北航经管学院“经济学系列论坛”系列讲座
（2024年第 9 期，总第 17 期）
讲座题目：The Natural Rate of Interest and Structural Change
讲座时间：2024.5.28（周二）10:00-11:30
讲座地点：新主楼A1148
讲座嘉宾：王彬 副教授
讲座嘉宾 简介
王彬，暨南大学经济学院副教授，博士毕业于香港城市大学，研究方向为宏观经济学、国际金融以及政治经济学，研究话题包括生产网络、低利率环境、晋升激励、劳动搜寻匹配等。论文发表于Macroeconomic Dynamics, Journal of Comparative Economics, Journal of International Money and Finance等期刊。
主持人：谭小芬 教授
讲座概要
Last three decades have witnessed two phenomenal stylized facts in the developed world: the natural rate of interest is trending down; the economy undergoes structural change from agriculture and manufacture to service. Do these two trends have any theoretical relations? This paper answers this question and finds that the natural rate of interest is declining if the economy undergoes structural change, e.g. the change from manufacture to service happening in our world. First, we construct these two stylized facts and explore their correlation. The higher the ratio of service to manufacture is, the lower the natural rate of interest is. Second, we construct a multi-sector dynamic general equilibrium model. We find that the change of final goods (consumption) share is a sufficient statistics for the declining natural rate if sectors are compliments and the growth rates of sectoral technologies are different. Once there is structural change in terms of final goods share change, the natural rate goes down. The mechanism behind the model is that the sector with lower growth rate becomes larger (higher service share in reality), and then the TFP goes down which results in the lower equilibrium interest rate.
