the main workhorses
of modern macroeconomics and related fields such as finance.
Sophisticated empirical analysis based on dynamic equilibrium models has
produced novel substantive findings. An increasing number of policy
making institutions, including the Federal Reserve Board and many
central banks including the European Central Bank, are actively
formulating and estimating DSGE models for policy analysis and
forecasting. Many of the group's activities are aimed at creating
bridges of communication and cooperation between pure macroeconomics
researchers, time-series econometricians, and central bank staff.
One active area of research is the incorporation of time variation
into the parameterization of DSGE models. Time-varying parameters can be
used, for instance, to capture changes in monetary policy over the
post-war period. Roger Farmer, Daniel Waggoner, and Tao Zha (12965)
develop and apply tools to solve rational expectations models with
regime-switching coefficients. Vasco Curdia and Ricardo Reis (15774)
examine to what extent the conclusions derived from estimated DSGE
models, for instance with respect to the sources of business cycles, are
sensitive to assumptions about the driving forces of macro fluctuations.
Martin Uribe and Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe (14215) study the role of
news (or anticipated) shocks for business cycle fluctuations. Because
direct information about the agents' information sets is not
available, this information needs to be extracted in an efficient manner
from the auto-covariance properties of observable macroeconomic
variables.
Macroeconomics across Time and Space--Jeremy Greenwood and Lee
Obanian, Leaders
This group uses modern dynamic theory to investigate long-standing
questions of substantive historical interest. Research presented at
these meetings includes analyses of great depressions, industrial
revolutions, the diffusion of new technologies, secular shifts in hours
worked and leisure, long-run trends in marriage, women's labor
supply, and fertility, the connection between the formation and
dissolution of institutions and the economy, the rise in urbanization;
international trade and capital flows, and the growth and location of
business.
Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Enrique Mendoza, and Linda Tesar (14874)
challenge the standard view that Finland's depression of the 1990s
was caused by a banking crisis. Instead, they show that the depression
began before the crisis, and its inception coincided with the breakup of
the former Soviet Union. Their paper develops a quantitative theoretic
model of Finland's depression based on the very large trade
relationship with the USSR that collapsed following the end of the
Soviet Union. They show how this shock temporarily reduced output, as
the production inputs from this sector were not easily reallocated to
other sectors, and then show how this shock was propagated for many
years by labor market rigidities that prevented wages from declining and
that kept unemployment high.
Another paper that integrates modern approaches to modeling with a
longstanding question of historical interest is by Matthias Doepke,
Moshe Hazan, and Yushiy Maoz (13707). They develop a theory of the
post-war baby boom based on the increased demand for female labor during
the war, using a model with endogenous fertility and labor force
participation. The theory implies that women who worked in the war
accumulated important work experience which led to higher wages and also
a persistent increase in labor force participation after the war,
resulting in that cohort delaying births. In contrast, the theory
predicts that younger women will tend to have children earlier. The
quantitative analysis generates a substantial baby boom, followed by a
baby bust, simply reflecting the one-time wartime increase in the demand
for female labor. The theory's predictions are consistent with
differences in the timing of births across countries that differed with
respect to the relative increases in their wartime demand for female
labor in the 1940s.
Betsy Caucutt, Thomas Cooley, and Nezih Guner (12854) undertake an
analysis of the rise of social security during the beginning of the
twentieth century. They argue that the rise of such programs in the West
is linked to the decline of the agrarian economy and the rise of the
industrial one. In decades past, the rural population did not favor
social security.
The median voter was a middle-aged person who earned a lot of his
income from land. With industrialization, the value of rural land
declined. The population shifted from the countryside to the city. This
led to a shift in the median voter. Now, she was an older, middle-aged
urban resident who favored the imposition of a social security system.
Aggregate Implications of Microeconomic Consumption
Behavior--Orazio Attanasio, Christopher Carroll, and Jose Victor Rios
Rull, Leaders
Research in this group ranges from empirical studies using
microeconomic data to theoretical analyses of dynamic stochastic general
equilibrium models with uninsurable idiosyncratic risk. At the 2009
Summer Institute, the group dedicated an entire day to a workshop on the
Consumer Expenditure Survey, organized in collaboration with the
Conference on Research on Income and Wealth (CRIW). The event attracted
a large number of academics and users of the CEX, as well as a
delegation from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and included discussions
of "Evolution and Change in the Consumer Expenditure Surveys:
Adapting Methodologies to Meet Changing Needs," by Karen Goldenberg
and Jay Ryan, and "Strengths and Weaknesses of the CE from a BLS Perspective," by Thesia Garner and William Passero. The panel
discussion afterwards included NBER President Jim Poterba with Barry
Bosworth, Chris Carroll, Stephen Landfeld, and Jonathan Parker. The
workshop also included three methodological papers on consumption
measures: "Survey Instruments and the Reports of Consumption
Expenditures: Evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Surveys" by
Erich Battistin and Mario Padula; "Methodological Innovations in
Collecting Spending Data: The HRS Consumption and Activities Mail
Survey" by Mike Hurd and Susann Rohwedder; and "Five Decades
of Consumption and Income Poverty" (14827), by Bruce Meyer and
James Sullivan. The current shortcomings of the CEX were discussed
extensively, with an eye to possible changes and innovations that would
improve the quality of the consumption measures currently available. The
active participation of the BLS delegation was particularly welcome.
