Closed Economy Model Research Articles

Effects on growth of environmental policy in a small open economy

This paper examines the effect of environmental policy on economic growth in a small open economy in a neoclassical framework with pollution as an argument in both the utility and production functions. We show that environmental policy imposes a drag on long-run growth in both the open and closed economy cases. The effect of environmental policy on growth is stronger in the open economy case relative to the closed economy model if the country has strong aversion to pollution and thus serves as a net exporter of capital in the international capital market. On the other hand, if the agents in the economy have low aversion to pollution and thus import capital, the effect of environmental care on growth is stronger in the closed economy relative to the open economy. Thus, from our setup, environmental policy is harmful to growth but environmental sustainability need not be incompatible with continued economic growth.

The Growth Effects of Tax Rate in the OECD

The literature testing for aggregate impacts of taxes on long-run growth rates in the OECD has generally used tax rate measures constructed from macroeconomic aggregates such as tax revenues. These have a number of advantages but two major disadvantages: they are typically average, rather than marginal, rates, and are constructed from endogenous tax revenues. Theory predicts a number of responses to both and tax rates, but empirical analogues of the latter tend to be at the level. In addition though most OECD economies are best regarded as small open economies, previous macroeconomic tests of OECD tax-growth relationships have implicitly been based on closed-economy models, focusing on domestic tax rates. This paper explores the relevance of these two aspects – macro average versus micro marginal tax rates, and open economy dimensions – for test of tax-growth effects in OECD countries. We use annual panel data on a number of and tax rate measures and find: (i) statistically small and/or non-robust effects of macro-based tax rates on capital income and consumption but more evidence for labor income tax effects; (ii) statistically robust GDP growth effects of modest size from changes in income tax rates at both the personal and corporate levels; (iii) international tax competition, in which both domestic and foreign corporate tax rates play a role, is consistent with the data; (iv) tax effects on GDP growth appear to operate largely via impacts on factor productivity rather than factor accumulation.

Financial integration and the term structure of interest rates

This paper presents a model of the term structure for an open economy. A flexible VAR approach is used to model macroeconomic growth, inflation, short rate and the yield spread. Then the term structure is built given restrictions implied by the no-arbitrage condition. Contrary to previously proposed macrofinance models of the term structure, the model suggested here explicitly accounts for financial and real spillovers between economies. As documented in the paper, foreign macroeconomic factors contain a lot of information about the domestic term structure of yields. Put to data, the model explains the dynamics of yields very well. It provides better out-of-sample forecasting results than the closed economy models. Openness induces more variability in the estimated term premia of yields with shorter maturities.

Effects of Incentives and Genetics on Food Choices and Weight Phenotypes in the Neuroendocrine Gene Tubby Mutant Mice

Food intake and obesity related phenotypes are greatly affected by economic factors and yet very little is known about the interaction of economic factors, genetics, behavior, and obesity phenotypes. Recent human population research suggests that a decreasing price of high fat food relative to low fat food has contributed to the current obesity epidemic in humans. The two key elements in this argument are choice and costs. We incorporate these key elements in a closed economy mouse model to study the interactions of economics, genetics, and obesity related phenotypes, using normal mice, and mice with a mutation in the hypothalamus-expressed Tub gene, which has a phenotype of adult onset obesity. Results for both genotypes indicate that as the price of the high fat food falls, consumption of that food increases and consumption of the low fat food declines, but not enough to offset the increase in high fat food so total intake and weight increases, with no statistically-significant differences between genotypes. These results are in contrast to previous literature based on an ad lib, no choice food setting. In addition, in our closed economy model, the Tub mutant showed a numerical and statistically significant increase in body fat percentage and glucose intolerance, whereas these increases were only numerical for the normal mice. Both genotypes showed numerical but statistically insignificant increases in leptin and ghrelin levels. These results show that accounting for choice in neuroeconomic studies is important to understanding the complex regulation of intake, body weight and other related phenotypes.

