Fabrizio Perri

• Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Commonly used consumption/saving models have radically dierent implications for households response to income shocks, ranging from the hands-to-mouth model, where consumption bears all the adjustment, to the complete markets model, where wealth bears all the adjustment. We use the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth, which is the only ava...

Over the past 50 years, households in the United States have experienced changes in earnings dynamics that have resulted in a large increase in inequality. This paper assesses the impact of these changes on aggregate growth and welfare. We begin by inspecting a simple statistical decomposition of aggregate earnings growth using data from the Panel...

We develop an ECON-EPI network model to evaluate policies designed to improve health and economic outcomes during a pandemic. Relative to the standard epidemiological SIR set-up, we explicitly model social contacts among individuals and allow for heterogeneity in their number and stability. In addition, we embed the network in a structural economic...

We study the problem of a monetary authority pursuing an exchange rate policy that is inconsistent with interest rate parity because of a binding zero lower bound constraint. The resulting violation in interest rate parity generates an inflow of capital that the monetary authority needs to absorb by accumulating foreign reserves. We show that these...

We document that declining hours worked are the primary driver of widening inequality in the bottom half of the male labor earnings distribution in the United States over the past 52 years. This decline in hours is heavily concentrated in recessions: hours and earnings at the bottom fall sharply in recessions and do not fully recover in subsequent...

Between 2007 and 2013, U.S. households experienced a large and persistent decline in net worth. The objective of this article is to study the business cycle implications of such a decline. We first develop a tractable monetary model in which households face idiosyncratic unemployment risk that they can partially self-insure using savings. A low lev...

This is the second of two volumes containing papers and commentaries presented at the Eleventh World Congress of the Econometric Society, held in Montreal, Canada in August 2015. These papers provide state-of-the-art guides to the most important recent research in economics. The book includes surveys and interpretations of key developments in econo...

The goal of this chapter is to study how, and by how much, household income, wealth, and preference heterogeneity amplify and propagate a macroeconomic shock. We focus on the US Great Recession of 2007–09 and proceed in two steps. First, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we document the patterns of household income, consumption, a...

In January 2015, in the face of sustained capital inflows, the Swiss National Bank abandoned the floor for the Swiss Franc against the Euro, a decision which led to the appreciation of the Swiss Franc. The objective of this paper is to present a simple numerical framework that help us better understand this episode, which we label a “reverse specul...

In a standard two-country international macro model, the paper asks whether imposing restrictions on international noncontingent borrowing and lending is ever desirable. The answer is yes. If one country imposes capital controls unilaterally, it can generate favorable changes in the dynamics of equilibrium interest rates and the terms of trade, and...

This paper analyzes the eects of the Great Recession on dierent generations. While older generations have suered the largest decline in wealth due to the collapse in asset prices, younger generations have suered the largest decline in labor income. Potentially, the young may benet from the purchase of cheaper assets, especially if they have access...

This paper is structured in three parts. The first part outlines the methodological steps, involving both theoretical and empirical work, for assessing whether an observed allocation of resources across countries is efficient. The second part applies the methodology to the long-run allocation of capital and consumption in a large cross section of c...

This paper documents, using county level data, some geographical features of the US business cycle over the past 30 years, with particular focus on the Great Recession. It shows that county level unemployment rates are spatially dispersed and spatially correlated, and documents how these characteristics evolve during recessions. It then shows that...

We study the effect of financial integration (through banks) on the transmission of international business cycles. In a sample of 20 developed countries between 1978 and 2009 we find that, in periods without financial crises, increases in bilateral banking linkages are associated with more divergent output cycles.This relation is significantly weak...

We then explore whether a simple partial equilibrium Friedman-style permanent income model is consistent with the empirical facts. Our preliminary findings suggest that the PIH model provides a reasonably good approximation of the facts in the data, but only if transitory income shocks are the predominant source of income changes and if measurement...

In this paper, we explore the impact of the Great Recession on economic inequality and redistribution in the United States. We analyze many sorts of inequality (in earnings, disposable income, consumption expenditures and wealth) for different sections of the economic distribution.

I document real exchange rates and terms of trade are pro-cyclical in emerging and counter-cyclical in developed economies. I show these facts provide identification between competing views of fluctuations in emerging markets. I consider a version of a two-country framework of Backus, Kehoe and Kydland (1994) and show the two prices are counter-cyc...

The 2008-2009 crisis was characterized by an unprecedented degree of international synchronization as all major industrialized countries experienced large macroeconomic contractions around the date of Lehman bankruptcy. At the same time countries also experienced large and synchronized tightening of credit conditions. We present a two-country model...

