Dynamic Models of Heterogeneous Economics with Applications to Poverty and Business Cycles

关于反贫困项目的有效性，在公共政策方面存在着很大的争论。与此同时，社会学的研究已经得出结论，内城贫困的一个本质特征是它的持久性。由于没有强调贫穷是一个动态的过程，最近对贫穷的大多数分析都有若干弱点。特别是，这些研究通常不试图解释非贫困家庭是如何变得贫困的，也不试图探索一些贫困家庭如何摆脱贫困。此外，很少有人关注社区形成的动态，这对于理解公共住房、学校财政均等化或公共汽车等政策举措如何扭转贫困至关重要。这个项目的贡献来自于研究贫困和不平等的出现作为一个动态过程的结果。该项目构建了一个明确的动态和随机的邻里形成、人力资本形成和职业成就模型。本研究的目的是了解社区对人力资本形成的影响如何与内生社区形成相互作用，从而在同一经济体中产生富裕和贫穷的社区。来自收入动态小组研究的父母和子女的大样本与各州教育委员会提供的每位学生支出数据相结合，以测试理论研究的实质性和政策意义。这个项目有三个总体目标。首先，它继续发展模拟异质经济的随机过程方法。这些方法在建立不完全市场和协调失效的动态模型方面应该是普遍有用的。其次，这项工作被应用于研究贫困和贫民窟形成的动态。第三，分析了一类基于协调的商业周期模型，以便更好地理解不完全市场在总波动中的作用。

A large debate exists in public policy over the efficacy of anti- poverty programs. At the same time, research in sociology has concluded that an essential characteristic of inner city poverty is its persistence. Most of the recent analyses of poverty suffer from several weaknesses due to the lack of emphasis on poverty as a dynamic process. In particular, these studies generally do not attempt to explain how nonpoor families ever become poor, not do they attempt to explore how some poor families can escape poverty. Further, little attention has been given to the dynamics of neighborhood formation, which is essential to understanding how policy initiatives, such as public housing, school finance equalization or busing can reverse poverty. The contribution of this project comes from studying the emergence of poverty and inequality as outcomes of a dynamic process. The project constructs an explicitly dynamic and stochastic model of neighborhood formation, human capital formation and occupational achievement. The goal of this research is to understand how community influences on human capital formation can interact with endogenous community formation to produce rich and poor communities within the same economy. The large sample of parents and offspring from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics is combined with per pupil expenditure data available from states' Boards of Education in order to test the substantive and policy implications of the theoretical research. This project has three overall goals. First, it continues to the development of stochastic process methods of modelling heterogenous economies. These methods should be generally useful in developing dynamic models of incomplete markets and coordination failure. Second, this work is applied to the study of the dynamics of poverty and ghetto formation. Third, a class of coordination-based business cycle models are analyzed in order to better understand the role of incomplete markets in aggregate fluctuations.