Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may AbstractWe revisit the transmission mechanism of monetary policy for household consumption in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model. The model yields empirically realistic distributions of household wealth and marginal propensities to consume because of two key features: multiple assets with different degrees of liquidity and an idiosyncratic income process with leptokurtic income changes. In this environment, the indirect effects of an unexpected cut in interest rates, which operate through a general equilibrium increase in labor demand, far outweigh direct effects such as intertemporal substitution. This finding is in stark contrast to small-and medium-scale Representative Agent New Keynesian (RANK) economies, where intertemporal substitution drives virtually all of the transmission from interest rates to consumption. JEL Non-technical SummaryA prerequisite for the successful conduct of monetary policy is a satisfactory understanding of the monetary transmission mechanism -the ensemble of economic forces that link monetary policy to the aggregate performance of the economy. This paper is concerned with the transmission mechanism of monetary policy for the largest component of GDP: household consumption.Changes in interest rates may affect household consumption through both direct and indirect effects. Direct effects are those that operate even in the absence of any change in household labor income: when interest rates fall, intertemporal substitution induces households to save less or borrow more, and therefore to increase their consumption demand. In general equilibrium, additional indirect effects on consumption arise from the expansion in labor demand, and thus in labor income, that emanates from the direct effects of the original interest rate cut.Understanding the monetary transmission mechanism requires an assessment of the importance of these direct and indirect channels. The relative magnitude of these effects is determined by how strongly household consumption responds to interest rate and income changes. Our first result concerns Representative Agent New Keynesian (RANK) models. In these commonly used benchmark economies, the aggregate consumption response to a change in interest rates is driven entirely by the Euler equation of the representative household. This implies that for any reasonable parameterization, monetary policy in RANK models works almost exclusively through intertemporal su...

I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model in which heterogeneous producers face collateral constraints, and study the effect of financial frictions on capital misallocation and aggregate productivity. My economy is isomorphic to a Solow model but with time-varying TFP. I argue that the persistence of idiosyncratic productivity shocks determines both the size of steady-state productivity losses and the speed of transitions: if shocks are persistent, steady-state losses are small but transitions are slow. Even if financial frictions are unimportant in the long run, they tend to matter in the short run and analyzing steady states only can be misleading. (JEL E21, E22, E23, G32, L26, O16)

The past forty years have seen a rapid rise in top income inequality in the United States. While there is a large number of existing theories of the Pareto tail of the long‐run income distributions, almost none of these address the fast rise in top inequality observed in the data. We show that standard theories, which build on a random growth mechanism, generate transition dynamics that are too slow relative to those observed in the data. We then suggest two parsimonious deviations from the canonical model that can explain such changes: “scale dependence” that may arise from changes in skill prices, and “type dependence,” that is, the presence of some “high‐growth types.” These deviations are consistent with theories in which the increase in top income inequality is driven by the rise of “superstar” entrepreneurs or managers.

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We recast the Aiyagari-Bewley-Huggett model of income and wealth distribution in continuous time. This workhorse model – as well as heterogeneous agent models more generally – then boils down to a system of partial differential equations, a fact we take advantage of to make two types of contributions. First, a number of new theoretical results: (i) an analytic characterization of the consumption and saving behavior of the poor, particularly their marginal propensities to consume; (ii) a closed-form solution for the wealth distribution in a special case with two income types; (iii) a proof that there is a unique stationary equilibrium if the intertemporal elasticity of substitution is weakly greater than one. Second, we develop a simple, efficient and portable algorithm for numerically solving for equilibria in a wide class of heterogeneous agent models, including – but not limited to – the Aiyagari-Bewley-Huggett model.