Determinants of urban land market outcomes: Evidence from California

Our understanding of the effects of land use regulations and other aspects of urban form has been hindered by limited aggregate data and gradual temporal changes in policies. More widely available GIS data on land use and land economics presents opportunities to overcome these obstacles. This study was undertaken to explore the potential for land economics research that draws on parcel level spatial data for urban land markets, and uses differences across a sample of cities as the source of variation. Policy obstacles such as protected open spaces and other land use regulations, like the limitations caused by land forms such as water bodies and mountains, can be expected to alter the supply of land in ways that will be reflected in land market outcomes across cities. Based on a sample of data for 46 California cities, this exploratory analysis analyzed land market outcomes as a function of population, income and other factors in a closed-economy model, including a ratio that measures the concentration of developed lands within a city's radius or perimeter. The approach produced robust relationships consistent with other studies, and results consistent with expectations not just in terms of the signs of the estimated coefficients but in terms of their magnitudes as well. Indeed, the elasticity of land development with respect to population has been estimated to be 0.79–0.82 based on open city models. The evidence suggests that both land forms and land use regulations have a positive effect on land prices; however, it was not possible with the current data to distinguish the amenity effects of proximity to oceans and mountains from the supply constraints on radial city expansion. The analysis, nevertheless, provides encouraging evidence for future research of this kind.

The Role of Trade in Structural Transformation

This paper examines the effects of international trade in agricultural goods on structural transformation and economic growth. To do the analysis, I introduce international trade into a neoclassical growth model with two sectors, agriculture and non agriculture. A key feature of the model is the low-income elasticity of the agricultural good. Consequently, in the closed economy model, as countries get richer labor moves out of agriculture and into the other sector. International trade can accelerate this transition for countries with low agricultural productivity because it allows them to import food and thus reduce their agricultural employment. I calibrate and simulate the model to show it can match three different structural transformations: the United States in the 20th century, the United Kingdom in the 19th century, and South Korea for nearly the last 50 years. The results show that trade had large effects in the United Kingdom, and smaller but positive effects in South Korea. Agricultural production subsidies and agricultural import tariffs reduced the role of trade in South Korea. Without these policies, the volume of trade would have been larger and the country would have experienced a faster transformation as well as higher real income growth and higher welfare.

The Open Economy Balance Sheet Channel and the Exporting Decisions of Firms: Evidence from the Brazilian Crisis of 1999

Many studies consider the aggregate impact of crises on output and the fiscal cost of reconstruction, but few studies of the impact of a crisis at the level of the firm. In this paper we consider the impact of the Brazilian crisis of 1999 on the extensive and intensive margin of exporters versus non-exporters. Using a unified theoretical framework based on a two-sector extension of the combined fixed and variable investment versions of the Holmstrom and Tirole (1997) closed-economy model, we explore predictors that firms will engage in global markets and export more intensively. Our results based on a detailed firm-level panel of data for Brazilian 52,667 firms from 1995-2007, show that the decision to export and increase export sales is driven by size, the debt ratio, the current ratio and operating costs as well as the direct impact of the crisis itself. The findings suggest that the mechanism is driven by the response of the credit market to the creditworthiness of the firm as it is by changing terms of trade.

Sovereign default risk premia, fiscal limits, and fiscal policy

We develop a closed economy model to study the interactions among sovereign risk premia, fiscal limits, and fiscal policy. The fiscal limits, which measure the government's ability to service its debt, arise endogenously from dynamic Laffer curves. The state-dependent distributions of fiscal limits depend on the growth of lump-sum transfers, the size of the government, the degree of countercyclical policy responses, and economic diversity. The country-specific fiscal limits imply that the market perceives the riskiness of sovereign debt issued by different countries to be different, which is consistent with the observation that developed countries are downgraded at different levels of debt. A nonlinear relationship between sovereign risk premia and the level of government debt emerges in equilibrium, which is in line with the empirical evidence that once risk premia begin to rise, they do so rapidly. Nonlinear simulations show that fiscal austerity measures that aim to balance the government budget in the short run fail to contain the default risk premium, even with sizeable cuts in government purchases; but a long-term plan for fiscal reform, if it credibly changes the market's expectation about future fiscal policies, can alleviate the rising risk premium.

