Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, Research Department staff report ;

"We study inferences about the dynamics of labor adjustment obtained by the "gap methodology" of Caballero and Engel and Caballero, Engel and Haltiwanger . In that approach, the policy function for employment growth is assumed to depend on an unobservable gap between the target and current levels of employment. Using time series observations, these studies reject the partial adjustment model and find that aggregate employment dynamics depend on the cross-sectional distribution of employment gaps. Thus, nonlinear adjustment at the plant level appears to have aggregate implications. We argue that this conclusion is not justified: these findings of nonlinearities in time series data may reflect mismeasurement of the gaps rather than the aggregation of plant-level nonlinearities"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site.

"Central to ongoing debates over the desirability of monetary unions is a supposed trade-off, outlined by Mundell : a monetary union reduces transactions costs but renders stabilization policy less effective. If shocks across countries are sufficiently correlated, then, according to this argument, delegating monetary policy to a single central bank is not very costly and a monetary union is desirable"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site.

"Innovations and their adoption are the keys to growth and development. Innovations are less socially useful, but more profitable for the innovator, when they are adopted slowly and the innovator remains a monopolist. For this reason, rent-seeking, both public and private, plays an important role in determining the social usefulness of innovations. This paper examines the political economy of intellectual property, analyzing the trade-off between private and public rent-seeking. While it is true in principle that public rent-seeking may be a substitute for private rent-seeking, it is not true that this results always either in less private rent-seeking or in a welfare improvement. When the public sector itself is selfish and behaves rationally, we may experience the worst of public and private rent-seeking together"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site.

"The data show that an increase in government provided old-age pensions is strongly correlated with a reduction in fertility. What type of model is consistent with this finding? We explore this question using two models of fertility, the one by Barro and Becker (1989), and the one inspired by Caldwell and developed by Boldrin and Jones (2002). In the Barro and Becker model parents have children because they perceive their children's lives as a continuation of their own. In the Boldrin and Jones' framework parents procreate because the children care about their old parents' utility, and thus provide them with old age transfers. The effect of increases in government provided pensions on fertility in the Barro and Becker model is very small, and inconsistent with the empirical findings. The effect on fertility in the Boldrin and Jones model is sizeable and accounts for between 55 and 65% of the observed Europe-US fertility differences both across countries and across time and over 80% of the observed variation seen in a broad cross-section of countries. Another key factor affecting fertility the Boldrin and Jones model is the access to capital markets, which can account for the other half of the observed change in fertility in developed countries over the last 70 years"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site.

"We analyze financial collapses, such as the one that occurred during the U.S. Great Depression, from the perspective of a monetary model with multiple equilibria.The multiplicity arises from the presence of a strategic complementarity due to increasing returns to scale in the intermediation process.Intermediaries provide the link between savers and firms who require working capital for production.Fluctuations in the intermediation process are driven by variations in the confidence agents place in the financial system.From a positive perspective, our model matches closely the qualitative changes in important financial and real variables (the currency/deposit ratio, ex-post real interest rates, the level of intermediated activity, deflation, employment and production) over the Great Depression period, an experience often attributed to financial collapse.Further, we show how adding liquidity to the banking system through increases in the money supply is sufficient to overcome strategic uncertainty and thus avoid financial collapse"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site.

"When credit markets to finance investment in human capital are missing, the competitive equilibrium allocation is inefficient. When generations overlap, this failure can be mitigated by properly designed social arrangements. We show that public financing of education and public pensions can be designed to implement an intergenerational transfer scheme supporting the complete market allocation. Neither the public financing of education nor the pension scheme we consider resemble standard ones. In our mechanism, via the public education system, the young borrow from the middle aged to invest in human capital. They pay back the debt via a social security tax, the proceedings of which finance pension payments. When the complete market allocation is achieved, the rate of return implicit in this borrowing-lending scheme should equal the market rate of return"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site.

"Innovation and the adoption of new ideas are fundamental to economic progress. Here we examine the underlying economics of the market for ideas.From a positive perspective, we examine how such markets function with and without government intervention.From a normative perspective, we examine the pitfalls of existing institutions, and how they might be improved.We highlight recent research by ourselves and others challenging the notion that government awards of monopoly through patents and copyright are "the way" to provide appropriate incentives for innovation"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site.

"Intellectual property protection involves a trade-off between the undesirability of monopoly and the desirable encouragement of creation and innovation. As the scale of the market increases, due either to economic and population growth or to the expansion of trade through treaties such as the World Trade Organization, this trade-off changes.We show that, generally speaking, the socially optimal amount of protection decreases as the scale of the market increases.We also provide simple empirical estimates of how much it should decrease"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site.

"In the modern theory of growth, monopoly plays a crucial role both as a cause and an effect of innovation. Innovative firms, it is argued, would have insufficient incentive to innovate should the prospect of monopoly power not be present. This theme of monopoly runs throughout the theory of growth, international trade, and industrial organization. We argue that monopoly is neither needed for, nor a necessary consequence of, innovation. In particular, intellectual property is not necessary for, and may hurt more than help, innovation and growth. We argue that, as a practical matter, it is more likely to hurt"--Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis web site.