the predictive content of the output gap for inflation resolving in sample and out of sample evidence this paper evaluates potential explanations for the sometimes poor forecasting performance of the phillips curve one explanation is that out of sample metrics are noisy or equivalently have relatively low power another potential explanation is instability in the coefficients of the model to assess these forces this paper compares sample forecasting results to results from bootstrap simulations of models that either assume stability or allow breaks in the coefficients of the model this analysis indicates that a significant portion of the weakness of the out of sample evidence is attributable to power limitations but instabilities in the coefficients on the output gap also play a role

social insurance and occupational mobility this paper studies how insurance from progressive taxation improves the matching of workers to occupations we propose an equilibrium dynamic assignment model to illustrate how social insurance encourages mobility workers experiment to find their best occupational fit in a process filled with uncertainty risk aversion and limited earnings insurance induce workers to remain in unfitting occupations we estimate the model using microdata from the united states and germany higher earnings uncertainty explains the u s higher mobility rate when workers in the united states enjoy germany s higher progressivity mobility rises output and welfare gains are large

the role of the trade channel in the propagation of oil supply shocks abstract this paper analyzes when and why idiosyncratic oil supply shocks produce large macroeconomic effects in an analytically tractable two country general equilibrium model we focus on a demand driven mechanism the trade channel which transmits oil shocks across economies through changes in the non oil goods terms of trade when the trade channel is operative we have three main consequences on the transmission of oil shocks first the macroeconomic impact of oil shocks may be large and asymmetric across countries second the magnitude of the effects is nonlinear in the size of the oil shock third terms of trade movements never ensure international risk sharing after an idiosyncratic oil supply shock

media scrutiny and the quality of public officials i investigate whether attempts by the media to determine a candidate s fitness for office lowers the average quality of public officials what i call the media scrutiny paradox media scrutiny imperfectly signals heterogeneous candidates type but imposes privacy costs and reputational costs on politicians the quality of office holders falls if the selection effect is adverse and outweighs the screening effect a low quality information signal which could result if the media focus on irrelevant aspects of behavior makes the screening effect small and the media paradox more likely to hold individuals of good character might invest more in their reputation and have more at stake from being falsely identified as a rapscallion the actual malice standard established in new york times v sullivan likely increased relatively the cost of candidacy for good people and lowered the quality of officials

sensationalism newspaper profits and the marginal value of watergate newspaper publishers supposedly profit some sensational events focusing on the two different products sold by publishers newspapers and advertising space this paper shows why sensational events do not necessarily increase publishers wealth it also uses financial market analysis to examine the wealth effects of one sensational event watergate on a portfolio of newspaper stocks and on the washington post in particular no significant effects are found

forecasting the real price of oil time variation and forecast combination abstract this paper sheds light on the questions whether it is possible to generate an accurate forecast of the real price of oil and how it can be improved using forecast combinations for this reason the following paper will investigate the out of sample performance of seven individual forecasting models the results show that it is possible to construct better forecasts compared to a no change benchmark for horizons up to 24 months with gains in the mspe ratio as high as 25 in addition some of the existing models will be extended e g the u s inventories model by introducing more suitable real time measures for the brent crude oil price and the var model of the global oil market by using different measures for the economic activity furthermore the time performance investigated by constructing recursively estimated mspe ratios discovers potential weaknesses of the used models hence several different combination approaches are tested with the goal of demonstrating that a combination of individual models is beneficial for the forecasting performance thereby a combination consisting of four models has proven to have a lower mspe ratio than the best individual models over the medium run and in addition to be remarkably stable over time

oil price shocks and the macroeconomy this paper examines the impact of oil price shocks and attempts to explain why the rise in oil prices up to 2008 had little impact on the world economy it makes three main arguments first that oil prices have never been as important as is popularly thought second that the most important route through which oil prices affect output is monetary policy when oil prices pass through to core inflation monetary authorities raise interest rates slowing growth based on the second argument the third argument is that high oil prices have not reduced growth in recent years because they no longer pass through to core inflation so the monetary tightening previously seen in response to high oil prices is absent it also argues that oil prices had little impact on the global recession of 20089

wealth distribution in life cycle economies abstract this paper compares the age wealth distribution produced in life cycle economies to the corresponding distribution in the us economy the idea is to calibrate the model economies to match features of the us earnings distribution and then examine the wealth distribution implications of the model economies the findings are that the calibrated model economies with earnings and lifetime uncertainty can replicate measures of both aggregate wealth and transfer wealth in the us furthermore the model economies produce the us wealth gini and a significant fraction of the wealth inequality within age groups however the model economies produce less than half the fraction of wealth held by the top 1 percent of us households

