Deep Habits Research Articles

A Fiscal Stimulus and Jobless Recovery

AbstractWe analyze the effects of a government‐spending expansion in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with Mortensen–Pissarides labor‐market frictions, deep habits in private and public consumption, investment adjustment costs, a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function, and adjustments in employment at both intensive and extensive margins. The combination of deep habits and CES technology is crucial. The presence of deep habits magnifies the responses of macroeconomic variables to a fiscal stimulus, while an elasticity of substitution between capital and labor in the range of available estimates allows the model to produce a scenario compatible with the observed jobless recovery.

Deep Habits in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

We derive and estimate a New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) in a model with deep habits. Habits are deep in that they apply to individual consumption goods instead of aggregate consumption. This alters the NKPC in a fundamental manner since it introduces consumption growth and future demand terms into the NKPC equation. We construct the driving process in the deep habits NKPC by using the model's optimality conditions to impute time series for unobservable variables. The resulting series is considerably more volatile than unit labor cost. Generalized methods of moments estimation shows an improved fit and a much lower degree of indexation compared to the standard NKPC.

Deep Habits in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

We derive and estimate a New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) in a model where consumers are assumed to have deep habits. Habits are deep in the sense that they apply to individual consumption goods instead of aggregate consumption. This alters the NKPC in a fundamental manner as it introduces expected and contemporaneous consumption growth as well as the expected marginal value of future demand as additional driving forces for inflation dynamics. We construct the driving process in the deep habits NKPC by using the model's optimality conditions to impute time series for unobservable variables. The resulting series is considerably more volatile than unit labor cost. General Methods of Moments (GMM) estimation of the NKPC shows an improved fit and a much lower degree of indexation than in the standard NKPC. Our analysis also reveals that the crucial parameters for the performance of the deep habit NKPC are the habit parameter and the substitution elasticity between differentiated products. The results are broadly robust to alternative specifications.

Redistributive Effects and Labour Market Dynamic

We propose and estimate, using Bayesian techniques, a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model featuring search and matching frictions with redistributive productivity shocks – which account for fluctuations in the distribution of income across factors of production. We first find supporting evidence that the model is able to replicate cyclical properties of labour market variables. We then disentangle two endogenous sources of labour market amplification: (i) deep habits and (ii) the replacement ratio. The latter appears to be a powerful endogenous amplification mechanism given the shock structure of the model. As far as the exogenous amplification is concerned, labour market variability can be largely explained by redistributive innovations. Finally, contrary to Total Factor Productivity shocks, redistributive shocks increase total hours.

A NOTE ON COMPARING DEEP AND AGGREGATE HABIT FORMATION IN AN ESTIMATED NEW KEYNESIAN MODEL

Habit formation is a fixture of contemporary new Keynesian models. The vast majority assume that agents form habits strictly over consumption of an aggregate good, leaving open the question of whether it might be preferable to have them form habits over differentiated products instead–an arrangement known as deep habits. I answer this question by estimating a model that nests both habit concepts as special cases. Estimates reveal that the data favor a specification in which consumption habits are stronger at the product level than at the aggregate level. A mix of significance tests and simulation results indicate that including deep habits greatly improves model fit, most notably with regard to inflation dynamics.

Deep habits in consumption: a spatial panel analysis using scanner data

Using scanner data from a large European retailer, this paper empirically assesses deep habit formation in consumption. Deep habit formation constitutes a possible source of price stickiness and helps to mimic procyclical labour and real wage dynamics that are present in macrodata. To gauge the existence and the extent of deep habits in consumption, we estimate a dynamic time–space simultaneous model for consumption expenditure at different levels of product aggregation. This spatial panel model enables us to test for both internal and external deep habit formation at the same time. The former captures inertia or persistence in consumption and is included in the empirical specification as a time lag. The latter captures preference interdependence across households and is captured by a spatial lag. Our results show mixed evidence with respect to internal habit formation, whereas the external habit effect is almost always positive and significant.

