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，随着人们变得更富有，家庭规模也在下降：年轻人提早搬出家门，年轻夫妇不和父母住在一起，老年人不搬回家和孩子住在一起，人们单身的时间比例更大。一个相关的鲜为人知的特征是，类似的行为在商业周期中也会发生：在衰退中，人们往往生活在更大的家庭中，而在扩张中，情况则相反。这主要是由于陷入困境的年轻人搬去和父母住在一起，尽管还有其他一些因素在起作用：离婚被推迟，人们搬到兄弟姐妹或朋友那里。对商业周期的研究忽略了这一差距，该项目第一部分的计划是缩小这一差距。由于各种原因，家庭规模在周期内的变动很重要。考虑到人们可以搬到一起住，这让人们更准确地了解了他们在经济扩张和衰退期间改变工作时间的意愿，也提供了一幅非常不同的图景，表明人们有多擅长承担经济逆境的后果。因此，它对整体经济表现以及对商业周期如何影响人们生活的研究都有潜在的影响。该项目涉及建立由稳定的人、年长的和已婚的人以及不太稳定的人、年轻的和未婚的人组成的人工经济。在这些人工经济中，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，这种情况在衰退期间更为普遍。然后，该项目将比较这些家庭规模正在变动的人造经济与忽略这一差额的标准商业周期模型的表现，并将衡量后者所需的调整，以获得家庭规模变动的经济体的主要特征。要进行这种类型的锻炼，需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数据共享整个商业周期中家庭构成的行为。在未来，该项目提供的洞察力将被用来构建由个人代理人组成的人工经济，这些代理人以类似于美国的方式建立和摧毁家庭(他们搬离父母，结婚和离婚，生孩子，然后搬出去)，但受到当前经济状况的影响。这一功能将是有用的，因为它补充了文献中的标准人工经济，在文献中，人和家庭被视为一个和相同的，或者随着时间的推移而不变。该项目还有一个更技术性的部分，与一些模型的求解方法有关。现有的求解这些模型的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。遗憾的是，没有检查这些全球条件是否得到满足。该项目的这一部分建立了考虑到这些全球考虑因素的全球方法。这个问题的一个例子是：公司有时不能改变员工的工资，他们面临着振荡的需求。标准方法的假设是，这些需求波动很小，并通过改变雇佣的工人数量来适应。然而，当需求大幅增长时，有可能只是没有足够的工人愿意以固定工资聘用(这是假设不会被违反的全球条件)。目前的方法就像总是有可用的工人一样进行，当需求增长足够小时，就有充分的理由这样做。然而，有时需求增长很大。该项目计划使用适应找不到工人的可能性的方法。