The paper employs an extended Yaari-Blanchard model of overlapping generations to study how the macroeconomy is affected over time by various demographic changes. It is shown that a proportional decline in fertility and death rates has qualitatively similar effects to capital income subsidies; both per capita savings and per capita consumption increase in the new steady state. A drop in the bir...

Equity Payout is ‘Net dividends of nonfarm, nonfinancial business’ (Table F.102, line 3), plus ‘Net dividends of farm business’ (Table F.7, line 24), minus ‘Net increase in corporate equities of nonfinancial business’ (F.101, line 35), minus ‘Proprietors’ net investment of nonfinancial business’ (F.101, line 39). Debt Repurchase is the negative of ‘Net increase in credit markets instruments of ...

We propose a large-scale Bayesian VAR model with factor stochastic volatility to investigate the macroeconomic consequences of international uncertainty shocks on the G7 countries. The factor structure enables us to identify an international uncertainty shock by assuming that it is the factor most correlated with forecast errors related to equity markets and permits fast sampling of the model. ...

This paper addresses two specific sets of questions. The first main question that has occupied a number of researchers is whether the adjustment programs (advocated by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) have had any positive effects to date on macroeconomic performance (i.e., on exports, imports, savings, investment, consumption, and gross domestic product) in Pakistan. The sec...

In recent years a “unified theory” has emerged out of labor economics, which argues that a combination of “macroeconomic shocks” and flexible labor market institutions in the U.S. has produced strong upward trends in wage inequality, while these same shocks have produced high unemployment and low employment growth in Europe as a side effect of the wage stability preserved by that continent’s ri...

This paper investigates the common movements of commodity sectors in China as well as the economic underpinnings of the comovements. We employ a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to disentangle the common and idiosyncratic sector-specific factors of the prices of a group of China's commodity sectors: petrochemicals, grains, energy, non-ferrous metals, oils & fats, and softs. The results indi...

In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework to investigate the impact of conflicts and wars on key macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. Using a panel data with 12 countries from 1875 onwards we first show that consumption drops more than output during conflicts, while the opposite is true during “peaceful” recessions. To handle both cases, we build a variation of a Real Business Cycle mo...