A Note on Comparing Deep and Aggregate Habit Formation in an Estimated New-Keynesian Model

Habit formation is a fixture of contemporary new-Keynesian models. The vast majority assume that agents form habits strictly over consumption of an aggregate good, leaving open the question of whether it might be preferable to have them form habits over differentiated products instead--an arrangement known as deep habits. I answer this question by estimating a model that nests both habit concepts as special cases. Estimates reveal that the data favor a specification in which consumption habits are stronger at the product level than at the aggregate level. A mix of significance tests and simulation results indicate that including deep habits greatly improves model fit, most notably with regard to inflation dynamics.

INTEREST RATE RULES AND EQUILIBRIUM STABILITY UNDER DEEP HABITS

This paper studies the determinacy of equilibrium in a new Keynesian model with deep habits under different interest rate rules. The main finding is that an interest rate rule satisfying the Taylor principle is no longer a sufficient condition to guarantee determinacy. Including interest rate smoothing and a response to output deviations from steady state significantly enlarges the regions of determinacy. However, under all the simple interest rate rules considered, determinacy is not guaranteed for a very high degree of deep habits. Deep habits give rise to countercyclical markups, which is in line with empirical evidence and makes them an appealing feature in the study of demand shocks. The countercyclicality of markups also leads to multiple equilibria because of self-fulfilling expectations for a high degree of deep habit formation.

DEEP HABITS AND THE MACROECONOMIC EFFECTS OF GOVERNMENT DEBT

In this paper, we study the effects of government debt on macroeconomic aggregates in a non-Ricardian framework. We develop a microfounded framework that combines time-varying markups, endogenous labor supply, and overlapping generations based on infinitely lived families. The main contribution of this paper is to provide a new transmission mechanism for public debt through the countercyclical markup movements induced by external deep habits. We analyze the effects of a positive shock to public debt. We show that the interest rate rises, entailing higher markups and a fall in employment and consumption. Interestingly, even without capital, a crowding-out effect of government debt is obtained in the long run. In addition, we show that when prices are sticky, public debt has a short-run expansionary effect, which is strengthened by the presence of deep habits.

Deep Habits, Price Rigidities and the Consumption Response to Government Spending

This paper presents the novel implications of introducing price rigidities into a model of good-specific habit formation, for the response of private consumption following a positive government spending shock. With 'deep' habits in demand, the price elasticity of demand rises after the fiscal expansion and it is optimal for the firm to lower the mark-up while increasing production. This in turn raises the demand for labor and the real wage rises. Consequently, agents raise consumption at the expense of leisure and overcome the negative wealth effect of the fiscal shock. We show that increasing price stickiness in a model with deep habits hinders the crowding-in of consumption. If the degree of price stickiness is high enough, consumption is crowded out by government spending. These dynamics are in stark contrast to those in traditional models where price rigidities are known to weaken the crowding-out of consumption.

A Fiscal Stimulus and Jobless Recovery

We analyse the effects of a government spending expansion in a DSGE model with Mortensen-Pissarides labour market frictions, deep habits in private and public consumption, investment adjustment costs, a constant-elasticity-of-substitution (CES) production function, and adjustments in employment both at the intensive as well as the extensive margin. The combination of deep habits and CES technology is crucial. The presence of deep habits magnifies the responses of macroeconomic variables to a fiscal stimulus, while an elasticity of substitution between capital and labour in the range of available estimates allows the model to produce a scenario compatible with the observed jobless recovery.

A fiscal stimulus with deep habits and optimal monetary policy

A New-Keynesian model with deep habits and optimal monetary policy delivers a larger-than-1 fiscal multiplier and consumption crowding in. Optimized Taylor-type rules dominate a conventional Taylor rule. Consumption is crowded out if the Taylor rule is suboptimal or if commitment is absent.

Deep Habits, Price Rigidities and the Consumption Response to Government Spending

This paper presents the novel implications of introducing price rigidities into a model of good-specific habit formation, for the response of private consumption following a positive government spending shock. With 'deep' habits in demand, the price elasticity of demand rises after the fiscal expansion and it is optimal for the firm to lower the mark-up while increasing production. This in turn raises the demand for labour and the real wage rises. Consequently, agents raise consumption at the expense of leisure and overcome the negative wealth effect of the fiscal shock. We show that increasing price stickiness in a model with deep habits hinders the crowding-in of consumption. If the degree of price stickiness is high enough, consumption is crowded out by government spending. These dynamics are in stark contrast to those in traditional models where price rigidities are known to weaken the crowding-out of consumption.

