Collaborative Research: Macroeconomics and Inequality

该提案的目的是继续进行正在进行的研究工作-发展理论和实证方法-旨在更好地理解宏观经济学与不平等之间的相互作用。研究人员早期的工作分析了消费者横截面的宏观经济模型，并附带了财富分配和个人财富转移的重要决定。本项目继续进行的这一努力的动机是：(i)需要为现有的宏观经济模型建立更坚实的微观基础，“消费者异质性可以说是头等重要的事实”，以及（ii）本身对不平等的兴趣，以及宏观经济总量和宏观经济政策如何影响消费者的横截面。本提案的总体目标是扩展宏观经济理论和方法，以便与研究消费和劳动力供给决策的应用微观经济学文献建立更紧密、更牢固的联系；因此，不是从宏观经济学的角度，而是从微观经济学的角度来看，它与所陈述的目标非常吻合。pi早期工作中的一个关键见解是近似聚合：具有异质主体的理论经济的一个特征(i)允许对这些经济进行分析（否则它们可能是不可思议的复杂），（ii）同时开辟了探索具有实质性和现实的消费者异质性的新宏观经济模型的可能性，这些模型具有重要和有趣的属性，似乎能够帮助我们更好地理解数据。目前的提案包含四个主要组成部分，它们是同一总体目标的一部分。首先，目标是继续探索近似聚集的边界：系统地寻找近似聚集可能失败的经济上有趣的情况。特别是，该项目探索了先验有趣的异质性的新形式，并研究了非平稳的宏观经济事件（例如，涉及重大政策变化或技术进步的爆发）。其次，研究人员特别关注了一种异质性形式，这种形式在宏观经济分析中很少出现，但在资产市场和投资决策中可以说是关键：信息不对称（关于基本面）。这部分研究引入了金融经济学的见解，并将其应用于另一个标准的、定量的宏观经济环境，该环境假定所有投资者都有相同的信念。第三，该项目考察了劳动力市场的摩擦。具体来说，它将通过明确地模拟具有摩擦的劳动力市场，然后将该市场纳入宏观经济模型，从而深入到早期工作中使用的外生特殊收入过程之下。它还将开发更丰富的方法，从经验上捕捉家庭面临的多重收入风险来源。第四，也是最后，项目探讨了将具有异质性的宏观经济模型引入数据的计量经济学；其中，方法的发展包括模型求解和参数选择相结合。因此，所提议的活动的智力价值在于开发了先进的工具，以改进宏观经济和宏观经济背景下的不平等分析。拟议的活动所产生的更广泛的影响是核心的：它们旨在以实质性的方式将宏观经济分析与经济学中的其他学科，主要是应用微观经济学联系起来。此外，这里“部分用于计算”的工具的开发在经济分析中广泛有用。最后，也是最广泛的一点是，关于宏观经济政策的许多公开辩论都集中在其分配效应上，即谁从政策变化中获益，谁又从政策变化中受损。拟议的研究正是为了提高经济学家在宏观经济中评估政策对不同群体——富人和穷人、熟练工人和非熟练工人、就业人员和失业人员——的数量影响的能力。拟议中的研究如果成功，将最终帮助决策者做出更明智的决策。

The purpose of the proposal is to continue an ongoing research effort - developing theory and empirical methods - aiming to better understand the interplay between macroeconomics and inequality. Earlier work of the investigators has analyzed macroeconomic models with a cross-section of consumers, with an accompanying nontrivial determination of the wealth distribution and of individual wealth transitions. This endeavor, which this project continues, is motivated both by (i) the need to build more solid microfoundations for existing macroeconomic models"consumer heterogeneity is a fact of arguably first-order importance" and by (ii) an interest per se in inequality, and in how macroeconomic aggregates and macroeconomic policy influence the cross-section of consumers. An overall goal of the present proposal is to extend macroeconomic theory and methods so as to establish a closer, and more solid, connection with the applied microeconomic literatures studying consumption and labor supply decisions; thus, it is closely in line with the goals stated, not from the perspective of macroeconomics, but from the perspective of microeconomics.A key insight in the earlier work of the PIs is approximate aggregation: a feature of theoretical economies with heterogeneous agents that (i) allows these economies to be analyzed at all (otherwise they may be infeasibly complicated) and (ii) at the same time opens up the possibility of exploring new macroeconomic models, with substantial and realistic consumer heterogeneity, that have nontrivial and interesting properties that seem to be able to help us understand the data better. The current proposal contains four main components that are part of the same overall goal. First, the aim is to continue exploring the boundaries of approximate aggregation: systematically looking for economically interesting cases where approximate aggregation may fail. In particular, the project explores new forms of heterogeneity that are a priori interesting and studies nonstationary macroeconomic episodes (involving, say, large policy change or a burst of technological progress). Second, the investigators look specifically at a form of heterogeneity that has had very little presence in macroeconomic analyses but that is arguably key especially in asset markets and for investment decisions: asymmetric information (about fundamentals). This part of the research imports insights from financial economics and adapts them to an otherwise standard, quantitative macroeconomic setting, which presumes that all investors have the same beliefs. Third, the project examines frictions in the labor market. Specifically, it will go underneath the exogenous idiosyncratic income processes used in earlier work by explicitly modeling a labor market with frictions and then incorporating this market into the macroeconomic model. It will also develop richer ways to capture empirically the multiple sources of income risk that households face. Fourth and finally, the project explores the econometrics of bringing the macroeconomic model with heterogeneity to the data; here, the methodological development includes combining model solution and parameter choice. The intellectual merit of the proposed activity is thus the development of advanced tools for improving the analysis both of the macroeconomy and of inequality in the context of the macroeconomy.The broader impacts resulting from the proposed activity are central: they aim to connect macroeconomic analysis, in a substantial way, to other disciplines within economics, primarily applied microeconomics. In addition, the development of tools here"in part for computation" is broadly useful in economic analysis. Finally, and most broadly, much of the public debate about macroeconomic policy focuses on its distributional effects, on who gains and who loses from changes in policy. The proposed research seeks precisely to improve the ability of economists to assess the quantitative effects of policy on different groups the rich and the poor, the skilled and the unskilled, the employed and the unemployed within the macroeconomy. The proposed research, if successful, will ultimately help policymakers to make more informed decisions.