energy consumption at business cycle horizons the case of the united states in this paper we propose a simple extension to a keynesian type macro model by augmenting it with energy consumption we show the relationship between energy consumption and output in a macroeconomic setting and ask the question do permanent shocks dominate changes in energy consumption and output at business cycle horizons for the united states to achieve the goal of this paper we undertake a variance decomposition analysis of shocks based on a common trend and common cycle framework within a vector error correction model our main finding is that permanent shocks explain the bulk of the variations in energy consumption and output at business cycle horizons for the united states

incentive effects of the u s welfare system a review the author would like to acknowledge support for prior work on this topic from the u s department of health and human services and helpful comments from three anonymous referees rebecca blank howard chernick john fitzgerald irwin garfinkel peter gottschalk edward gramlich david greenberg judith gueron james heckman v joseph hotz robert hutchens michael keane frank levy larry mead michael murray robert plotnick anuradha rangarajan philip robins howard rolston jeffrey smith and daniel weinberg all opinions and errors are those of the author alone

do exchange rates respond asymmetrically to shocks in the crude oil market abstract the paper argues that exchange rates respond asymmetrically to different shocks to the crude oil market we apply kilian s 2009 methodology to disentangle shocks to the crude oil market into distinct demand and supply shocks and examine the response of the u s real and nominal trade weighted u s dollar exchange rate indexes as well as six other bilateral exchange rates to these shocks our analysis indicates that oil supply shocks have no significant effects on exchange rates while global aggregate demand and oil specific demand shocks lead to depreciations we further show that exchange rates respond asymmetrically to shocks in the crude market depending on whether the shocks are large versus small or positive versus negative

the asymmetric impact of oil prices interest rates and oil price uncertainty on unemployment in the us abstract in this study we investigate the presence of asymmetric interactions between oil prices oil price uncertainty interest rates and unemployment in a cointegration framework utilizing the nonlinear auto regressive distributed lag nardl approach we show the asymmetric responses of unemployment to changes in oil prices oil price uncertainty and interest rates in the long run more specifically the results of our analyses suggest that an increase in oil price results in increased unemployment while there is no significant impact of reduced oil prices on the one hand reduced oil price uncertainty leads to a decrease in unemployment whereas an increase in oil price uncertainty does not have an impact we also observe increased unemployment in response to a decrease in interest rates as the impact of increased interest rates is not significant last but not least we find that option implied oil price volatility as a measure of oil price uncertainty outperforms the conditional volatility of crude oil prices in predicting unemployment this study provides valuable implications for policymakers to design sound economic policies

path dependency and input substitution implications for energy policy modelling in most policy oriented energy models the effectiveness of energy policy instruments crucially depends both on the values of the substitution elasticities between the various inputs and on the rates of technological progress in this paper we argue that due to the fixed cost nature of adjustments to relative price changes these technological parameters are affected by past developments failing to account for the role of history will result in biased parameter estimates and hence the implication for energy policy modelling is that the estimation period should be carefully selected we provide an empirical illustration using data for the netherlands

on real and sticky price theories of the business cycle after presenting some facts about the growth of government in western industrialized countries possible causes of this development are analyzed from a public choice perspective next some empirically tested theories which seek to explain this growth are discussed finally possible consequences for efficiency and individual liberty are examined it is shown that both the number and size of interest groups age of democracy as stated by mancur olson 1982 and the increasing share of government expenditure in gdp seem to exert a negative influence on the growth rate of gdp copyright 1986 by ohio state university press

efficient investment in children abstract many would say that children are society s most precious resource so how should we invest in them to gain insight into this question a dynamic general equilibrium model is developed where children differ by ability parents invest time and money in their offspring depending on their altruism this allows their children to grow up as more productive adults first the efficient allocation is characterized next this is compared with the outcome that arises when financial markets are incomplete the situation where child care markets are also lacking is then examined additionally the consequences of impure altruism are analyzed journal of economic literature classification numbers d1 d31 d58 i2

on the dynamic effects of oil price shocks a study using industry level data abstract this paper analyzes the effects of oil price shocks on demand and supply in various industries the impulse responses of identified var models indicate that for industries that have a large cost share of oil such as petroleum refinery and industrial chemicals oil price shocks mainly reduce supply in contrast for many other industries with the automobile industry being a particularly important example oil price shocks mainly reduce demand the paper suggests that oil price shocks influence economic activities beyond that explained by direct input cost effects possibly by delaying purchasing decisions of durable goods

