How to Recover From the Great Recession: The Case of a Two-Sector Small Open Economy with Traded and Non-Traded Capital

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, the world economy has been suffering from the Great Recession characterized by high and persistent unemployment as well as drastic fall in asset prices. Real business cycle theory or new-Keynesian economics which has been the dominant paradigm in macroeconomics for the last four decades is unable to explain the high and persistent unemployment during the Great Recession. This implies that the economics of Keynes should be taken seriously again as a tool to explain the Great Recession. Farmer (2012) proposes a new way of interpreting the economics of Keynes by providing it with a solid micro-foundation based on labor markets with search. According to Farmer (2012), aggregate economic activity independently depends on the long-term self-fulfilling expectations about the stock prices. As a consequence, the government or the central bank should implement a policy that influences the public's confidence about the stock market. For an open economy like the Korean economy, it is not only stock price but also the price of asset such as house that matters more for the aggregate economic activity. Households in the Korean economy hold more than 70 percent of their wealth in the form of real estate asset, especially housing asset. This makes the public's confidence about the future prices of houses even more important in explaining the business cycles of the Korean economy. Policymakers should implement policies to improve the confidence of households about the housing market to recover from the recession caused by a fall in house prices. Little theoretical work has been done in explaining fluctuations in the aggregate economic activity from the point of house prices. This paper develops a small open economy model with traded and non-traded capital based on Farmer (2012) and shows that the aggregate economic activity also independently depends on the households' self-fulfilling expectations about the future prices of non-traded asset such as houses.