Berthold Herrendorf

Growth and Structural Transformation

Structural transformation refers to the reallocation of economic activity across the broad sectors agriculture, manufacturing and services. This review article synthesizes and evaluates recent advances in the research on structural transformation. We begin by presenting the stylized facts of structural transformation across time and space. We then develop a multi-sector extension of the one-sector growth model that encompasses the main existing theories of structural transformation. We argue that this multi-sector model serves as a natural benchmark to study structural transformation and that it is able to account for many salient features of structural transformation. We also argue that this multi-sector model delivers new and sharper insights for understanding economic development, regional income convergence, aggregate productivity trends, hours worked, business cycles, and wage inequality. We conclude by suggesting several directions for future research on structural transformation.

Ruling Out Multiplicity and Indeterminacy: The Role of Heterogeneity

It is well known that economies of scale that are external to the individual decision makers can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and the multiplicity or even indeterminacy of equilibrium. We argue that the importance of this source of multiplicity and indeterminacy is overstated in representative agent models, as they ignore the potential stabilizing effect of heterogeneity. We illustrate this in a version of Matsuyamas (1991) two-sector model with increasing returns to scale. Two main results are shown. First, sufficient homogeneity with respect to individual productivity leads to the instability and non-uniqueness of a given stationary state and the indeterminacy of the corresponding stationary state equilibrium. Second, sufficient heterogeneity leads to the global saddle-path stability and the uniqueness of a given stationary state and the global uniqueness of equilibrium.

Barriers to entry and development

We ask whether barriers to entry are a quantitatively important reason for the income gap between developing countries and the United States. We develop a tractable general equilibrium model that captures the effects of barriers to entry and the other main distortions typically considered in the development literature. We carry our model to the data and ask it to match the main development facts from the Penn World Table. We find that this requires large barriers to entry in developing countries, which account for about half of the income gap with the United States.

Transparency, reputation, and credibility under floating and pegged exchange rates

This paper shows that if the cost of importing foreign inflation and real exchange rate shocks are not too high, then the equilibrium nominal exchange rate regime for a country with a credibility problem is a peg, under which credibility is higher and inflation is lower than under a float. This holds true although devaluations of the pegged rate are assumed to be costless. The reason is that as realized inflation is not perfectly controllable, planned inflation under a float is private information. In contrast, since the exchange rate can be perfectly controlled, pegging resolves the private information problem, is more transparent, and makes reputation more effective.

Monopoly Rights Can Reduce Income Big Time

We ask which part of the observed cross-country differences in the level of per capita income can be accounted for by monopoly rights in the labour market. We answer this question in a calibrated growth model with two final goods sectors. The novel feature being that monopoly rights in the capital-producing sector shield insiders from competition by outsiders and permit coalitions of insiders to choose inefficient technologies or working practices. We find that monopoly rights can lead to quantitatively much larger reductions in the level of per capita income than previously demonstrated. This comes about because they do not only reduce TFP in capital-producing sector but also increase the relative price of capital. This reduces the capital-labour ratio in the whole economy. The implied predictions about the price of capital goods relative to consumption goods and the investment share in output are quantitatively consistent with the cross-country facts.

Importing Credibility through Exchange Rate Pegging

This paper employs an optimal taxation framework in order to study the credibility of monetary policy-making in an open economy. Since inflation is, in part, uncontrollable due to stochastic disturbances, the authoritys actions cannot be monitored perfectly when the exchange rate floats, thus implying that reputational forces may become ineffective. In contrast, pegging the nominal exchange rate to a low-inflation currency allows perfect monitoring because the exchange rate is, in principle, controllable. For this reason, exchange rate pegging may import credibility and result in the best reputational equilibrium, even though the authority retains the discretion to devalue unexpectedly. Copyright 1997 by Royal Economic Society.