should oil prices receive so much attention an evaluation of the predictive power of oil prices for the u s economy i introduction oil prices are monitored by consumers firms financial market traders and government officials and are the subject of much media coverage this in large part reflects the view that higher oil prices tend to be followed by inflation and recessions 1 early work by hamilton 1983 as well as recent papers by hamilton 2003 and lee and ni 2002 have provided convincing evidence of a relationship between oil prices and future economic activity 2 much of the literature has focused on whether oil prices improve the fit of a benchmark model via examination of impulse response functions as done by lee and ni 2002 or hypothesis testing as done by hamilton 2003 guo and kliesen 2005 discussed a number of theoretical explanations for the oil price macroeconomy relationship the textbook explanation is that higher oil prices represent an increase in production costs causing a fall in output and higher inflation another strand of literature has argued that large oil price movements cause uncertainty about future oil prices or costly reallocation of labor 3 causing large oil price movements to have asymmetric effects on the economy even to the point that both positive and negative oil price movements hurt output along these lines hamilton 1996 motivated the construction of a net oil price increase nopi variable by arguing that it is the behavior of oil prices relative to recent experience that matters this implies that the only time oil shocks have an impact on gross domestic product gdp is when the price of oil is above the high of the previous year for many purposes though the relevant question is whether the information in oil prices can be used to improve forecasts of macroeconomic variables examples include federal reserve policymaking using the price of oil as an indicator variable private sector planning and portfolio management for these applications it should be of interest to evaluate the historical out of sample forecast performance of models that include oil prices moreover impulse response functions and hypothesis tests are not able to provide information about how much out of sample forecasts can be improved 4 this paper evaluates forecasts of different measures of output inflation and monetary policy all of which are important macroeconomic variables that can plausibly be expected to respond to oil shocks based on both economic theory and media reports we apply standard out of sample predictive ability tests to data covering the period january 1986 to december 2004 this time period has seen substantial variation in the price of oil from a low of 11 per barrel in late 1998 to a high of 53 per barrel in october 2004 and includes two gulf wars as well as multiple boom and bust cycles if oil prices have value as an indicator variable it should clearly be present in our sample as oil price fluctuations of this magnitude will explain a large proportion of the variance of the macroeconomic variables our results suggest that there are few cases where models with oil prices are even able to improve upon the forecasts of simple autoregressive ar models this finding is robust to changes in specification that allow for nonlinearities the use of rolling estimation windows to account for possible parameter instability the use of industry level data and changes in the forecast horizon to ensure that our results are not due to low power of the predictive ability tests that we employ we show that the potential forecasting gains from including oil prices are in most cases close to 0 we conclude that oil prices provide little information about the future direction of the economy the rest of the paper proceeds as follows the next section describes our methodology section iii describes the data section iv presents and discusses the results of tests for predictive ability of oil prices for the macroeconomic variables and section v concludes the paper

unequal societies income distribution and the social contract this paper develops a theory of inequality and the social contract aiming to explain how countries with similar economic and political fundamentals can sustain such different systems of social insurance fiscal redistribution and education finance as those of the united states and western europe with imperfect credit and insurance markets some redistributive policies can improve ex ante welfare and this implies that their political support tends to decrease with inequality conversely with credit constraints lower redistribution translates into more persistent inequality hence the potential for multiple steady states with mutually reinforcing high inequality and low redistribution or vice versa

inter vivos transfers and intended bequests abstract empirical work on intergenerational transfers has focused on distinguishing between altruistic and exchange motivated behavior however these two models are unable to explain the strong tendency for inter vivos transfers to be negatively related to the income of the recipient while bequests bear no relationship to income this paper presents a new framework for analyzing transfers from parents to children that is more consistent with observed behavior than are the altruistic and exchange models alone in particular the model developed here predicts differing behavior with respect to inter vivos transfers and bequests due to liquidity constraints and uncertainty about the recipient s permanent income the empirical work uses data from the health and retirement study and the asset and health dynamics study the patterns observed in these data are consistent with earlier findings that inter vivos transfers go disproportionately to less well off children while bequests are divided equally across children further the results support the predictions of the model in that differences in inter vivos transfers arise from differences in current income while differences in bequests result when indicators of the children s permanent incomes differ

asymmetries in the responses of regional job flows to oil price shocks this paper studies the effect of oil price innovations on manufacturing job flows across u s states first i estimate a nonlinear structural equation model and compute impulse response functions by monte carlo integration i find asymmetries in the responses of job flows to positive and negative oil price innovations yet these asymmetries do not pass a test of symmetry on the impulse responses especially after accounting for data mining third i use a test for the absence of job reallocation to evaluate whether an unexpected increase in the real price of oil price triggers an important change in job reallocation i find that oil price shocks have limited regional allocative effects

