General Equilibrium Welfare Research Articles

General Equilibrium Welfare Analysis of Monetary Policy Using Indian Household Survey Data

General Equilibrium Welfare Analysis of Monetary Policy Using Indian Household Survey Data

Customs Union, Wage Inequality and Welfare in General Equilibrium

The article attempts to consider the impact of a customs union formed between two small countries embedded in the global economy and trading in intermediates, in terms of a general equilibrium framework. It shows that with such a union both countries will gain, although there will be asymmetric effect on wage inequality. However, with higher capital stock the significance of the formation of customs union will be undermined. It also shows that perfect international capital mobility will lead to finite changes in the economy, shutting down the less capital intensive unskilled export sector in each country, which in turn makes the bilateral union irrelevant. Further tariff reduction will increase inequality in both countries. We have also considered the welfare effects of formation of customs union in the form of tariff cut and such a tariff reduction unequivocally improves welfare of the customs union irrespective of small country and large country assumptions, without any intra-union income transfer. JEL Codes: F02, F11, F55, F68

A New General Equilibrium Welfare Measure, with Application to Labor Income Taxes

Abstract In this paper we extend the Hicksian compensating variation welfare measure in two directions. First, we adjust the size of the compensating variation in order to account for the fact that the compensating transfers will result in changes in output, as well as in prices, because labor and, in dynamic models, capital will adjust in response to these transfers. Second, we extend the measure to a dynamic setting with possibly time non-separable preferences. We find that these considerations become more significant for the welfare cost of higher labor income taxes as one moves from static to dynamic models, to models with time non-separable preferences, and finally to models with uncertainty.

Difference-in-Differences Hedonics

Cross-sectional estimates of hedonic price functions theoretically recover marginal values for characteristics but face endogeneity problems. Consequently, economists have introduced difference-in-differences and other quasi-experimental econometric methods into hedonic models. Unfortunately, the welfare interpretation of these estimands has not been clear. This paper shows that quasi-experimental hedonics can identify the movement along the ex post price function. It further shows that this effect is a lower bound on general equilibrium welfare. Thus, nonmarginal welfare can be recovered using transparent designs without Rosen’s second stage or more structural models. The paper illustrates these results with an application to toxic facilities and housing prices.

Distributional consequences of surging housing rents

The trajectories of real housing rents and real house prices have shown an upward sloping trend in most industrialized countries since WW2. The burden of rising housing rents is likely to be distributed unequally because income-poor households devote a larger share of their consumption expenditures on housing than income-rich households. This inverse relation between income and the expenditure share of housing is labeled Schwabe's law. We analyze how the dynamics in housing rents affect household welfare, accounting for Schwabe's law and the endogeneity of housing rents in general equilibrium. We show analytically that Schwabe's law amplifies heterogeneous welfare effects that operate through housing rent changes. We then study how zoning deregulation affects household welfare in general equilibrium. Zoning deregulation triggers a temporarily slower growth in housing rents and house prices. The representative household experiences a welfare gain of 0.37 percent. This welfare effect is unequally distributed at the micro-level. The highest welfare gain amounts to 12.52 percent, while the highest welfare loss amounts to 1.63 percent. Lower housing rent growth drives most of the overall welfare gain, and Schwabe's law is responsible for most of the variation in the welfare gain across households.

Trade and Welfare in General Equilibrium: A Discrete-time Infinite Horizon Case

Trade and Welfare in General Equilibrium: A Discrete-time Infinite Horizon Case

Myopia, education, and social security

A potential role of social security is to protect individuals who have accumulated little or no assets for retirement. Yet, this type of social safety net could reduce human capital formation by making the life-cycle financial rewards from education less attractive. For example, social security tax rates are correlated negatively with tertiary educational attainment across OECD countries. We construct a continuous-time overlapping-generations model with endogenous school duration that can account for this correlation, and we use the model to compute the social security tax rate that maximizes steady-state social welfare in general equilibrium. Social security in the model provides protection for retirees who arrive at retirement with no assets, and it can also redistribute wealth toward those with low earnings, but the program distorts the level of human and physical capital accumulation. In the presence of these characteristics, the social security tax rate that maximizes steady-state welfare is approximately 10%, which is about half of the average rate of 21% across the OECD. This result is robust to whether the social security program is redistributive or earnings based.

Myopia, Education, and Optimal Social Security

A potential role of social security is to protect individuals who have accumulated little or no assets for retirement. Yet, this type of social safety net could reduce human capital formation by making the life-cycle financial rewards from education less attractive. For example, social security tax rates are correlated negatively with tertiary educational attainment across OECD countries. We construct a continuous-time overlapping-generations model with endogenous school duration that can account for this correlation, and we use the model to compute the social security tax rate that maximizes steady-state social welfare in general equilibrium. Social security in the model provides protection for retirees who arrive at retirement with no assets, and it can also redistribute wealth toward those with low earnings, but the program distorts the level of human and physical capital accumulation. In the presence of these characteristics, the social security tax rate that maximizes steady-state welfare is approximately 10%, which is about half of the average rate of 21% across the OECD. This result is robust to whether the social security program is redistributive or earnings-based.

