We introduce public spending, financed through income taxation, in the Ramsey model with heterogeneous agents. Public spending as a source of welfare generates more complex dynamics. In contrast to previous contributions focusing on similar models but with wasteful public spending, limit cycles through Hopf bifurcation and expectation-driven fluctuations appear if the degree of capital-labor su...

Current explanations why a growing economy necessarily goes through booms and recessions predict countercyclical R&D investment. As this is very controversial from an empirical perspective, a stochastic Poisson model of endogenous business cycles and growth is presented where the determinants of the cyclical behaviour of R&D investment are analytically studied. Providing an explicit expression ...

In the wake of emerging market turmoil, the role and welfare consequences of volatility have attracted renewed attention. An emerging consensus points to various types of volatility being both a consequence and a determinant of longerterm growth performance. The linkages appear to be context dependent. This paper employs classification tree analysis to explore determinants of consumption volati...

The empirical success of Real Business Cycle (RBC) models is often judged by their ability to explain the behavior of a multitude of real macroeconomic variables using a single exogenous shock process. This paper shows that in a model with the same basic structure as the bare bones RBC model, monetary, cost-push or preference shocks are equally successful at explaining the behavior of macroecon...

This paper examines sources of cyclical movements in output, in ation and the term structure of interest rates. It employs a novel identi cation approach which uses the sign of the cross correlation function in response to shocks to catalog orthogonal disturbances. We nd that demand shocks are the dominant source output, in ation and term structure uctuations in six of the G-7 countries. Within...

This paper is aimed at investigating the effects of government intervention through unemployment benefits on macroeconomic dynamics in an agent based decentralized matching framework. The major result is that the presence of such a public intervention in the economy stabilizes the aggregate demand and the financial conditions of the system at the cost of a modest increase of both the inflation ...

This paper develops a measure of U.S. monetary policy shocks for the period 1969–1996 that is relatively free of endogenous and anticipatory movements. Quantitative and narrative records are used to infer the Federal Reserve’s intentions for the federal funds rate around FOMC meetings. This series is regressed on the Federal Reserve’s internal forecasts to derive a measure free of systematic re...

In the present paper general stationary overlapping generations economies with many commodities in every period and many different consumers in every generation are considered. A government maximizes a utilitarian social welfare function, which is the sum of weighted averages of utilities for generations, through fiscal policy, i.e., monetary transfers and taxes. Situations both with and withou...

This paper presents two dynamic models of the economy in which credit constraints arise because creditors cannot force debtors to repay debts unless the debts are secured by collateral. The credit system becomes a powerful propagation mechanism by which the effects of shocks persist and amplify through the interaction between collateral values, borrowers' net worth and credit limits. In particu...

This paper examines a simple monetary optimizing model with sticky-prices. Two types of monetary policy rules are considered: constant money growth rules and interest-rate feedback (Taylor-type) rules. In the case of constant money growth rules, we show the existence of limit cycles through the Hopf bifurcation theorem. On the other hand, in the case of the interest-rate feedback rules, we show...