Deep Habits in the New Keynesian Phillips Curve

We derive and estimate a New Keynesian Phillips curve (NKPC) in a model where consumers are assumed to have deep habits. Habits are deep in the sense that they apply to individual consumption goods instead of aggregate consumption. This alters the NKPC in a fundamental manner as it introduces expected and contemporaneous consumption growth as well as the expected marginal value of future demand as additional driving forces for inflation dynamics. We construct the driving process in the deep habits NKPC by using the model's optimality conditions to impute time series for unobservable variables. The resulting series is considerably more volatile than unit labor cost. General Methods of Moments (GMM) estimation of the NKPC shows an improved fit and a much lower degree of indexation than in the standard NKPC. Our analysis also reveals that the crucial parameters for the performance of the deep habit NKPC are the habit parameter and the substitution elasticity between differentiated products. The results are broadly robust to alternative specifications.

THE IMPACT OF FISCAL POLICY ON PROFITS

I. INTRODUCTION A large number of policy-making decisions rely on the key issue of the impact of fiscal policy on the economy. Therefore, it is not surprising that the effect of fiscal policy on macroeconomic aggregates has been extensively studied in the empirical literature. (1) Several authors, starting with Blanchard and Perotti (2002), have attempted to estimate the effect of government spending shocks on output and other variables in the context of structural VAR models (see Perotti 2008 for a survey). This interest has been renewed since the 2008-2009 recession, given the unprecedented size of fiscal packages worldwide (Barro and Redlick 2009; Hall 2009). An important part of this literature focuses on the theoretical and empirical investigation of the fiscal policy transmission channels. Theories of fiscal policy transmission differ in their implications regarding the response of different macroeconomic variables to government spending shocks. For example, the neoclassical model predicts a negative impact of government spending on real wages and consumption, while this prediction is challenged by New Keynesian models. To that end, an important branch of empirical literature on fiscal multipliers has investigated the transmission channels of fiscal policy by looking mainly at the response of private consumption and real wages. (2) This paper deals with an important but relatively under-investigated channel of fiscal policy transmission, which is the effect of fiscal policy on profits. As pointed out by Hall (2009), the impact of fiscal shocks on the markup of price over marginal cost is important for understanding the functioning of the fiscal multiplier. In the purely neoclassical general-equilibrium model, a rise in government spending produces a negative wealth effect, the labor supply curve shifts outward and real wages and consumption fall. This implies that the output multiplier will be well below unity. A Keynesian type fiscal multiplier, implying a large positive output effect and positive responses of private consumption and real wages to increased government spending, relies on a negative response of the markup of price over marginal cost to an increase in economic activity. The intuition is that a decrease in the price-marginal cost markup in response to higher government spending allows a rise in wages or at least a smaller reduction in wages, compared with the case when the markup is constant. A rise in wages would then imply that households will substitute away from leisure and into consumption. Therefore, if the markup is countercyclical conditional on government spending shocks, sizeable output multipliers of fiscal spending are consistent with existing empirical evidence that fiscal shocks are not related to strong decreases in real wages or consumption (Blanchard and Perotti 2002; Fatas and Mihov 2001; Gall, David Lopez-Salid, and Valles 2007; Perotti 2005, 2008). In general, a New Keynesian model with sticky prices implies a countercyclical markup ratio, as input prices rise in a boom while output prices stay constant. However, for understanding the fiscal policy transmission, the key factor is markup and not price stickiness itself, as a countercyclical markup could also be implied by models with flexible prices when the desired markup changes in response to a shock. (3) A model which assigns a central role to markups for fiscal policy transmission has been presented by Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe, and Uribe (2007). Assuming that demand has a price-inelastic component that is a function of deep habits, a government spending shock that leads to a positive output response increases the share of the price-elastic component of demand, causing a rise in the overall demand elasticity and a corresponding decline in the optimal markup. (4) Thus, for a sufficient decline in the markup, the resulting rise in wages induces households to substitute away from leisure and into consumption, thereby more than offsetting the negative wealth effect of government spending, predicted by the neoclassical model. …