The Belt and Road Initiative’s effect on supply-chain trade: evidence from structural gravity equations

This article considers the effect of China’s Belt and Road Initiative on supply-chain trade for 64 economies in the period 2002–2011. We employ a structural gravity equation to estimate the impact of trade-cost reducing measures—notably infrastructural improvements and the creation of free trade agreements—on supply-chain trade and welfare in general equilibrium. We find that infrastructural investments will yield asymmetric benefits to China, Russia and Southeast Asian countries stemming from greater European market access. Our results also suggest that China’s alternatives to foster (inter)regional economic growth through the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership and the Trans-Pacific Partnership offer much less attractive economic prospects.

A historical welfare analysis of Social Security: Whom did the program benefit?

A well‐established result in the literature is that Social Security reduces steady state welfare in a standard life cycle model. However, less is known about the historical quantitative effects of the program on agents who were alive when the program was adopted. In a computational life cycle model that simulates the Great Depression and the enactment of Social Security, this paper quantifies the welfare effects of the program's enactment on the cohorts of agents who experienced it. In contrast to the standard steady state results, we find that the adoption of the original Social Security generally improved these cohorts' welfare, in part because these cohorts received far more benefits relative to their contributions than they would have received if they lived their entire life in the steady state with Social Security. Moreover, the negative general equilibrium welfare effect of Social Security associated with capital crowd‐out was reduced during the transition, because it took many periods for agents to adjust their savings levels in response to the program's adoption. The positive welfare effect experienced by these transitional agents offers one explanation for why the program that may reduce welfare in the steady state was originally adopted.

Longevity and welfare in general equilibrium

Life expectancy is on the rise across the world. This paper analytically studies how it affects welfare in general equilibrium. First, we examine the exogenous impact of a longevity increase on welfare in a canonical Diamond model. We find that a longevity increase does not necessarily increase welfare. Second, we study the impact of a longevity increase on welfare when longevity improvements are costly. We show the existence of economies in which welfare is maximized when longevity is at its minimal level. We provide numerical illustrations of our results. They highlight that the age at which longevity improves and the cost of such improvements are important to determine the welfare impact of a longevity increase.

Ignorance, Uncertainty, and Strategic Consumption-Portfolio Decisions

This paper studies how the interaction between two types of uncertainty due to ignorance affects strategic consumption-portfolio rules, precautionary savings, and welfare in general equilibrium. We incorporate these two types of uncertainties into a recursive utility version of a canonical Merton (1971) model with uninsurable labor income and unknown income growth and derive analytical solutions and testable implications. We show that the interaction between the two types of uncertainty plays a key role in determining the demand for precautionary savings and risky assets. We derive formulas to evaluate both marginal and total welfare costs of ignorance-induced uncertainty and show they are significant for plausible parameter values.

Balancing water resource conservation and food security in China

China's economic growth is expected to continue into the next decades, accompanied by sustained urbanization and industrialization. The associated increase in demand for land, water resources, and rich foods will deepen the challenge of sustainably feeding the population and balancing agricultural and environmental policies. We combine a hydrologic model with an economic model to project China's future food trade patterns and embedded water resources by 2030 and to analyze the effects of targeted irrigation reductions on this system, notably on national agricultural water consumption and food self-sufficiency. We simulate interprovincial and international food trade with a general equilibrium welfare model and a linear programming optimization, and we obtain province-level estimates of commodities' virtual water content with a hydrologic model. We find that reducing irrigated land in regions highly dependent on scarce river flow and nonrenewable groundwater resources, such as Inner Mongolia and the greater Beijing area, can improve the efficiency of agriculture and trade regarding water resources. It can also avoid significant consumption of irrigation water across China (up to 14.8 km(3)/y, reduction by 14%), while incurring relatively small decreases in national food self-sufficiency (e.g., by 3% for wheat). Other researchers found that a national, rather than local, water policy would have similar effects on food production but would only reduce irrigation water consumption by 5%.

International capital markets, oil producers and the Green Paradox

A rapidly rising carbon tax leads to faster extraction of fossil fuels and accelerates global warming. We analyze how general equilibrium effects operating through the international capital market affect this Green Paradox. In a two-region, two-period world with identical homothetic preferences and without investment, the global interest rate falls and the Green Paradox weakens. With investment or a relatively more impatient oil-importing region, the Green Paradox may be strengthened because the future oil demand function shifts downward or because the interest rate rises. If the oil-importing region is very much more patient than the oil-exporting region, the Green Paradox may be reversed but in our calibrated model the effects are tiny. With exploration and endogenous initial oil reserves, a future carbon tax lowers cumulative oil extraction in partial equilibrium. If the boost to current oil extraction is weakened, strengthened or reversed in general equilibrium, so is the fall in cumulative extraction. A partial and general equilibrium welfare analysis of a future carbon tax, both for full and partial exhaustion, is given. The effects of stock-dependent extraction costs are separately discussed in an Appendix.

