Suchergebnisse

This paper examines the consequences of international financial integration in a two-sector heterogeneous-agent dynamic general equilibrium model of occupational choice with financial constraints and idiosyncratic risks. We discuss the macroeconomic and distributional effects of financial market integration for small economies which differ only with respect to the tightness of constraints on the domestic credit market. The results contribute to an explanation of the "Lucas paradox", i.e. the empirical observation of capital flowing from poor to rich countries, where lending countries are characterized by tighter domestic constraints and lower capital returns. Capital market liberalization goes along with adjustments towards the world return. Capital-exporting countries experience an increase in GNP, whereas the GDP effect is of ambiguous sign and driven by the tightness of the domestic credit market. Countries with less tight constraints or unlimited access to external business financing loose throughout integration due to a decline in aggregate output and a very unequal distribution of welfare gains and losses in the underlying heterogeneous-agent economy. We find that international integration is only beneficial for economies where financial constraints on entrepreneurial activity are very tight. Here, we observe an accumulation-driven rise in the entrepreneurship rate, overall positive output effects and welfare gains for all members of society.

We discuss long-run growth in an economy which is subject to aggregate productivity shocks affecting all factors of production. We demonstrate that the presence of labor income risk unambiguously is an important determinant of long-run expected growth. The issue of dynamic inefficiency of the underlying allocation is related to the size of the risk premium on capital return. The paper also examines the effects distributive disturbances and elastic labor supply, the latter giving rise to the possibility of multiple equilibria.

This paper employs a stochastic endogenous growth model with productive government expenditure to analyze the macroeconomic effects of income taxation. We demonstrate that in the presence of capital and income risk the impact of taxation on consumption choice as well as on economic growth is ambiguous as it affects the mean as well as the variance of disposable income. We observe that the effects of taxation crucially depend on the degree of risk aversion and on the capital income share. Nevertheless, it is possible to solve for welfare maximizing policies. Compared to the deterministic setting, for the optimal policy design additional conditions have to be met.

This paper investigates the effects of monopolistic competition on entrepreneurial risk-taking in a general equilibrium model. In this context, occupational choice of risk averse agents is biased towards firm ownership. In this case, the inefficiencies due to the presence of non-diversifiable risk are partly compensated by inefficiencies arising from imperfect competition. Comparative static results show that too many firms remain in the market for an increase in the degree of risk aversion, thereby mutually deteriorating profit opportunities, which provides an explanation for the empirically observed comparably low risk premium on entrepreneurial risk.

This paper discusses a twosector neoclassical overlapping generations economy with intermediate and final goods in the spirit of Romer (1990). The risk averse agents engage in one of two alternative occupations: either firm-ownership in the intermediate goods sector, characterized by monopolistic competition, or employment as a worker in this sector. The occupational choice under risk endogenizes the number of firms and products in the intermediate goods industry. Since entrepreneurial profits are stochastic, an inefficiently low number of agents chooses firm-ownership. We find that expected profits of monopolists do not vanish in equilibrium and that the level of economic performance is inefficiently low due to the presence of risk. This result carries over to a suboptimally low growth rate in an enodgenous growth context.

Dieser Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über Ansatzpunkte und Möglichkeiten zur Integration von Lernprozessen in volkswirtschaftliche Fragestellungen. Es werden alternative Methoden vorgestellt, individuelle aber auch gesellschaftliche Lernenvorgänge in ökonomischen Modellen zu erfassen.