时间：2017年12月12日（周二）12：00-13：00

地点：同济大厦A楼502室

题目： Unsecured Credit, Product Variety, and Unemployment Dynamics

主讲人：Mario Silva

语言：英语

Abstract:  “Revolving credit expanded from 1% of consumption in 1970 to 10% in 2009 and now primarily determines short-run household liquidity. It comoves positively with product variety and negatively with unemployment. I develop a theory of the business cycle comovement of revolving credit and product variety and explore its ability to fit unemployment and other United States postwar time series. The Mortensen-Pissarides model is augmented with an endogenous borrowing constraint and free entry of monopolistically competitive firms. I identify financial shocks as residuals from the debt limit equation and include them alongside productivity shocks. The model reproduces stylized facts in the data and amplifies both shocks through a two-way feedback: higher debt limits encourage firm entry and raise product variety (the entry channel), and greater variety makes default more costly and thereby raises the equilibrium debt level (the consumption value channel). Moreover, compared to a counterfactual economy in which either channel is shut down, the cumulative response of unemployment to a one-standard deviation productivity or credit shock is 70-80% larger. The percentage amplification rises modestly with the size of the shock.  Furthermore, only the model economy generates a procyclical response of the credit-to-consumption ratio, as observed in the data. The model with financial shocks better approximates the time series for unemployment, vacancies, and revolving credit.”

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