Kaiji Chen

Financial Frictions on Capital Allocation: A Transmission Mechanism of TFP Fluctuations

This paper provides a theory of financial frictions as a transmission mechanism for news shocks to drive aggregate TFP fluctuations. We show that in an economy calibrated to U.S. data, variations in financial frictions on capital allocation in response to news about future technology can generate aggregate TFP fluctuations and, thus, trigger business cycles before the actual technological change is realized. Using the COMPUSTAT dataset, we find that the relative capital productivity of financially constrained to unconstrained firms is highly countercyclical. Moreover, our VAR analysis shows that news shocks can account for a substantial fraction of the relative capital productivity fluctuations over business cycle frequencies.

A Life-Cycle Analysis of Social Security with Housing

This paper incorporates two features of housing in a life-cycle analysis of social security: housing as a durable good and housing market frictions. We find that with housing as a durable good unfunded social security substantially crowds out housing consumption throughout the life cycle. By contrast, aggregate non-durable consumption is higher when social security is present, although it is postponed until late in life. Moreover, in the presence of housing market frictions, social security lowers the aggregate home ownership rate and reduces the average size of owner-occupied housing. The effects of social security on housing position, furthermore, exhibit substantial heterogeneity across households of different income levels.

Trends and cycles in China's macroeconomy

We make four contributions in this paper. First, we provide a core of macroeconomic time series usable for systematic research on China. Second, we document, through various empirical methods, the robust findings about striking patterns of trend and cycle. Third, we build a theoretical model that accounts for these facts. Fourth, the models mechanism and assumptions are corroborated by institutional details, disaggregated data, and banking time series, all of which are distinctive of Chinese characteristics. We argue that preferential credit policy for promoting heavy industries accounts for the unusual cyclical patterns as well as the post-1990s economic transition featured by the persistently rising investment rate, the declining labor income share, and a growing foreign surplus. The departure of our theoretical model from standard ones offers a constructive framework for studying Chinas modern macroeconomy.

Markovian Social Security in Unequal Societies

In this paper, we develop a dynamic politico-economic theory of social security to address two questions. First, how is social security sustained? Second, how does inequality affect the size of social security, and can the theoretical predictions be consistent with the observed puzzling relationships between inequality and the size of social security? As a stark framework, our model economy features the absence of altruism, commitment, reputation mechanism and electoral uncertainty. We characterize analytically a Markov perfect equilibrium and find that the joint between Markovian tax policy and tax distortion on private investment shapes an intertemporal policy rule linking taxes positively over time. The positive intertemporal tax linkage, by allowing current taxpayers to influence their own future social security benefit, provides the political support for social security. Moreover, we find that a larger wage inequality weakens the intertemporal tax linkage and, thus, reduces inter-generational redistributive benefit. This may lead to a smaller size of social security. Our theoretical predictions are in line with both time-series and cross-country correlations between inequality and social security.

A life-cycle analysis of social security with housing☆

This paper incorporates two features of housing in a life-cycle analysis of social security: housing as a durable good and housing market frictions. We find that both housing quantities and homeownership rates respond strongly to eliminating social security. Accordingly, the aggregate impacts of this policy reform are significantly larger in an economy with explicit housing choices than in a standard life-cycle economy. Our analysis shows that the key mechanism behind these results is the substitution effects of a change in interest rates and, thus, the price of housing services on the choice of non-durable consumption versus housing services. (Copyright: Elsevier)

Misallocation and the recovery of manufacturing TFP after a financial crisis

The Chilean economy experienced a decade of sustained growth in aggregate out-put and productivity after the 1982 .nancial crisis. This paper analyzes the effects of resource misallocation on total factor productivity (TFP) of the manufacturing sector by applying the methodology of Hsieh and Klenow (2009) to the establishment data from the Chilean manufacturing census. We find that a reduction in resource misallocation accounts for about 46 percent of the growth in manufacturing TFP between 1983 and 1996. The improvement in allocative effciency, moreover, is essentially driven by a reduction in the cross-sectional dispersion of output distortion. In particular, a reduction in the least productive plants.output subsidies is the most important reason for the reduction in resource misallocation during this period.

Debt and the U.S. Economy

Publicly held debt to GDP ratio in the U.S. is estimated to be 72% in 2011 and is expected to continue rising. Many proposals regarding the ways to curb the government deficit and the resulting debt are being discussed. In this paper we incorporate these different policy proposals in a fully calibrated general equilibrium model. This framework allows us to model the reactions of labor and capital due to changes in policy which impact the projected debt to GDP ratios.

Precautionary Corporate Liquidity

We develop a theory of corporate liquidity demand, capturing the fact that a firms borrowing capacity depends on news on future investment profitability. In our model, bad news on future investment profitability reduces a firms borrowing capacity and therefore increases the need for internal finance. Consequently, the firms cash savings respond negatively to news on future profitability. This negative correlation is strongly supported by our empirical evidence using a combined data set of Compustat and IBES. Moreover, both our simulation and empirical results show that the sensitivity of cash savings to news on future profitability is a reliable indicator of the presence of financial constraints at firm level.

Investment-Specific Technology Shocks: The Source of Anticipated TFP Fluctuations

This paper explores the importance of investment-specific technology changes in anticipated TFP fluctuations. To this end, we identify two types of news shocks with the maximum forecast error variance approach: news shocks to TFP and news shocks to the relative price of investment. We show in a model with IST diffusion and spillover that the correlation of these two empirically identified shocks can be used to quantify the importance of the IST shocks in aggregate TFP fluctuations. Using postwar U.S. data, we find that these two news shocks are almost perfectly colinear, if both are identified to capture the long-run movement of the corresponding variable. Moreover, these two news shocks can explain a significant, and surprisingly similar fraction of the fluctuations in other important macro variables over business cycles. Our findings suggest that embodied technological changes are the main driver of the anticipated TFP fluctuations via spillover to the productivity of the rest of the economy.