Robert R. Reed

Money and Risk Sharing

We study the use of money for sharing consumption risk. In our model, agents randomly receive endowments at some points in time and produce at other points. Due to information frictions, agents cannot use intertemporal contracts to share risk. The use of money allows agents to overcome these information frictions. The Friedman rule is shown to generate efficient risk sharing. Furthermore, we quantify the welfare costs of incomplete risk sharing and find that with 10% inflation, the welfare cost of inefficient risk sharing is approximately 1%-1.5% of steady-state consumption.

Default Risk and Collateral in the Absence of Commitment

Default risk is an important concern for lenders and is a main reason they require borrowers to pledge collateral. There are two reasons for this. The first is that collateral provides some incentive for the borrower to not strategically default. The second is that, in the event of default, the lender can liquidate the collateral and salvage some value from the failed credit relationship. This paper provides a model to study properties of allocations that arise when collateral is part of an optimal lending contract that looks much like a repurchase agreement. In particular, a lack of commitment to future actions implies that collateral must be used to alleviate strategic default. Moreover, because collateral is held by lenders during the credit relationship, there is also a potential incentive for lenders to default on returning collateralized assets. Thus, the optimal contract requires the satisfaction of an incentive constraint for the lender, in addition to the one that must be satisfied for the borrower. The paper then discusses how the need to satisfy both constraints places certain restrictions on the allocations that arise when collateral is part of an optimal contract. We conclude by comparing the allocation to a world where agents can commit to future actions.

Aging, Unemployment, and Welfare in a Life-Cycle Model with Costly Labor Market Search

In recent years, many countries have experienced a significant shift in demographic patterns towards the elderly. This phenomenon poses numerous challenges for the design of public pension programs and labor market policies. To better understand how public policy should be designed in response to a aging workforce, it is imperative to first make an assessment of how the lifecycle affects aggregate labor market activity, and in particular, unemployment. While much work has been done on exploring how the lifecycle influences individual labor market behavior, its impact on aggregate labor market outcomes is far less studied. This paper is an attempt at addressing this lacuna within the context of a lifecycle model with costly search and matching in the labor market. The lifecycle of workers in conjunction with frictions in the labor market produces an environment in which unemployment arises as a natural possibility and both young and old workers find themselves contemporaneously competing for the same jobs. The lifecycle is shown to have significant implications for aggregate labor market activity; it may even be responsible for an inefficient allocation of workers to jobs. Additionally, public policies designed to increase labor market participation among older workers may not necessarily enhance aggregate welfare.

Decentralized International Exchange

We utilize a random-matching model to examine the relationships between market frictions and international trade. In our setting, an individual may choose to search abroad where she may have a cost advantage, but is less likely to meet potential trading partners, owing to higher market frictions. Interestingly, we find that international trade may be associated with lower welfare than autarky. We show how this is due to price distortions resulting from bargaining when there are opportunities for exchange across countries.

Money and Specialization in a Neoclassical Growth Model

This paper studies the links between money, specialization, and capital accumulation in a neoclassical growth framework. For tractability, the transactions role of money is introduced through a cash-in-advance constraint. In contrast to the standard cash-in-advance model, an individuals reliance on money balances for transactions is endogenous through the choice of specialization. Although the cash-in-advance constraint only applies to consumption, the model exhibits a reverse-Tobin effect.We conclude by discussing the implications of the model for the welfare costs of inflation.

Social Security and Intergenerational Redistribution

Many countries around the world have large public pension programs with significant cross-cohort redistribution. This paper provides a rationale for such programs in a lifecycle framework with search and matching frictions in the labor market. In the model, public pension programs alter the age composition of the labor force by inducing the jobless elderly to retire. This improves the allocation of workers to jobs, raises firm entry and may also improve welfare. By requiring a long history of labor market attachment as a precondition to receiving benefits, these programs raise the future value of current employment for the young. This redistributes bargaining strength and income from the young to the old.

A Positive Theory of the Income Redistributive Focus of Social Security

Many countries around the world have large public pension programs. Traditionally, these programs have been used to induce retirement by the elderly in order to free up jobs for the young and to redistribute income across generations. This paper provides an efficiency rationale for the inter-generational income redistribution focus of such programs in a framework which explicitly accounts for the role of the lifecycle as well as search and matching frictions in the labor market. In our model, public pension programs alter the age composition of the labor force by inducing the jobless elderly to retire. By requiring a long history of labor market attachment in order to receive benefits, these programs raise the future value of current employment for the young which serves to redistribute bargaining power, and hence income, from the young to the old. The paper argues that pension programs through their effect on the wage structure, the age distribution of the labor force and firm entry decisions, can improve the operation of the labor market and might therefore be desirable on efficiency grounds alone (abstracting from equity and insurance motives). It shows that a pension program that is funded from within the economy can lead to higher welfare than having no pension program at all.

Can Monetizing Trade Lower Welfare? An Example

In decentralized trade individuals self-insure against consumption risk via costly diversification of skills. Although money acts as a consumption insurance, it may lead to a moral hazard problem. If the problem is severe, monetizing trade can lower welfare relative to barter.

The Effects of Aging on US FDI

This chapter empirically documents how population aging affects FDI using data on US inbound and outbound FDI. Notably, the estimates for developed countries conform to the predictions of the theory of Davies and Reed (2008). These predictions anticipate different effects depending on whether one considers the impact of aging on capital versus labour markets and the parent versus the host. In particular, FDI seeks out young workers, locations with higher savings rates, and countries with lower social security taxes.