Edward C. Prescott

Rules Rather than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans

Even if there is an agreed-upon, fixed social objective function and policymakers know the timing and magnitude of the effects of their actions, discretionary policy, namely, the selection of that decision which is best, given the current situation and a correct evaluation of the end-of-period position, does not result in the social objective function being maximized. The reason for this apparent paradox is that economic planning is not a game against nature but, rather, a game against rational economic agents. We conclude that there is no way control theory can be made applicable to economic planning when expectations are rational.

The equity premium: a puzzle

Abstract Restrictions that a class of general equilibrium models place upon the average returns of equity and Treasury bills are found to be strongly violated by the U.S. data in the 1889–1978 period. This result is robust to model specification and measurement problems. We conclude that, most likely, an equilibrium model which is not an Arrow-Debreu economy will be the one that simultaneously rationalizes both historically observed large average equity return and the small average risk-free return.

Postwar U.S. Business Cycles: An Empirical Investigation

The authors propose a procedure for representing a time series of a smoothly varying trend component and a cyclical component. They document the nature of the comovements of the cyclical components of a variety of macroeconomic time series. The authors find that comovements are very different than the corresponding comovements of the slowly varying trend components. Copyright 1997 by Ohio State University Press.

Barriers to Technology Adoption and Development

We propose a theory of economic development in which technology adoption and barriers to such adoptions are the focus. The size of these barriers differs across countries and time. The larger these barriers, the greater the investment a firm must make to adopt a more advanced technology. The model is calibrated to the U.S. balanced growth observations and the postwar Japanese development miracle. For this calibrated structure we find that the disparity in technology adoption barriers needed to account for the huge observed income disparity across countries is not implausibly large.

Needed: a theory of total factor productivity

This paper evaluates the argument that differences in physical and intangible capital can account for the large international income differences that characterize the world economy today. The finding is that they cannot. Savings rate differences are of minor importance. What is all-important is total factor productivity (TFP). In addition, the paper presents industry evidence that TFPs differ across countries and time for reasons other than differences in the publicly available stock of technical knowledge. These findings lead the author to conclude a theory of TFP is needed. This theory must account for differences in TFP that arise for reasons other than growth in the stock of technical knowledge. Copyright 1998 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

Equilibrium Search and Unemployment

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on equilibrium search and unemployment. It presents a study on wage and employment determination in a single market and discusses the impact of the rest of the economy on this market by certain given parameters. This impact takes three forms. First, product demand functions shift in an exogenously determined, stochastic manner. Second, the outside economy offers alternative employment to workers. Third, new workers arrive from the rest of the economy, augmenting the local work force. The chapter also presents an equilibrium model that provides a complete description of the time paths of all variables involved, both at an aggregate and the individual market level.

Pareto Optima and Competitive Equilibria with Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard

This paper explores the extent to which standard, general equilibrium analysis of Pareto optima and of competitive equilibria can be applied to environments with moral hazard and adverse selection problems. Allowing for lotteries, contracts with random components, we first establish that an adverse-selection insurance economy, a moral-hazard insurance economy, a signaling economy, and a private-information labor market economy are all special cases of a simple, general structure. We then show that techniques for characterizing Pareto optimal contracts as solutions to concave programming problems are useful and nice and appear to be broadly applicable; allowing for lotteries, we show how to characterize the optimal allocations for the adverse-selection insurance and labor market economies. We then show that standard existence and optimality theorems for competitive equilibria apply in the linear space containing lotteries if agents with characteristics which are distinct and privately observed at the time of initial trading enter the economy-wide resource constraints in a homogeneous way (other kinds of diversity are not critical). For economies with moral hazard which satisfy the homogeneity condition, competitive contract markets single out a subset of the optima and thus can be consistent with apparent unemployment and with a random allocation of labor supplied though all households are averse to risk. The adverse-selection insurance and signaling economies, however, do not satisfy the homogeneity condition and are difficult to decentralize efficiently with a price system.