This is a theory of total factor productivity based on measured capital market im-perfections and costs of creating and operating formal sector firms. We develop a firm dynamics model with endogenous formal and informal sectors where firms face a technol-ogy adoption opportunity. The model predicts that countries with a low degree of debt enforceme...

The paper studies a fiscal policy instrument that can reduce fiscal distortions without affecting revenues, in a politically viable way. The instrument is a private contract (tax buyout), offered by the government to each citizen, whereby the citizen can choose to pay a fixed price in exchange for a given reduction in her tax rate for a period of t...

We conduct a systematic empirical study of cross-sectional inequality in the United States, integrating data from the Current Population Survey, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and the Survey of Consumer Finances. In order to understand how different dimensions of inequality are related via choices, markets, and...

All data and codes necessary to replicate results of the article. Also includes the data for figures.

Can public income insurance through progressive income taxation improve the allocation of risk in an economy where private risk sharing is incomplete? The answer depends crucially on the fundamental friction that limits private risk sharing in the first place. If risk sharing is limited because insurance markets are missing for model-exogenous reas...

This paper provides an introduction to the special issue of the Review of Economic Dynamics on "Cross Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists''. The issue documents, for nine countries, the level and the evolution, over time and over the life cycle, of several dimensions of economic inequality, including wages, labor earnings, income, consumption, and...

Raising children is an important productive activity for a society since children's out-comes depend on their parents' investments. This paper develops an intergenerational framework in which adult outcomes are determined by parental investment, analyzes Pareto efficient allocations, and derives implications for policy. There are two key frictions:...

In this paper, we present a tractable model of a small open economy where the main driver of international borrowing is investment. Debt is non-state-contingent and the choice of default is endogenous, as in Eaton and Gersovitz (1981). By introducing a simple AK technology, we obtain a setup where countries can be permanent debtors (or permanent cr...

This paper studies the maturity composition and the term structure of interest rate spreads of government debt in emerging markets. In the data, when interest rate spreads rise, debt maturity shortens and the spread on short-term bonds is higher than on long-term bonds. To account for this pattern, we build a dynamic model of international borrowin...

We evaluate the asset pricing implications of a class of models in which risk sharing is imperfect because of limited enforcement of intertemporal contracts. Lustig (2004) has shown that in such a model the asset pricing kernel can be written as a simple function of the aggregate consumption growth rate and the growth rate of consumption of the set...

This paper documents time trends for U.S. cross-sectional inequality in individual wages and hours, and household earnings and consumption. The empirical analysis covers the period 1967-2006 and is based on three data sources: CPS, PSID and CEX. An effort is made to create comparable samples across the three data sets.

The majority of OECD countries has experienced a reduction in macroeconomic volatility during the last two decades. This period is also characterized by a gradual liberalization of the capital accounts in these countries. We first show that, on average, countries/periods with more open capital markets are associated with lower macroeconomic volatil...

This article illustrates when limited enforcement of contracts induces enforcement constraints (limits to intertemporal exchange) or default (the breaking of intertemporal promises with the associated punishment), and sheds light on how enforcement policies should be related to the observed frequency of default. When limited enforcement is the only...

In simple one-good international macro models, the presence of non-diversifiable labor income risk means that country portfolios should be heavily biased toward foreign assets. The fact that the opposite pattern of diversification is observed empirically constitutes the international diversification puzzle. We embed a portfolio choice decision in a...

We evaluate the asset pricing implications of a class of models in which risk sharing is imperfect because of the limited enforcement of intertemporal contracts. Lustig (2004) has shown that in such a model the asset pricing kernel can be written as a simple function of the aggregate consumption growth rate and the growth rate of consumption of the...

The early 1980s marked the onset of two striking features of the current world macroeconomy: the fall in U.S. business cycle volatility (the ggreat moderationh) and the large and persistent U.S. external imbalance. In this paper, we argue that an external imbalance is a natural consequence of the great moderation. If a country experiences a fall in...

We explore the relationship between macroeconomic volatility of a country and its net foreign asset position. We show that in OECD economies over the period 1970-2005 changes in country specific macroeconomic volatility are strongly positively associated with changes in net external asset position. We show that this relation arises naturally in the...

Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we first document that the recent increase in income inequality in the U.S. has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise in consumption inequality. Much of this divergence is due to different trends in within-group inequality, which has increased significantly for income, but little for consumpti...