Several papers presented to the group provided evidence on income
processes: for example, "Changes in the Distribution of Income
Volatility," by Shane Jensen and Stephen Shore; "RIP to HIP:
The Data Reject Heterogeneous Labor Income Profiles," by Dmytro
Hryshko; "Semiparametric Characterizations of Income
Dynamics," by James Feigenbaum and Geng Li; and "Wages over
the Business Cycle: Spot Markets?" by Marcus Hagedorn and Iourii
Manovskii. Another set looked at the topical issues of housing, mortgage
markets, and bankruptcy, including "Mortgage Innovation and the
Foreclosure Boom," by Dean Corbae and Erwan Quintin; "Housing
and Debt over the Life Cycle and over the Business Cycle," by
Matteo Iacoviello and Marina Pavan; "Bankruptcy and Debt
Portfolios," by Thomas Hintermaier and Winfried Koeniger;
"Access to Credit after Bankruptcy: Does it Pay To Bc a
Deadbeat?" by Ethan Cohen-Cole, Burcu Duygan-Bump, and Judit
Montoriol-Garriga; and "Household Borrowing after Personal
Bankruptcy" by Song Han and Geng Li. Others considered different
types of investment and other life-cycle decisions such as college
enrollment, entrepreneurship, and disability risk, including
"Insuring College Failure Risk," by Satyajit Chatterjee and
Felicia Ionescu; "Health Insurance and Entrepreneurship," by
Vincenzo Quadrini; and "Disability Risk, Disability Insurance and
Life Cycle Behavior;' by Hamish Low and Luigi Pistaferri.
Income Distribution and Macroeconomics--Daron Acemoglu, Roland
Benabou, and Oared Galor, Leaders
This group explores a wide range of issues related to the sources
and consequences of inequality at the national and international levels.
Much of its discussions have centered on the interplay of markets,
technological change, trade, and redistributive policies with
geographical, institutional, and cultural factors in accounting for the
remarkable transformation of the world income distribution over the last
two centuries, as well as in the sharp rise in inequality within
countries during recent decades. The groups' work is organized
along three main avenues of research.
The first line focuses on deep-rooted determinants of the growth
process and comparative economic development throughout the course of
history, and up to the modern era. These include: 1) geographical
factors, such as differences in land endowments and access routes, which
were shown to generate permanent differences in both income and
ethnolinguistic heterogeneity, by Stelios Michalopoulos ("The
Origins of Ethnolinguistic Diversity") and Louis Putterman and
David Weil (14448); 2) long-run consequences of major historical events,
such as slavery, by Nils-Petter Lagerlof ("Slavery and Other
Property Rights") and Nathan Nunn (13367), and colonization and the
industrial revolution, by Carol Shiue and Wolfgang Keller (10778); 3)
initial stocks of scientific knowledge, by Diego Comin, William
Easterly, and Erick Gong (12657), and factors affecting the subsequent
pace of innovation, such as the levels of diversity and cooperation
within a society, by Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galor ("Human Genetic
Diversity and Comparative Economic Development"), or the attitudes
of different political and religious groups towards the diffusion of
knowledge, by Roland Benabou, Davide Ticchi, and Andrea Vindigni
("The Political Economy of Science, Religion, and Growth").
The second theme is the role of political institutions and social
conflict in determining cross-country differences in income per capita.
From a long-term perspective, a key issue is: what makes institutions so
persistent, even when they have very detrimental economic effects, as in
the case of entrenched elites, dictatorships, or weak, failed states?
This is addressed in studies by Daron Accmoglu and James Robinson
(12108); Nicola Gennaioli and Ilia Rainer ("The Modern Impact of
Pre-Colonial Centralization in Africa"); Daron Acemoglu, Davide
Ticchi, and Andrea Vindigni (12748); and Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson,
and Rafael Santos (15578). With a shorter-run perspective, the main
questions explored by the group centered around: 1) the optimal forms
and levels of redistribution and social insurance, for example, Emmanuel
Farhi and Ivan Werning (11408), Giovanni Violante and Nicola Pavoni
("Optimal Welfare-to-Work Programs"), and Jess Benhabib and
Alberto Bisin (14730); 2) the political-economy mechanisms and belief
dynamics that can explain why actually observed policies are often so
different, for example, Rodney Ramcharan ("Inequality and
Redistribution: Evidence from US Counties and States, 1890-1930"),
Dietrich Vollrath ("Inequality, Property Taxes, and Public Debt:
The United States, 1880-1930"), Roland Benabou (13907), Erzo
Luttmer and Monica Singhal (14268), Emmanuel Farhi and Ivan Werning
("The Political Economy of Nonlinear Capital Taxation,"), and
Benjamin Olken and Monica Singhal (15221).
