Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/171542 
Year of Publication: 
2008
Series/Report no.: 
Economics Working Paper Series No. 08/99
Publisher: 
ETH Zurich, CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research, Zurich
Abstract: 
We consider a real business cycle model with a productive externality and an aggregate non- convex technology set µa la Benhabib and Farmer embodying capacity utilization, which exhibits indeterminacy of the steady state and multiplicity of deterministic equilibria under plausible values of the increasing returns to scale. The aim of the paper is to rank these different equilibria according to the initial value of consumption using both a linear-quadratic approximation, extensively explained by Benigno and Woodford [2006a, 2006b], and simulation methods. We study the implications of such a ranking in terms of smoothness of the welfare-maximizing trajectory and show that the welfare- maximizing consumption and labor paths are all the smoother since the level of increasing returns is low. At last, we show that this solution provides a good benchmark for judging the desirability of the stabilization policy proposed by Guo and Lansing [1997].
Subjects: 
Increasing returns
Local indeterminacy
Welfare analysis
Numerical Methods
JEL: 
E32
E4
H61
O42
O47
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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