Collaborative Research: Macroeconomics and Inequality

该提案的目的是继续正在进行的研究努力--发展理论和实证方法--旨在更好地理解宏观经济学和不平等之间的相互作用。研究人员早期的工作分析了不同消费者群体的宏观经济模型，并对财富分配和个人财富转变做出了不平凡的决定。本项目继续开展这项工作的动机既有：(1)需要为现有的宏观经济模型建立更坚实的微观基础--“消费者的异质性可以说是头等重要的事实”；(2)关注不平等本身，以及宏观经济总量和宏观经济政策如何影响消费者群体。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应决策的应用微观经济学文献建立更紧密、更坚实的联系；因此，它与所述的目标非常一致，不是从宏观经济学的角度，而是从微观经济学的角度。采购经理人指数早期工作中的一个关键洞察力是近似聚集：具有不同动因的理论经济的一个特征，即(I)允许对这些经济体进行分析(否则它们可能是不可行的复杂的)和(Ii)同时打开了探索新的宏观经济模型的可能性，这些模型具有实质性和现实的消费者异质性，具有似乎能够帮助我们更好地理解数据的非平凡和有趣的特性。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有趣的案例。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时期(例如，涉及重大政策变化或技术进步的爆发)。其次，研究人员专门研究了一种异质性，这种异质性在宏观经济分析中很少出现，但可以说是关键，尤其是在资产市场和投资决策中：信息不对称(关于基本面)。研究的这一部分从金融经济学中引入见解，并使其适应其他标准的、量化的宏观经济环境，该环境假设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。具体地说，它将通过显式地对存在摩擦的劳动力市场进行建模，然后将该市场纳入宏观经济模型，来研究早期工作中使用的外生特殊收入过程。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，该项目探索了将具有异质性的宏观经济模型引入数据的计量经济学；在这里，方法的发展包括结合模型解和参数选择。因此，拟议活动的智力价值在于开发了先进的工具，用于改进宏观经济和宏观经济背景下的不平等分析。拟议活动产生的更广泛影响是核心：它们旨在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，进行实质性的联系。此外，这里开发的“部分用于计算”的工具在经济分析中也是非常有用的。最后，也是最广泛的一点是，关于宏观经济政策的大部分公开辩论都集中在其分配效应上，即政策变化对谁有利、谁受损。拟议中的研究正是为了提高经济学家评估政策对宏观经济中不同群体的量化影响的能力--富人和穷人、技术人员和非技术人员、就业者和失业者。这项拟议的研究如果成功，最终将有助于政策制定者做出更明智的决定。

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.