Collaborative Research: Inequality and the Distributional Effects of Macroeconomic Policy

本项目的目标是利用经济不平等的定量一般均衡模型研究宏观经济政策的分配效应。宏观经济稳定政策如何影响经济中不同群体的福利，如富人和穷人，或就业者和失业者？稳定政策在多大程度上替代了失业保险等社会保险项目？降低股息税是否对那些不持有股票的人以及那些持有股票的人有利？这些政策问题中的一个共同点是不平等、宏观经济政策和总体（或商业周期）风险之间的均衡互动。因此，这一项目与大多数现有的宏观经济政策福利效应分析大相径庭。这些分析通常依赖于一个代表性的虚构，或平均，消费者在这种情况下，他们是沉默的政策对不同群体的消费者的不同影响，或者他们不研究宏观经济波动在这种情况下，他们沉默的不平等，宏观经济政策和商业周期之间的相互作用。虽然现有的几个框架在解释美国观察到的经济不平等程度方面取得了相当大的成功，但使用这些模型来探索和评估宏观经济政策的分配效应仍处于起步阶段，特别是在有关不平等与商业周期之间相互作用的政策问题方面。本项目的目的是为分析这些政策作出实质性和方法性贡献。更广泛的影响除了对宏观经济政策的分配效应和不平等的根源作出实质性贡献外，该项目将通过继续开发快速准确的计算工具来研究经济模型的均衡影响，从而做出方法论贡献，这些模型既具有现实商业特征，消费者之间的巨大不平等。此外，该项目还旨在扩展间接推理技术，以有效地估计大规模一般均衡模型。 这些模型在其他经济学领域也应该有更广泛的适用性。

The goal of this project is study the distributional effects of macroeconomic policy using quantitative general equilibrium models of economic inequality. How does macroeconomic stabilization policy affect the welfare of different groups in the economy, such as the rich and the poor, or the employed and the unemployed? To what extent does stabilization policy provide a substitute for social insurance programs such as unemployment insurance? Does a reduction in the tax on dividends benefit those who do not hold stocks as well as those who do?A common element in each of these policy questions is the equilibrium interaction between inequality, macroeconomic policy, and aggregate (or business cycle) risk. This project thus departs sharply from most existing analyses of the welfare effects of macroeconomic policy. These analyses typically either rely on the fiction of a representative, or average, consumer-in which case they are silent on the differential impact of policy on different groups of consumers-or they do not study macroeconomic fluctuations-in which case they are silent on the interaction between inequality, macroeconomic policy, and the business cycle. Although several existing frameworks have shown considerable success in accounting for the degree of economic inequality observed in the United States, the use of these models to explore and evaluate the distributional effects of macroeconomic policy is still in its infancy, particularly for policy questions concerning the interaction between inequality and the business cycle. This project aims to make both substantive and methodological contributions to the analysis of such policies.Broader ImpactIn addition to making substantive contributions concerning the distributional effects of macroeconomic policy and the origins of inequality, this project will make a methodological contribution by continuing the development of fast and accurate computational tools to study the equilibrium implications of economic models which feature both realistic business cycles and substantial inequality across consumers. Furthermore, the project also aims to extend indirect inference techniques to efficiently estimate large-scale general equilibrium models. These models shouldhave wider applicability in other fields of economics as well.