Sequential location among firms with foresight

Existing theory poorly describes the product diversity in a modern market economy largely because such theory is founded on an inadequate concept of equilibrium. Standard analysis regards decision makers as naive in their anticipations of the response of rivals to their decisions and neglects the substantial costs of relocating in the product characteristic space. In this paper, we construct an equilibrium model of firms in which each firm locates in sequence with correct expectations of the way its decisions influence the decisions of firms yet to locate. The nature of the equilibrium is explored in a series of familiar examples taken from the literature.

Prosperity and Depression

Prosperity and depression are relative concepts. Today both France and Japan are depressed relative to the United States; equivalently, the United States is prosperous relative to these countries. I say these countries are depressed relative to the United States because their output per working-age person is 30 percent less than the U.S. level. An interesting and important policy question is: Why are these countries depressed? The answers for these two countries turn out to be very different. The United States is prosperous relative to France because the U.S. intratemporal tax wedge that distorts the trade-off between consumption and leisure is much smaller than the French wedge. I will show that, if France modified its intratemporal tax wedge so that its value was the same as the U.S. value, French welfare in consumption equivalents would increase by 19 percent. Consumption would have to increase by 19 percent now and in all future periods to achieve as large a welfare gain as that resulting from this tax reform. The United States is prosperous relative to Japan because production efficiency is higher in the United States. In the United States, total factor productivity is approximately 20 percent higher than in Japan. If Japan suddenly became as efficient in production as the United States, its welfare gain in consumption equivalents would be 39 percent. Equally interesting and important are big changes over time in relative output (per working-age person) across countries. Why are New Zealand’s and Switzerland’s economies depressed by over 30 percent relative to their 1970 trend-corrected levels? Both of these countries have small populations, but depressions are not restricted to small countries. Japan, with its 125 million people, is now depressed by 20 percent relative to its 1991 trend-corrected level. On the prosperity side, why are Ireland and South Korea so prosperous now relative to their 1970 trend-corrected levels? This lecture is concerned primarily with big international differences among relatively rich industrial countries and changes in these differences over time. The countries that receive primary attention all have market economies and healthy, well-educated populations. In the countries considered, the variations in aggregate output per working-age person are large, and reasonably good measures of the factor inputs are available. This permits, in many cases, the identification of the change in policy or the difference in policy that gave rise to prosperity or depression. This is in contrast to business-cycle theory, which provides little guidance to policy except for the important policy implication that a stabilization effort will have either no effect or a perverse effect. The output variations studied and analyzed in this lecture are big: an order of magnitude larger than the much-studied business-cycle fluctuations. The variations studied, however, are an order of magnitude smaller than the muchstudied differences between the richest and poorest countries. Surprisingly, only recently have depressions been systematically studied from the perspective of growth theory, which is the theory used * University of Minnesota and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. I thank my colleagues at the University of Minnesota and the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis for helpful discussions and comments. In particular, I thank Tim Kehoe, Ellen McGrattan, and Nancy Stokey for their help. I also thank Martin Weale and Franck Portier for providing some British and French tax information used in this lecture. Thanks also go to Sami Alpanda and James MacGee for research assistance and helpful discussions. This lecture draws heavily on collaborative research with Fumio Hayashi. I thank the Economic and Social Research Institute, Cabinet Office, Government of Japan and the U.S. National Science Foundation for financial support. The views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal Reserve System.

Dynamic optimal taxation, rational expectations and optimal control

Within a rational expectations framework, policy has effect if it alters relative prices and policy evaluations are exercises in modern public finance theory. The time inconsistency of an optimal taxation plan precludes the use of standard control theory for its determination. In this article recursive methods are developed that overcome this difficulty. The technique is novel in that the constraint set as well as the value function are determined recursively. Even though there is little hope of the optimal plan being implemented - because of its time inconsistency - we think the exercise is of more than pedagogical interest. The optimal plans return is a benchmark with which to compare the time consistent solution under alternative institutional constraints which society might choose to impose upon itself.