N. Gregory Mankiw

The consumption of stockholders and nonstockholders

Only one-fourth of U.S. families own stock. This paper examines whether the consumption of stockholders differs from the consumption of non-stockholders and whether these differences help explain the empirical failures of the consumption-based CAPM. Household panel data are used to construct time series on the consumption of each group. The results indicate that the consumption of stockholders is more volatile than that of non-stockholders and is more highly correlated with the excess return on the stock market. These differences help explain the size of the equity premium, although they do not fully resolve the equity premium puzzle.

Free Entry and Social Inefficiency

Previous articles have noted the possibility of socially inefficient levels of entry in markets in which firms must incur fixed set-up costs upon entry. This article identifies the fundamental and intuitive forces that lie behind these entry biases. If an entrant causes incumbent firms to reduce output, entry is more desirable to the entrant than it is to society. There is therefore a tendency toward excessive entry in homogeneous product markets. The roles of product diversity and the integer constraint on the number of firms are also examined.

The Baby Boom, the Baby Bust, and the Housing Market

This paper examines the impact of major demographic changes on the housing market in the United States. The entry of the Baby Boom generation into its house-buying years is found to be the major cause of the increase in real housing prices in the 1970s. Since the Baby Bust generation is now entering its house-buying years, housing demand will grow more slowly in the 1990s than in any time in the past forty years. If the historical relation between housing demand and housing prices continues into the future, real housing prices will fall substantially over the next two decades.

The response of consumption to income: A cross-country investigation

Abstract In previous work we have argued that aggregate, post-war. United States data on consumption and income are well described by a model in which a fraction of income accrues to individuals who consume their current income rather than their permanent income. This fraction is estimated to be about 50%, indicating a substantial departure from the permanent income hypothesis. In this paper we ask whether the same model fits quarterly data from the United Kingdom over the period 1957–1988 and from Canada, France, Japan, and Sweden over the period 1972–1988. We also explore several generalizations of the basic model.

The Inexorable and Mysterious Tradeoff between Inflation and Unemployment

This paper discusses the short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Although this tradeoff remains a necessary building block of business cycle theory, economists have yet to provide a completely satisfactory explanation for it. According to the consensus view among central bankers and monetary economists, a contractionary monetary shock raises unemployment, at least temporarily, and leads to a delayed and gradual fall in inflation. Standard dynamic models of price adjustment, however, cannot explain this pattern of responses. Reconciling the consensus view about the effects of monetary policy with models of price adjustment remains an outstanding puzzle for business cycle theorists.

The Savers-Spenders Theory Of Fiscal Policy

The macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy is usually based on one of two canonical models--the Barro-Ramsey model of infinitely-lived families or the Diamond-Samuelson model of overlapping generations. This paper argues that neither model is satisfactory and suggests an alternative. In the proposed model, some consumers plan ahead for themselves and their descendants, while others live paycheck to paycheck. This model is easier to reconcile with the essential facts about consumer behavior and wealth accumulation, and it yields some new and surprising conclusions about fiscal policy.

The NAIRU in Theory and Practice

This paper discusses the NAIRU -- the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment. It first considers the role of the NAIRU concept in business cycle theory, arguing that this concept is implicit in any model in which monetary policy influences both inflation and unemployment. The exact value of the NAIRU is hard to measure, however, in part because it changes over time. The paper then discusses why the NAIRU changes and, in particular, why it fell in the United States during the 1990s. The most promising hypothesis is that the decline in the NAIRU is attributable to the acceleration in productivity growth.

The Equity Premium and the Concentration of Aggregate Shocks

This paper examines an economy in which aggregate shocks are not dispersed equally throughout the population. Instead, while these shocks affect all individuals ex ante, they are concentrated among a few ex post.The equity premium in general depends on the concentration of these aggregate shocks; it follows that one cannot estimate the degree of risk aversion from aggregate data alone. These findings suggest that the empirical usefulness of aggregation theorems for capital asset pricing models is limited.

The Allocation of Credit and Financial Collapse

This paper examines the allocation of credit in a market in which borrowers have greater information concerning their own riskiness than do lenders. It illustrates (1) the allocation of credit is inefficientand at times can be improved by government intervention, and (2) small changes in the exogenous risk-free interest rate can cause large (discontinuous) changes in the allocation of credit and the efficiency of the market equilibrium.These conclusions suggest a role for government as the lender of last resort.

Hall's consumption hypothesis and durable goods

Abstract Hall shows that consumption obeys an AR(1) process if the life cycle-permanent income hypothesis is true. This paper expands Halls framework to show that expenditure on durable goods should be ARMA(1, 1) but not AR(1). Post-war U.S. data rejects the expanded model.