Macroeconomics of Extensive Margins: A Simple Model

How do monopolistically competitive industries react to shocks in the context of a New Keynesian macro model? I bridge macroeconomics and trade theory by considering market dynamics. I use an analytically tractable closed-economy model with endogenous entry of firms and show the implications of markets structure for the transmission of real shocks on aggregate variables and welfare. Shock sources become crucial for the results: traditional productivity shocks cause an extensive effect on production; shocks on innovation cause an intensive impact. More patient populations bring the economy to a richer market, although it cushions the extensive effect after an innovation shock.

Modeling news-driven international business cycles

This paper reexamines the question of how to explain business cycle co-movements within and between countries. First, we present a simple flexible price models to illustrate how and why news shocks can generate robust positive co-movements in economic activity across countries. We also discuss under what conditions a two-sector version of the model generates appropriate business cycle patterns within countries. Second, we develop a quantitative two-country two-sector model that is capable of replicating news driven international business cycles. The model is a two-country extension of the closed economy model of Beaudry and Portier (2004), in which there are limited possibilities to reallocate factors between investment and consumption-good sectors.

Factor Substitution and Relative Factor Prices

This paper examines the effects of factor endowments on factor prices in a three-factor, two-commodity general-equilibrium model with endogenous commodity demand and prices. Unlike the conventional small open-economy model that assumes constant commodity prices, factor substitution influences the direction of these effects. When a factor endowment increases, complementarity with the expanding factor benefits an unchanged factor, but substitutability harms it. If the unchanged factors are complements, there is a possibility of a rise in the expanding factor's price. A comparison of this closed-economy model with the small open-economy model reveals the role of international trade, which dampens the effect on the expanding factor's price.

A Model on Knowledge and Endogenous Growth

The authors present a model of endogenous growth in which the main engine of economic development is knowledge. Using a two-sector closed economy model that comprises of a conventional goods-producing sector and a research and development sector, their model incorporates two key aspects of knowledge: technology and human capital. Steady-state equilibrium conditions show that the growth rate of per capita income hinges on the growth rate of human capital. While the growth rate of human capital has been previously shown to affect the growth of the economy in transition between steady states or balanced growth paths, the authors are the first to link the growth rate of human capital to the steady-state growth rate of productivity and output per worker. Furthermore, this result does not exhibit scale effects or policy invariance, both of which have been longstanding concerns with the predictions of endogenous growth models developed in the 1990s.

Monetary Policy in Estimated Models of Small Open and Closed Economies

This paper compares monetary policy effects in New-Keynesian models of small open and closed economies fit to Canada. A monetary policy rule allows the central bank to systematically manage the nominal interest rate in response to inflation, output, and money growth variations. The structural parameters of a small open-economy (SOE) and a closed-economy (CE) models are estimated using a maximum-likelihood procedure with a Kalman filter. Estimation results show that the SOE and CE models lead to qualitatively similar estimates for the Canadian economy. Also, the effects of monetary policy shocks, and of other domestic shocks, generated in the SOE model resemble to those generated in the CE model. In addition, the forecast-error decomposition shows that foreign shocks account for small fractions of the variability observed in Canadian macroeconomic variables.

Sovereign Default Risk Premia, Fiscal Limits and Fiscal Policy

We develop a closed economy model in order to study the interactions among sovereign risk premia, fiscal limits and fiscal policy. The stochastic fiscal limit, which measures the ability and willingness of the government to service its debt, arises endogenously from dynamic Laffer Curves. The distribution of fiscal limits is country specific, depending on the size of the government, the degree of the counter-cyclical policy responses, economic diversity and political uncertainty, and, therefore, the model can rationalize different sovereign ratings across developed countries. The model also produces a nonlinear relationship between sovereign risk premia and the level of government debt. The nonlinearity is consistent with the empirical evidence that once risk premia begin to rise, they do so rapidly. The default risk premia of long-term bonds jump ahead of short-term bonds and provide early warnings of sovereign defaults.

