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，随着人们变得更加富有，家庭规模逐渐缩小：年轻人更早地搬出他们的家庭住宅，年轻夫妇不与父母住在一起，老年人不与孩子一起搬回来，人们单身的时间越来越多。一个相关的鲜为人知的特征是，在商业周期中也会出现类似的行为：在经济衰退中，人们倾向于生活在大家庭中，而在经济扩张中，情况正好相反。这主要是因为处于困境中的年轻人搬去和父母住，尽管还有其他的边际因素在起作用：离婚被推迟，人们搬去和兄弟姐妹或朋友住。对商业周期的研究忽略了这一差距，本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化很重要。考虑到人们可以和其他人一起住，可以更准确地了解他们在经济扩张和经济衰退期间改变工作时间的意愿，也可以更好地了解人们在经济逆境中的承受能力。因此，它对整体经济的表现以及研究商业周期的影响如何渗透到人们的生活中都有潜在的意义。该项目涉及到由稳定的人组成的人造经济体，这些人是老年人和已婚者，以及不那么稳定的人，年轻人和未婚者。在这些人为的经济中，不那么稳定的人可以选择在某些情况下与稳定的人一起生活，这些情况在经济衰退期间更为普遍。然后，该项目将比较家庭规模不断变化的这些人为经济体的业绩与忽略这一差额的商业周期标准模式，并将衡量后者需要作出的调整，以便具有家庭规模不断变化的经济体的主要特性。为了开展这类工作，需要仔细衡量人们与他人同居的意愿和能力。人工 即将建立的经济体将不得不与数据共享家庭组成在商业周期中的行为。在未来，该项目提供的见解将用于构建人工经济体，这些经济体由个体代理人组成，以类似于美国的方式形成和摧毁家庭（他们离开父母，结婚和离婚，生孩子，然后再搬出去），但受到当前经济形势的影响。这一特点将是有用的，因为它补充了文献中的标准人工经济，在文献中，人和家庭被认为是同一个人，或者随着时间的推移而不变。该项目还有另一个更技术性的部分，与一些模型的求解方法有关。解决这些模型的现有方法是基于某些全局考虑因素不相关的假设，并使用所谓的局部技术。不幸的是，这些全局条件是否满足没有检查。项目的这一部分建立了考虑到这些全球因素的全球方法。这个问题的一个例子是：企业有时无法改变其雇员的工资，他们面临着波动的需求。标准方法假设的是，这些需求波动很小，并且通过改变雇佣的工人数量来适应。然而，当需求大幅增长时，有可能没有足够的工人愿意以这些固定工资被雇用（这是假设不会被违反的全球条件）。目前的方法似乎总是有可用的工人，当需求增长足够小时，有充分的理由这样做。但是，有时候需求的增长很大。该项目计划使用的方法，适应的可能性，工人无法找到。