Nonlinear household earnings dynamics, self-insurance, and welfare

By Mariacristina De Nardi, Giulio Fella and Gonzalo Paz-Pardo

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cfm:wpaper:1817&r=dge

Earnings dynamics are much richer than typically assumed in macro models with heterogeneous agents. This holds for individual-pre-tax and household-post-tax earnings and across administrative (Social Security Administration) and survey (Panel Study of Income Dynamics) data. We study the implications of two processes for household, post-tax earnings in a standard life-cycle model: a canonical earnings process (that includes a persistent and a transitory shock) and a rich earnings dynamics process (that allows for age-dependence of moments, non-normality, and nonlinearity in previous earnings and age). Allowing for richer earnings dynamics implies a substantially better fit of the evolution of cross-sectional consumption inequality over the life cycle and of the individual-level degree of consumption insurance against persistent earnings shocks. Richer earnings dynamics also imply lower welfare costs of earnings risk, but, as the canonical earnings process, do not generate enough concentration at the upper tail of the wealth distribution.

The days of using AR(1) processes for individual earnings processes are long over. This paper nicely demonstrates how complex this gets, how necessary it is, and yet how incomplete the description of the process still is..

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Housing Taxation and Financial Intermediation

BY Hamed Ghiaie and Jean-François Rouillard

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:shr:wpaper:18-01&r=dge

Through the lens of a multi-agent dynamic general equilibrium model, we examine the effects of four permanent changes in housing taxes and deductions on macroeconomic aggregates and welfare. Our main result is that the presence of borrowing-constrained bankers dampen the negative consequences of housing taxation on output. The long-run tax multipliers found range from -1.02 to -0.6. The reduction in the deduction of mortgage interest payments delivers the lowest multiplier. We also implement revenue-neutral tax reforms and find that the repeal of mortgage deductibility is the only policy that generates gains in output.

Deducting mortgage interest from taxes never struck me as a good policy, as it principally benefits people with large mortgages (and thus high debt and oversized houses) and high incomes (and thus high marginal tax rates and low propensities to consume). This paper seems to confirm that.

Migration and Business Cycle Dynamics

By Christie Smith and Christoph Thoenissen

http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:shf:wpaper:2018006&r=dge

Shocks to net migration matter for the business cycles. Using an estimated dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model of a small open economy and a structural vector autoregression, we find that migration shocks account for a considerable proportion of the variability of per capita GDP. Migration shocks matter for the capital investment and consumption components of per capita GDP, but they are not the most important driver. Migration shocks are also important for residential investment and real house prices, but other shocks play a larger role in driving housing market volatility. In the DSGE model, the level of human capital possessed by migrants relative to that of locals materially affects the business cycle impact of migration. The impact of migration shocks is larger when migrants have substantially different levels of human capital relative to locals. When the average migrant has higher levels of human capital than locals, as seems to be common in most OECD economies, a migration shock has an expansionary effect on per capita GDP and its components.

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