International Capital Markets, Oil Producers and the Green Paradox

A rapidly rising carbon tax leads to faster extraction of fossil fuels and accelerates global warming. We analyze how general equilibrium effects operating through the international capital market affect this Green Paradox. In a two-region, two-period world with identical homothetic preferences and without investment, the global interest rate falls and the Green Paradox weakens. With investment or a relatively more impatient oil-importing region, the Green Paradox may be strengthened because the future oil demand function shifts downward or because the interest rate rises. If the oil-importing region is very much more patient than the oil-exporting region, the Green Paradox may be reversed but in our calibrated model the effects are tiny. With exploration and endogenous initial oil reserves, a future carbon tax lowers cumulative oil extraction in partial equilibrium. If the boost to current oil extraction is weakened, strengthened or reversed in general equilibrium, so is the fall in cumulative extraction. A partial and general equilibrium welfare analysis of a future carbon tax, both for full and partial exhaustion, is given.

The impact of trade on employment, welfare, and income distribution in unionized general oligopolistic equilibrium

This paper sets up a multi-sector general oligopolistic equilibrium trade model in which all firms face wage claims of firm-level unions. By accounting for productivity differences across industries, the model features income inequality along multiple lines, including inequality between firm owners and workers as well as within these two groups of agents, and involuntary unemployment. We use this setting to study the impact of trade liberalization on key macroeconomic performance measures. In particular, we show that a movement from autarky to free trade with a fully symmetric partner country lowers union wage claims and therefore stimulates employment and raises welfare. Whether firms can extract a larger share of rents in the open economy depends on the competitive environment in the product market. Furthermore, the distribution of profit income across firm owners remains unaffected, while the distribution of wage income becomes more equal when a country opens up to trade with a fully symmetric trading partner. We also analyze how country size differences and technological dissimilarity of trading partners affect the results from our analysis.

Theft and Welfare in General Equilibrium: A Theoretical Note

We show that in a dynamic general equilibrium model theft lowers social welfare even if it is costless to steal, there is no theft prevention cost, and all stolen goods are immediately returned to society. Theft lowers social welfare because it distorts the investment decision, resulting in undercapitalization and a lower steady-state level of capital. This sheds a new light on the literature originated by Tullock [1].

Behavior, Robustness, and Sufficient Statistics in Welfare Measurement

The joint implications for welfare measurement of three recent literatures are considered: the behavioral welfare economics literature, the structural versus reduced form debate in econometrics, and the use of sufficient statistics for characterizing behavior. The first permits the revealed preference paradigm to include a wide variety of so-called anomalous behavioral criteria. Sufficient statistics permit aggregation under heterogeneous behavioral criteria, not only heterogeneous characteristics, to facilitate meaningful economic welfare analysis. Atheoretic reduced form econometrics and traditional treatment-effect econometrics do not support welfare analysis, but marginal treatment-effect econometrics is useful for a certain type of policy problems. More generally, estimation of sufficient statistics requires theory-based reduced form econometrics. Sufficient statistics are further suggested for general equilibrium welfare measurement. Under certain assumptions about endogenous government behavior, robust concepts of economic welfare measurement emerge that rationalize the terminology and concepts of traditional welfare economics, although with a much broader conceptual basis.

Nonlinear income effects in random utility models: revisiting the accuracy of the representative consumer approximation

This article investigates the implications of nonlinear income effects in Random Utility Models (RUM) for measuring general equilibrium welfare impacts. A popular approach in applied welfare analysis is to approximate the expected compensating variation (cv) for an amenity change as the cv of a representative consumer whose indirect utility is given by the expected maximum utility. However, this approach can be misleading in the case of nonmarginal changes as it implies that changes in income do not affect the consumer's choice. In this case the true expected cv can be obtained via simulation. Empirical applications to recreational demand find that the bias from the representative approach is small. This article re-evaluates the accuracy of the representative consumer approximation in the context of measuring the general equilibrium welfare impacts of large environmental changes. Our findings suggest that, though the representative consumer approximation could lead to biased point estimates of the expected cv, this bias is overwhelmed by the size of the confidence intervals that result from the empirical estimation of household preferences.

International Trade, Union Wage Premia, and Welfare in General Equilibrium

We study how two distinct forms of globalisation, trade cost reductions and opening up of trade in previously shielded sectors, affect sector-specific wages, employment levels and aggregate welfare in a two-country model of general oligopolistic equilibrium (GOLE) with partly unionised labour markets. We find that both forms of globalisation increase union coverage, and they also lead to a lower union wage premium in shielded sectors. In contrast, the union wage premium in open sectors and aggregate welfare are affected differently by the two types of globalisation. Trade cost reductions in open sectors always lead to higher union wage premia and to lower aggregate welfare, while an increased number of open sectors lowers the union wage premium, and it may also increase welfare.