E20 Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment: General (includes Measurement and Data)

March 1, 2009

We develop a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with an heterogeneous banking sector. We introduce endogenous default probabilities for both firms and banks, and allow for bank regulation and liquidity injection into the interbank market. Our aim is to understand the interactions between the banking sector and the rest of the economy, as well as the importance of supervisory and monetary authorities to restore financial stability. The model is calibrated against real US data and used for simulations. We show that Basel regulation reduces the steady state but improves the resilience of the economy to shocks, and that moving from Basel I to Basel II is procyclical. We also show that liquidity injections relieve financial instability but have ambiguous effects on output fluctuations.

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March 1, 2009

We explore the long and short run relationship between private consumption, disposable income and housing and financial wealth approximated by price indices for a panel of industrialized countries. Consumption, income and wealth are cointegrated in their common, but not in their idiosyncratic components. This stresses the relevance of inter-national spillovers to explain aggregate consumption behaviour. The cointegrating vector is robust and in line with the life cycle permanent income hypothesis. The in-come elasticity does not differ from unity, and wealth elasticities are within a range of 2 to 5 percent. According to the error correction mechanism, consumption could not be interpreted as a weakly exogenous series.

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