Technological Change, the Labor Market and the Stock Market

This paper presents a model in which a partially anticipated technological shock results, in the short-run, in lower investment and higher unemployment. Because of the expectation of future lower profits, the market value of existing firms --and the wages they pay-- decrease before the technology becomes available. When the new technology arrives, the market value of new firms rises, investment and average wages increase, but endogenous gradual adoption results in temporary wage dispersion among identical workers. The model shows that the factors that affect the rate of adoption of a new technology also influence the cross sectional dispersion of labor earnings among identical workers, and firms' market values. The predictions of the model seem to be broadly consistent with the U.S. experience of the last thirty years.

Commentary on What do we know (and not know) about potential output?

Economic development ; Economic conditions

Modern business cycle analysis: a guide to the Prescott-Summers debate

Business cycles

Policy Uncertainty and Informational Monopolies: The Case of Monetary Policy.

In this paper we have presented a model in which perfectly enticipated inflation is superneutral: if the variance of the money (or the growth rate of the money supply in the dynamic interpretation) supply is zero, the real equilibrium is independent of the mean of the money supply.ECONOMIC MODELS ; INFLATION ; MONETARY POLICY

A Convex Model of Equilibrium Growth

Our aim in this paper is to exposit a convex model of equilibrium growth. The model is strictly in the Solow tradition. The model has two features which distinguish it from most other work on the subject. These are, first, that the model is convex on the technological side and, eecond, that fixed fatten are explicitly included. The difference between our model and the standard single sector growth model lies in the fact that the marginal product of capital does not converge to zero as the level of inputs go to infinity. Existence and characterization results are provided along with some preliminary analyses of taxation and international trade policies. It is shown that the long-run growth rate in per capita consumption depends, in the natural way, on the parameters describing tastes and technology. Finally, it is shown that some policies have growth effects while others affect only levels. It is demonstrated that in a free trade equilibrium with taxation national growth rates of consumption and output need not converge.

"Frictions in financial and labor markets": a summary of the 35th Annual Economic Policy Conference

This article contains synopses of the papers presented at the 35th Annual Economic Policy Conference of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis held October 21-22, 2010. The conference theme was “Frictions in Financial and Labor Markets.” Leading participants in this field presented their research and commentary.Labor market ; Financial markets

LabelFusion: A Pipeline for Generating Ground Truth Labels for Real RGBD Data of Cluttered Scenes

Deep neural network (DNN) architectures have been shown to outperform traditional pipelines for object segmentation and pose estimation using RGBD data, but the performance of these DNN pipelines is directly tied to how representative the training data is of the true data. Hence a key requirement for employing these methods in practice is to have a large set of labeled data for your specific robotic manipulation task, a requirement that is not generally satisfied by existing datasets. In this paper we develop a pipeline to rapidly generate high quality RGBD data with pixelwise labels and object poses. We use an RGBD camera to collect video of a scene from multiple viewpoints and leverage existing reconstruction techniques to produce a 3D dense reconstruction. We label the 3D reconstruction using a human assisted ICP-fitting of object meshes. By reprojecting the results of labeling the 3D scene we can produce labels for each RGBD image of the scene. This pipeline enabled us to collect over 1,000,000 labeled object instances in just a few days. We use this dataset to answer questions related to how much training data is required, and of what quality the data must be, to achieve high performance from a DNN architecture

East Asia vs. Latin America: TFP and Human Capital Policies

(None)

The growth effects of monetary policy

This article investigates the relationship between inflation and output, in the data and in standard models. The article reports that empirical cross-country studies generally find a nonlinear, negative relationship between inflation and output, a relationship that standard models cannot come close to reproducing. The article demonstrates that the models' problem may be due to their standard narrow assumption that all money is held by the public for making transactions. When the models are adjusted to also assume that banks are required to hold money, the models do a much better job. The article concludes that researchers interested in studying the effects of monetary policy on growth should shift their attention away from printing money and toward the study of banking and financial regulations.Economic development ; Monetary policy