Robust monetary policies in small open economies

Recent research on model uncertainty has focused mainly on closed economies. Levin and Williams confirm the existence of robust rules across competing closed economy models. In this paper, we evaluate three small open economy models exhibiting different degrees of inflation and output gap persistence. We find that the above result does not carry over to the open economy, primarily due to the mutually exclusive degree of interest rate smoothing that yields stability in the three models. We also confirm the existence of robust rules across the closed economy versions of these models. Finally, a first difference rule, though yields dynamic stability across the open economy models, continues to perform poorly in at least one of the models. Thus, the cost of choosing the wrong model is extremely high in open economies compared to closed economies, and policymakers must invest more resources to know the true structure of these economies. Copyright 2010 Oxford University Press 2009 All rights reserved, Oxford University Press.

Optimal exchange-rate policy in a low interest rate environment

This paper examines optimal monetary policy with an explicit zero lower bound in a small open-economy model. The paper finds that the gains from commitment are increasing in the openness of the economy while the optimal rate of inflation is decreasing in the openness of the economy. These results imply that the main findings of Adam and Billi (2007) for a closed-economy model are also true for an open-economy model. Finally, the paper finds that the effectiveness of the exchange-rate channel as a stabilization tool in the low interest rate environment depends on whether the central bank can make a credible commitment. If the central bank cannot commit and makes monetary-policy decisions on a discretionary basis, the optimal path of the nominal exchange rate will exhibit an appreciation, rather than depreciation as suggested in the literature.

Structural Change in an Interdependent World: A Global View of Manufacturing Decline

This paper presents a simple model of the world economy, in which productivity gains in manufacturing are responsible for the global trend of manufacturing decline, and yet, in a cross-section of countries, faster productivity gains in manufacturing do not necessarily imply faster declines in manufacturing. In doing so, it aims to draw attention to the common pitfall of using the cross-country evidence to test a closed economy model, and argues for a global perspective; in order to understand cross-country patterns of structural change, one needs a world economy model in which the interdependence across countries is explicitly spelled out.

Using the General Equilibrium Growth Model to Study Great Depressions: A Rejoinder to Kehoe and Prescott

The reply by Kehoe and Prescott restates their position but does not answer the criticism made in my review of their book (Temin 2008). I argued that the general equilibrium model of economic growth to study income fluctuations does not lead to a useful research program; the use of closed-economy models to understand the world problems of the 1930s and the Latin-American problems of the 1980s is not helpful; and the authors using Kehoe and Prescott's recommended approach do not use data with the care standard in other branches of economics. I stand by those criticisms.

The Credit Risk Premium in a Disaster-Prone World

The seminal Barro (2006) closed-economy model of the equity risk premium in the presence of extreme events (disasters) allowed for leverage in the form of risky corporate debt which defaulted only in states when the Government defaulted on its debt. The probability of default was therefore exogenous and independent of the degree of leverage. In this paper, we take the model a step closer to reality by assuming that, on the one hand, the Government never defaults, and on the other hand, that the .corporate sector. in the form of the Lucas tree owner pays its debts in full if and only if its asset value is sufficient, which is always the case in non-crisis states. Otherwise, in exceptionally severe crises, it defaults and hands over the whole .firm. to its creditors. The probability of default by the tree owner is thus endogenous, dependent both on the volume of debt issued (taken as exogenous) and on the uncertain value of output. We show, using data from both Barro (2006) and Barro and Ursua (2008), that the model can generate values of the riskless rate, equity risk premium and credit risk spread broadly consistent with those typically observed in the data.

Globalisation, Import Prices and Inflation Dynamics

In this paper we model the role of open-economy effects within a New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) via the inclusion of intermediate imports in firms' production technology. Using this framework we provide evidence on two questions: first, does the inclusion of import prices help explain post-war inflation dynamics in the United Kingdom, United States and Japan; and second, has the influence of import prices in firms' costs become greater over the more recent period since the mid-1980s. Overall, our results suggest that import prices do help explain movements in inflation; in particular, NKPC models that allow for import prices to enter into firms' costs outperform closed-economy models in sample. However, our results suggest that the influence of import prices has generally remained constant across our sample period, with perhaps only the United Kingdom providing some evidence that import prices have become more important in firms' marginal costs.