Credit Market Frictions, Business Cycles, and Monetary Policy: The Research Contributions of Charles Carlstrom and Timothy Fuerst

Charles Carlstrom and Timothy Fuerst were prolific and prominent research economists who, until their untimely deaths a few years ago, were long-associated with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Their myriad contributions include the incorporation of financial market imperfections into macroeconomic models and the study of optimal monetary policy. We provide an overview of their work and summarize a few key themes from a research conference held in their honor.

Bubble on real estate: the role of altruism and fiscal policy

In this paper, we are interested in the interplay between real estate bubble, aggregate capital accumulation and taxation in an overlapping generations economy with altruistic households. We consider a three-period overlapping generations model with three key elements: altruism, portfolio choice, and financial market imperfections. Households realise different investment decisions in terms of asset at different periods of life, face a binding borrowing constraint and leave bequests to their children. We show that altruism plays a key role on the existence of a productive real estate bubble, i.e. a bubble in real estate raising physical capital stock and aggregate output. The key mechanism relies on the fact that a real estate bubble raises income of retired households. Because of higher bequests, there children are able to invest more in productive capital. Introducing fiscal policy, we show that raising real estate taxation dampens capital accumulation.

On the Timing and Pricing of Dividends: Reply

Schulz (2016) replicates the findings of van Binsbergen, Brandt, and Koijen (2012)—henceforth, BBK—and agrees that the average pretax returns on short-term dividend strips are higher than those of the index, but argues that the after-tax returns are not. He thus provides a possible economic interpretation of the results in BBK: taxes. Schulz (2016) estimates the differential tax rates of dividends versus capital gains from ex-dividend day returns. We show that these estimated tax rates are suspect and imprecisely measured, peaking at over 100 percent in some periods. The results in BBK are robust to using tax rates from the literature (Sialm 2009). The arguments in Schulz (2016) thus crucially depend on implausibly large tax esti mates. We further discuss two other financial market imperfections discussed in the literature and show that they are also unlikely to explain the results in BBK. (JEL G11, G12, G35)

ENTREPRENEURS, FINANCIERS, AND BOOM–BUST CYCLES

In this paper, a dynamic general equilibrium model with infinitely lived entrepreneurs and financiers is developed to investigate a possible mechanism that explains business cycles and financial crises. The highest growth rate is achievable only if financiers coexist with entrepreneurs, given a certain extent of financial market imperfections. However, if financiers coexist with entrepreneurs, the economy is highly likely to face a financial crisis at certain parameter values. These two-sided implications of the coexistence of entrepreneurs and financiers explain why both instability and high growth are frequently observed in modern economies. Furthermore, our model can obtain countercyclical movements in total factor productivity growth that cannot be explained by the standard real business cycle theory but were observed in the Great Recession of 2007–2008.