The Role of Transportation in U.S. Economic Development: 1840–1860

We return to two questions concerning the 19th century U.S. transportation revolution. First, to what extent were transportation improvements responsible for the large changes in the regional distribution of population in the United States and, within regions, for the changes in industry structure? Second, how important were transportation improvements for welfare gains? We find that transport improvements were the key factor driving where people lived and what industry they worked in. We also find that transport improvements were important for welfare gains: Gains over 1840–1860 would have been only half as large if there had been no transportation improvements.

Time Consistent Collection of Optimal Seigniorage: A Unifying Framework

This paper reviews the existing literature on the time consistency problem of seigniorage collection when monetary policy is determined by optimal taxation considerations. It develops a unifying accounting framework and suggests a general measure for seigniorage, which encompasses the standard measures employed in the literature. In addition, the ex ante optimal solution to the optimal taxation problem is derived and interpreted in relation to the Ramsey principle. We show that the different recommendations of the public finance literature, i.e. the Friedman rule of optimal deflation, [moderately] positive inflation, and seigniorage maximizing inflation, are specific solutions to the optimal taxation problem. The paper continues with a formal illustration of the time consistency problem of the ex ante optimal policy and the characterization of the time consistent solution under discretion. As possible solutions to the time consistency problem, we consider reputational forces, institutional reforms that establish central bank independence, and specific ways of asset and debt management. In particular, it is formally shown that a modified version of the asset and debt management scheme suggested by Persson, Persson, and Svensson is not only necessary but also sufficient for optimality, although this did not hold in their model.

Determinacy Through Intertemporal Capital Adjustment Costs

It is well known that if there are mild sector-specific externalities, then the steady state of the standard two-sector real business cycle model can become indeterminate and endogenous business cycles can arise. We show that this result is not robust to the introduction of standard intertemporal capital adjustment costs, which may accrue when total capital is adjusted or when each sectors capital is adjusted. We find for both forms of adjustments costs that the steady state is determinate for all empirically plausible parameter values. We also find that determinacy occurs for a much larger range of parameter values when adjusting each sectors capital is costly. (Copyright: Elsevier)

A nonnormative theory of inflation and central bank independence

A Nonnormative Theory of Inflation and Central Bank Independence. — The authors study monetary policy under different central bank constitutions when the labor-market insiders set the minimal wage so that the outsiders are involuntarily unemployed. If the insiders are in the majority, the representative insider will be the median voter. The authors show that an independent central bank, if controlled by the median voter, does not produce a systematic inflation bias, albeit equilibrium employment is too low from a social welfare point of view. A dependent central bank, in contrast, is forced by the government to collect seigniorage and to take the government’s re-election prospects into account. The predictions of their theory are consistent with the evidence that central bank independence decreases average inflation and inflation variability, but does not affect employment variability.ZusammenfassungEine nicht-normative Theorie von Inflation und UnabhÄngigkeit von Zentralbanken. — Die Verfasser untersuchen Geldpolitik unter verschiedenen Zentralbankverfassungen, wenn die Arbeitsmarkt-Insider den Mindestlohn so festsetzten, dass die Outsider unfreiwillig arbeitslos sind. Wenn die Insider die Mehrheit bilden, wird der typische Insider der MedianwÄhler sein. Die Verfasser zeigen, dass eine unabhÄngige Zentralbank, sofern sie vom MedianwÄhler kontrolliert wird, nicht systematisch für Inflation sorgen wird, obwohl das BeschÄftigungsgleichgewicht vom Standpunkt der sozialen Wohlfahrt zu niedrig ist. Im Gegensatz dazu wird eine abhÄngige Zentralbank von der Regierung gezwungen, die Inflationssteuer zu erheben und die Aussichten der Regierung auf Wiederwahl in Rechnung zu stellen. Die Ergebnisse dieser Theorie stimmen mit dem Befund überein, dass UnabhÄngigkeit der Zentralbank die durchschnittliche Rate der Inflation und ihre Varianz verringert, aber die Varianz der BeschÄftigung nicht beeinflusst.