Topics in the Study of Fluctuations: Business Cycles and Household Formation and Corner Solutions in New Keynesian Models

波动研究主题：新凯恩斯主义模型中的经济周期和家庭形成及角点解决方案

• 批准号: 1156228
• 负责人: Jose-Victor Rios-Rull
• 金额: $ 25.82万
• 依托单位: University of Minnesota-Twin Cities
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2012
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2012-03-15 至 2016-02-29
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1156228&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Topics; Study; Fluctuations; Business; Cycles

AbstractOver time, as people get richer, household size declines: young people move out of their family house earlier, young couples do not live with their parents, older people do not move back with their children, people spend a bigger fraction of their time as singles. A related little known feature is that similar behavior occurs during business cycles: in recessions people tend to live in larger households, while the opposite happens in expansions. This is mostly due to young people in distress moving in with their parents, although there are other margins at work: divorces get delayed, people move in with their siblings or friends. Studies of the business cycles have ignored this margin, and the plan of the first part of the project is to close this gap. Movements in household size over the cycle are important for various reasons. Taking into account that people can move in with others gives a more accurate picture of how willing they are to change the hours that they work over expansions and recessions, and it also gives a very different picture of how good people are at bearing the consequences of economic adversity. So it has potential implicationsboth for the performance of the economy in the aggregate, and for the study of how the effects of business cycles trickle down in the lives of people.The project involves posing artificial economies populated by stable people, those that are older and married, and by not-so-stable people, the young, the unmarried. In these artificial economies, the not-so-stable people have the option of moving in with stable people in certain circumstances that are more prevalent during recessions. The project will then compare the performance of these artificial economies where household size is moving with standard models of the business cycle that ignore this margin and it will measure the adjustments that the latter would need in order to have the main properties of economies with movements in household size. To carry out this type of exercise, there is a need to carefully measure the willingness and ability of people to move in with others. The artificial economies that will be built will have to share with the data the behavior of household composition over the business cycle. Further down the road, the insights provided by the project will be used to construct artificial economies populated by individual agents that form and destroy households (they move out of their parents, get married and divorce, have children who in turn move out) in ways that are similar to those in the U.S., but that are affected by current economic conditions. This feature will be useful as it complements standard artificial economies in the literature where people and households are taken to be either one and the same, or unchanged over time.The project has another part more technical that has to do with the solution methods of some models. The existing methods to solve these models are based on assumptions that certain global considerations are not relevant and use what are called local techniques. Unfortunately, whether these global conditions are satisfied or not are not checked. This part of the project builds global methods that take into account those global considerations. An example of this issue is the following: firms sometimes cannot change the wages of their employees, and they face oscillating demand. What standard methods assume is that these demand oscillations are small and they are accommodated by changing the number of workers hired. It is possible, however that when demand increases are large, there are just not enough workers willing to be hired at those fixed wages (this is the global condition that is assumed not to be violated). Current methods proceed as if there are always available workers, and there are sound reasons to do so when demand increases are small enough. However, sometimes the demand increases are large. The project plans to use methods that accommodate the possibility that workers cannot be found.

随着时间的推移，随着人们变得越来越富有，家庭规模却在下降：年轻人更早地搬出自己的家，年轻夫妇不和父母住在一起，老年人不和孩子一起搬回来，人们单身的时间占比更大。一个鲜为人知的相关特征是，在商业周期中也会出现类似的行为：在经济衰退期间，人们倾向于住在更大的家庭中，而在经济扩张期间，情况则相反。这主要是由于陷入困境的年轻人搬去与父母同住，尽管在工作中也有其他的优势：离婚被推迟，人们搬去与兄弟姐妹或朋友同住。商业周期的研究忽略了这一差距，项目第一部分的计划是缩小这一差距。由于各种原因，家庭规模在周期中的变动很重要。考虑到人们可以与他人同住，可以更准确地反映出他们在经济扩张和经济衰退期间改变工作时间的意愿，也可以很好地反映出人们在承受经济逆境后果方面的表现。因此，它不仅对总体经济表现有潜在的影响，而且对研究商业周期对人们生活的影响有潜在的影响。这个项目涉及到人造经济，由稳定的人组成，那些年长和已婚的人，以及不那么稳定的人，年轻人，未婚者。在这些人造经济中，不太稳定的人可以选择在某些情况下与稳定的人住在一起，这种情况在经济衰退期间更为普遍。然后，该项目将把这些家庭规模正在变动的人工经济体的表现与忽略这一边际的商业周期标准模型进行比较，并将衡量后者需要进行的调整，以便获得家庭规模变动经济体的主要属性。为了进行这种类型的练习，有必要仔细衡量人们与他人同居的意愿和能力。将要建立的人工经济将不得不与商业周期中的家庭构成行为数据共享。在未来的道路上，该项目提供的见解将被用于构建由个体主体组成的人工经济，这些个体主体形成和破坏家庭（他们离开父母，结婚和离婚，有了孩子，孩子又搬出去），其方式与美国类似，但会受到当前经济状况的影响。这一特征将是有用的，因为它补充了文献中标准的人工经济，在这些文献中，人们和家庭要么是相同的，要么随着时间的推移而不变。项目的另一部分技术性更强，与一些模型的解决方法有关。解决这些模型的现有方法是基于某些全局考虑不相关的假设，并使用所谓的局部技术。不幸的是，没有检查是否满足这些全局条件。项目的这一部分构建了考虑到那些全局考虑的全局方法。这个问题的一个例子如下：公司有时不能改变员工的工资，他们面临着需求的波动。标准方法的假设是，这些需求波动很小，可以通过改变雇佣工人的数量来调节。然而，当需求大幅增长时，有可能就是没有足够多的工人愿意以这些固定工资受雇（这是假定不会违反的全球条件）。目前的方法似乎总是有可用的工人，而且当需求增长足够小时，有充分的理由这样做。然而，有时需求增长很大。该项目计划使用考虑到无法找到工人的可能性的方法。