Consumption models with endogenous debt constraints differ from standard incomplete markets models in their predictions about an individual household's ability to smooth consumption across time and states of the world. In this paper we develop these differences, both theoretically and quantitatively. We then use data from the U.S. Consumer Expendit...

A central puzzle in international finance is that real exchange rates are volatile and, in stark contradiction to efficient risk-sharing, negatively correlated with cross-country consumption ratios. This paper shows that a standard international business cycle model with incomplete asset markets augmented with distribution services can account quan...

Dirk Krueger is Professor of Economics, especially Macroeconomics at Goethe University Frankfurt (Germany). Fabrizio Perri is Associate Professor of Economics at the Stern School of Business, New York University and currently visiting the Research Department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. They have both worked, often in collaboration,...

Currency crises are usually associated with large nominal and real depreciations. In some countries depreciations are perceived to be very costly (“fear of floating”). In this paper we try to understand the reasons behind this fear. We first look at episodes of currency crises in the 1990s and establish that countries entering a crisis with high le...

We introduce adaptive learning behavior into a general-equilibrium life-cycle economy with capital accumulation. Agents form forecasts of the rate of return to capital assets using least-squares autoregressions on past data. We show that, in contrast to the perfect-foresight dynamics, the dynamical system under learning possesses equilibria that ar...

We find that in a sample of emerging economies business cycles are more volatile than in developed ones, real interest rates are countercyclical and lead the cycle, consumption is more volatile than output and net exports are strongly countercyclical. We present a model of a small open economy, where the real interest rate is decomposed in an inter...

This study demonstrates how constrained efficient allocations can arise endogenously as equilibria in an economy with a limited ability to enforce contracts and with private agents behaving competitively, taking a set of taxes as given. The taxes in this economy limit risk-sharing and arise in an equilibrium of a dynamic game between governments of...

In this paper we demonstrate that different incomplete markets models yield qualitatively distinct predictions about how consumption growth responds to declines and increases in earnings. Markets are either exogenously incomplete in that households can only trade a risk-free bond, subject to a possibly binding borrowing constraint, or endogenously...

We investigate the welfare consequences of the stark increase in wage and earnings inequality in the US over the last 30 years. Our data stems from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which is the only US data set that contains information on wages, hours worked, earnings and consumption for the same cross section of US households. We first document t...

In this paper we do two things. First we document that over the last 40 years the U.S. business cycle has become less synchronized with the cycle in the rest of the world. Second we try to explain why this has happened. We use a general-equilibrium model as a tool to discriminate between two alternative explanations: (i) a change in the nature of r...

Faced with income fluctuations, countries smooth their consumption by raising (lowering) savings when income is high (low). How much of these savings do countries invest at home and abroad? In other words, what are the effects of fluctuations in savings on domestic investment and the current account? In the long run, we find that countries invest t...

This Paper first documents the evolution of the cross-sectional income and consumption distribution in the US in the past 25 years. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey we find that a rising income inequality has not been accompanied by a corresponding rise in consumption inequality. Over the period from 1972-98 the standard deviation of...

In Italy, as in many other countries, the years immediately after 1929 were characterized by a major slowdown in economic activity. We argue that the depth and duration of the crisis cannot be explained solely by productivity shocks. We present a model in which trade restrictions together with wage rigidities produce a significant slowdown in econo...

Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (1992), Baxter and Crucini (1995), and Stockman and Tesar (1995) find two major discrepancies between standard international business cycle models with complete markets and the data: In the models, cross-country correlations are much higher for consumption than for output, while in the data the opposite is true; and cross...

We present a two-country, two-good model in which there do not exist any markets for international trade in financial assets. We compare the predictions of this model to those of two other models, one in which markets are complete and a second in which a single non-contingent bond is traded. We find that only the financial autarky model can generat...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

This paper investigates the relationship between the cross-sectional income and consumption distribution in the US. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Current Population Survey we …nd that in the last two decades a rising income inequality has not been accompanied by a rise in consumption inequality. The Gini coe¢cient of after...

This paper documents the empirical relation between the interest rates that emerging economies face in international capital markets and their business cycles. The dataset used in the study includes quarterly data for Argentina during 1983-2000 and for Brazil, Mexico, Korea, and Philippines,during 1994-2000. In this sample, interest rates are very...

In this appendix we provide more extensive proofs of results in the main paper. In particular we explicitly prove results that are direct adap- tations of arguments from Atkeson and Lucas (1995) and hence omitted in the main paper We also provide a detailed discussion of the algorithm used in the quantitative exercises of the main papers.