UC Berkeley

In this dissertation I study recessionary environments in general, placing a special emphasis on the steps that can be taken by policy makers to alleviate the negative consequences of recessions. After the Great Recession, most advanced economies had a prolonged period of low growth and high unemployment that is slowly subsiding. Several economists have proposed the possibility that the economy has entered a regime of "secular stagnation" where demand factors and the Zero Lower Bound lead to persistently low growth. Given the current worldwide decline in interest rates, secular stagnation is a looming risk that should be taken seriously, as it would have a significant impact on welfare. All chapters of this dissertation relate to these issues. The first chapter provides a general motivation of the topic and discusses the relationships between the remaining chapters. In the second chapter, "Going Negative at the Zero Lower Bound", I investigate whether negative rates can provide an antidote against the ZLB, granting monetary authorities more room to perform expansionary policy and combat demand-induced low growth. In the third chapter, "The Cyclical Sensitivity in Estimates of Potential Output", I study whether potential output really decreases permanently after prolonged recessions, or if, in contrast, this is a byproduct of a faulty computation of potential output. I also study whether some structural VAR methodologies can avoid these shortcomings. In the fourth chapter, "Neo-Keynesian Trade", I build a dynamic model that unifies a detailed trade pattern across regions and sectors with monetary non-neutrality. The nominal friction, a downwardly rigid wage, can lead to unemployment in the face of a negative shock if the monetary authority is unwilling or unable to inflate the economy, and this effect can vary substantially across regions depending on their industrial composition. Overall, the evidence in this dissertation indicates that policy makers should do more to combat slow growth, and that they have tools to do so.