The Secular Stagnation of Investment?
The Secular Stagnation of Investment?
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投资长期停滞?
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发表时间:
2017
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影响因子:
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通讯作者:
C. Jones
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作者:
Thomas Philippon;G. Gutiérrez;C. Jones
We argue that a secular decline in competition in the goods markets explains several macroeconomic puzzles, in particular low interest rates and weak corporate investment. Corporate investment in the U.S. is lower than what one would expect based on profitability, discount rates, or the market value of corporate assets (Q-theory). Moreover, this investment gap is driven by firms located in less competitive industries. We explore the macro-economic consequences of this phenomenon in a DSGE model with time-varying parameters and an occasionally binding zero lower bound constraint on nominal interest rates (ZLB). We calibrate the model using micro data on investment and we show that the trend decrease in competition can explain the joint evolution of investment, Q, and the nominal interest rate. Absent the decrease in competition, we find that the U.S. economy would have escaped the ZLB by the end of 2010 and that the nominal rate today would be close to 2%. In December 2008, the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate to a target range of zero to 25 basis points. The U.S. economy has remained stuck at or near this zero lower bound (ZLB) on nominal rate of interest rates ever since. Our goal in this paper is to shed some light on why this has happened. Gutiérrez and Philippon (2016) show that investment is weak relative to measures of profitability and valuation – particularly Tobin’s Q, and that this weakness starts in the early 2000’s. Gutiérrez and Philippon (2016) find that lack of competition explains the bulk of the investment gap across industries and across firms. Industries with less entry and more concentration invest less, even after controlling for current market conditions. Within each industry-year, the investment gap is driven by firms that are owned by quasi-indexers and located in industries with less entry/more concentration. These firms spend a disproportionate amount of free cash flows buying back their shares. ∗New York University, CEPR and NBER 1 The main contribution of our paper is to study the macro-economic consequences of a decline in competition in the markets for goods and services. We argue that it accounts for the decrease in investment, the persistence of the ZLB problem, and, to some extent, the decreased in the labor share. Section 1 presents the relevant facts about the U.S. economy in recent years. Section 2 presents our benchmark model. We start from a standard DSGE model in which we allow for the possibility that the zero lower bound constraint on short term nominal rates binds. The most important feature of our model is a time-varying degree of competition in the goods market. The rational expectation equilibrium of the model is then represented by the time-varying function xt = Ψt(xt−1,Etxt+1, εt), where x represents the state and ε the shocks. An empirical contribution of our paper is that we construct an observable time series for the degree of competition that we feed in the model. Competition is not a residual that we obtain after fitting the macroeconomic data. It is an observable input that parameterizes the function Ψt above. We solve for the path of the economy using the solution method and approach of Jones (2016a). We use a Kalman filter and information about expected duration of the ZLB to back out the other shocks that drive the model (productivity, discount rate, risk premia). Our main finding is that time-varying competition has had a significant impact on macro-economic dynamics over the past 30 years. For instance, absent the decrease in competition since 2000, the nominal interest rate would have been just below 2 per cent per annum in 2015. Literature A large and growing literature studies the consequences of a binding zero lower bound (ZLB) on the nominal rate of interest. Krugman (1998) and Eggertsson and Woodford (2003) argue that the ZLB can lead to a large drop in output. Lawrence Christiano (2011) show that the government spending multiplier can be large when the ZLB binds, suggesting a more important role for fiscal policy. Coibion et al. (2012) ask whether the risk of a binding ZLB should lead policy makers to increase the average rate of inflation. Swanson and Williams (2014) study the impact of the ZLB on long rates, that are more relevant for economic decisions. Most studies of the liquidity trap are based on simple New-Keynesian models that abstract from capital accumulation. Fernández-Villaverde et al. (2015) study the exact properties of the New Keynesian model around the ZLB. In these models, consumption is depressed because the equilibrium interest rate is higher than the natural rate – the rate that would have cleared the asset market in the absence of price or wage rigidities. In most of the existing models, the ZLB episode is triggered by an increase in households’ patience, that is, an increase in their subjective discount factor. Explicitly allowing for capital accumulation complicates matters, however, because changes in discount rates imply that consumption and investment move in opposite directions. The shock that triggers the ZLB episode is also a shock that reduces the real rate, and therefore encourages investment. The ZLB has been proposed as an explanation for the slow recovery of most major economies following the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Summers (2013) argues that the natural rate of interest