NBER Publications by Horag Choi

Trending current accounts pose a challenge for intertemporal open-economy macro models. This paper shows that a two-country representative-agent business cycle model is able to explain the historical time-paths of the US and Japanese current accounts, both of which display trends but in opposite directions. Households have a state-dependent subjective discount factor such that they become relatively impatient (patient) when societal consumption is abnormally high (low). We present agents in the model with historical observations on the exogenous state variables, run the economy, and compare the current account implied by the model with the data. We find that the model generates national saving behavior that matches the current account's trend. Investment dynamics are important for explaini...

We study the evolution of the U.S. current account in a two-country dynamic stochastic endowment model in which a single non-state contingent bond is the only internationally traded asset. The paper focuses on the world `saving glut' as the primary cause of continual deterioration in the current account and departs from the standard framework by introducing a three-parameter model of the subjective discount factor that depends on societal (per capita) variables that are external to household choices. When agents in the model are presented with U.S. and rest-of-world endowment data as the realization of the exogenous state vector, endogenously driven short-run international differences in subjective discounting that display increasing relative U.S. impatience create saving and current accou...