Deep habits and the cyclical behaviour of equilibrium unemployment and vacancies

We extend the standard textbook search and matching model by introducing deep habits in consumption. This assumption generates amplification in the response of labour market variables to technology shocks by producing endogenous countercyclical mark-ups. The cyclical fluctuations of vacancies and unemployment in our model can replicate those observed in the US data, with labour market tightness being 20 times more volatile than consumption. Vacancies display a hump-shaped response to technology shocks and the numerical simulations generate an artificial Beveridge curve that is in line with the data. Our model preserves the assumption of fully flexible wages for new hires and the calibration is consistent with the estimated elasticity of unemployment to unemployment benefits. Finally, we show that in contrast to models with exogenous mark-up shocks, the deep habits model does not require an implausible variation in the elasticity of demand to match the volatility of labour market variables, and the cyclical properties of the mark-up are in line with empirical evidence.

Solving Exchange Rate Puzzles without Sticky Prices nor Trade Costs

We present a simple framework in which both the exchange rates disconnect and forward bias puzzles are simultaneously resolved. The flexible-price two-country monetary model is extended to include a consumption externality with habit persistence. Habit persistence is modeled using Campbell Cochrane preferences with ‘deep’ habits along the lines of the work of Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe. By deep habits, we mean habits defined over goods rather than countries. The model is simulated using the artificial economy methodology. It offers a neo-classical explanation of the Meese-Rogoff puzzle and mimics the failure of fundamentals to explain nominal exchange rates in a linear setting. Finally, the model naturally generates the negative slope in the standard forward market regression.

Macroeconomic Implications of “Deep Habits” in Banking

Recent empirical evidence shows that price‐cost margins in the market for bank credit are countercyclical in the U.S. economy and that this cyclical behavior can be explained in part from the fact that switching banks is costly for customers (i.e., from a borrower hold‐up effect). Our goal, in this paper, is to study the “financial accelerator” role of these countercyclical margins as a propagation mechanism of macroeconomic shocks. To do so, we apply the “deep habits” framework in Ravn, Schmitt‐Grohé, and Uribe (2006) to financial markets to model this hold‐up effect within a monopolistically competitive banking industry. We are able to reproduce the pattern of price‐cost margins observed in the data, and to show that the real effects of aggregate total factor productivity shocks are larger the stronger the friction implied by borrower hold‐up. Also, output, investment, and employment all become more volatile than in a standard model with constant margins in credit markets. An empirical contribution of our work is to provide structural estimates of the deep habits parameters for financial markets.

Deep Habits and the Cyclical Behaviour of Equilibrium Unemployment and Vacancies

We extend the standard textbook search and matching model by introducing deep habits in consumption. The cyclical fluctuations of vacancies and unemployment in our model can replicate those observed in the US data, with labour market tightness being 20 times more volatile than consumption. Vacancies display a hump-shaped response to technology shocks as well as autocorrelation coefficients that are in line with the empirical evidence. Our model preserves the assumption of fully flexible wages for the new hires and the calibration is consistent with the estimated elasticity of unemployment to unemployment benefits. The numerical simulations generate an artificial Beveridge curve which is in line with the data.

Solving exchange rate puzzles with neither sticky prices nor trade costs

We present a simple framework in which both the exchange rates disconnect and forward bias puzzles are simultaneously resolved. The flexible-price two-country monetary model is extended to include a consumption externality with habit persistence. Habit persistence is modeled using Campbell Cochrane preferences with ‘deep’ habits along the lines of the work of Ravn, Schmitt-Grohe and Uribe. By deep habits, we mean habits defined over goods rather than countries. The model is simulated using the artificial economy methodology. It offers a neo-classical explanation of the Meese–Rogoff puzzle and mimics the failure of fundamentals to explain nominal exchange rates in a linear setting. Finally, the model naturally generates the negative slope in the standard forward market regression.