The group's third main line of research aims to: 1) identify
the main market and non-market channels through which the distributions
of income, human capital, and financial assets affect aggregate economic
performance; and 2) bring to light the key determinants of the rise in
inequality experienced by most countries over the last quarter-century.
On the markets side, the papers have documented the impacts on wages
levels and income risk of: sectorial shifts in labor demand, for
example, Francisco Buera and Joseph Kaboski (14822); international
migration, for example, Jess Benhabib and Boyan Jovanovic (12871); and
globalization, for example, Xavier Gabaix and Angustin Landier (12365),
and Thomas Philippon and Ariell Reshef (14644). Considerable attention
also was devoted to credit market imperfections as impediments to
educational or entrepreneurial investments, and to how the human-capital
promoting or retarding nature of institutions and policies (child labor regulation, and the availability and quality of public education) is
shaped by the distribution of ownership of production factors and the
interests of landed aristocracies or industrial elites. Examples include
Raghuram Rajan and Rodney Ramchandran (14347), and Oded Galor, Omer
Moav, and Dietrich Vollrath ("Inequality in Landownership, the
Emergence of Human-Capital Promoting Institutions, and the Great
Divergence"). On the non-market side, a number of papers have
documented and analyzed the role of family decisions (fertility,
intra-household bargaining) and the powerful influence of social
networks, such as in "Traditional Institutions Meet the Modern
World: Caste, Gender, and Schooling Choice in a Globalizing
Economy" by Kaivan Munshi and Mark Rosenzweig. In particular,
changing patterns of gender inequality or parental preferences for
educated offspring reflect a combination of market and technological
forces with slow-moving cultural attributes and gradual adaptation of
preferences to economic incentives. An example of this work is Raquel
Fernandez, Alessandra Fogli, and Claudia Olivetti ("Mothers and
Sons: Preference Formation and Female Labor Force Dynamics"), and
Matthias Doepke and Fabrizio Zillibotti (12917).
Economic Growth--Charles I. Jones and Peter J. Klenow, Leaders
The growth group focuses on differences in income across countries,
firm-level productivity growth, and technical progress over time, as
illustrated by the following papers: Simon Johnson, William Larson,
Chris Papageorgiou, and Arvind Subramanian (15455) study how revisions
to the Penn World Tables--one of the most widely-used datasets in the
literature--affect our understanding of economic growth. They document
that in the move to the most recent version, the revision to the annual
growth rate of a country had a standard deviation of 5.4 percent, much
greater than the average growth rate itself of 1.5 percent. Remarkably,
the revision to the average 30-year growth rate had a standard deviation
of only 1.1 percent.
Daron Acemoglu, Philippe Aghion, Leonardo Bursztyn, and David
Hemous (15451) examine theoretically how technological change and
environmental problems can interact. In particular, they study
situations in which researchers can choose to work on improving
"dirty" technologies like the internal combustion engine, or
"clean" technologies like fuel cells and electric cars. They
find that achieving optimal growth without an environmental catastrophe
often involves not only input taxes (such as a carbon tax) but also
efforts to direct technical change through research subsidies or profit
taxes. When inputs are sufficiently substitutable, such subsidies or
taxes can be temporary.
Mark Aguiar and Manuel Amador (15194) document that high-growth
countries tend to accumulate official net foreign assets, but not
private net foreign assets. Their explanation: the government in power
has a bias toward current consumption (which it can direct while it is
temporarily in power), and cannot commit the future government to a low
tax rate on capital. Reforms that reduce these political economy and
contracting frictions result in less government debt, and therefore less
temptation to tax capital--but only gradually over time. So growth
proceeds as the tax on capital slowly falls and official net foreign
assets rise. Their theory implies that unconditional foreign aid does
not boost growth even temporarily, and that unconditional debt relief
lifts growth only temporarily.
Robert E. Hall *
* Hall directs the NBER's Program on Economic Fluctuations and
Growth and is Chairman of the NBER's Business Cycle Dating
Committee. He is 2010 President of the American Economic Association,
and is the Robert and Carole McNeil Professor of Economics and Hoover
Senior Fellow at Stanford University. In this article, the numbers in
parentheses refer to NBER Working Papers. For other papers, titles are
included, and the latest versions can be found by googling the title.