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

crude oil and the macroeconomy tests of some popular notions a note perhaps no other economic events in the post world war ii era have generated as much attention as the series of crude oil price shocks that have jolted the world economy since the opec boycott of 1973 a tremendous amount of space in the popular and professional literature has been devoted to analyzing the impacts of these shocks on the developed economies and the adjustments these shocks have induced one residual of this literature has been a general impression that since 1973 the functional relationship between crude oil prices and the developed macroeconomies has been dramatically and fundamentally altered yet to our knowledge no one has formally tested this impression recent evidence of hamilton 1983 suggests that crude oil prices had a strong impact on the u s business cycle well before 1973 further while textbook treatments of oil price shocks tend to highlight cost push inflationary effects the research of berndt and wood 1975 1979 and wilcox 1983 indicates the net complementarity between energy and capital in the u s economy is quite strong both before and after 1973 thus oil price shocks may have stronger real effects than generally believed in this paper we formally test three popular notions associated with the so called

a comparison of the effects of exogenous oil supply shocks on output and inflation in the g7 countries a comparison of the effects of exogenous shocks to global crude oil production on seven major industrialized economies suggests a fair degree of similarity in the real growth responses an exogenous oil supply disruption typically causes a temporary reduction in real gdp growth that is concentrated in the second year after the shock inflation responses are more varied the median cpi inflation response peaks after three to four quarters exogenous oil supply disruptions need not generate sustained inflation or stagflation typical responses include a fall in the real wage higher short term interest rates and a depreciating currency with respect to the dollar despite many qualitative similarities there is strong statistical evidence that the responses to exogenous oil supply disruptions differ across g7 countries for suitable subsets of countries homogeneity cannot be ruled out a counterfactual historical exercise suggests that the evolution of cpi inflation in the g7 countries would have been similar overall to the actual path even in the absence of exogenous shocks to oil production consistent with a monetary explanation of the inflation of the 1970s there is no evidence that the 1973 1974 and 2002 2003 oil supply shocks had a substantial impact on real growth in any g7 country whereas the 1978 1979 1980 and 1990 1991 shocks contributed to lower growth in at least some g7 countries jel e31 e32 q43

crude oil price volatility and short term predictability of the real u s gdp growth rate abstract the predictive power contained in crude oil price volatility with regards to forecasting the real u s gdp growth rate is evaluated contrary to models based on the price of crude oil specifications employing crude oil price volatility tend to afford statistically significant improvements in terms of population level predictability and finite sample forecast accuracy relative to the benchmark at the one quarter ahead horizon

sectoral shifts and cyclical unemployment a substantial fraction of cyclical unemployment is better characterized as fluctuations of the frictional or natural rate than as deviations from some relatively stable natural rate shifts of employment demand between sectors of the economy necessitate continuous labor reallocation since it takes time for workers to find new jobs some unemployment is unavoidable this paper presents evidence that most of the unemployment fluctuations of the seventies unlike those in the sixties were induced by unusual structural shifts within the u s economy simple time series models of layoffs and unemployment are constructed that include a measure of structural shifts within the labor market these models are estimated and a derived natural rate series is constructed

regression toward mediocrity in economic stature this paper provides estimates of the correlation in lifetime earnings between fathers and sons intergenerational data from the national longitudinal survey are used earlier studies conducted for the united states report elasticities of children s earnings with respect to parent s earnings of 0 2 or less suggesting extensive integenerational mobility these estimates however are biased downward by error contaminated measures of lifetime economic status estimates presented in this paper correct for the problem of measurement error and find the intergenerational correlation in income to be on the order of 0 4 this suggests considerably less intergenerational mobility than previously believed jel j62

do oil prices help forecast u s real gdp the role of nonlinearities and asymmetries there is a long tradition of using oil prices to forecast u s real gdp it has been suggested that the predictive relationship between the price of oil and one quarter ahead u s real gdp is nonlinear in that a oil price increases matter only to the extent that they exceed the maximum oil price in recent years and that b oil price decreases do not matter at all we examine first whether the evidence of in sample predictability in support of this view extends to out of sample forecasts second we discuss how to extend this forecasting approach to higher horizons third we compare the resulting class of nonlinear models to alternative economically plausible nonlinear specifications and examine which aspect of the model is most useful for forecasting we show that the asymmetry embodied in commonly used nonlinear transformations of the price of oil is not helpful for out of sample forecasting more robust and often more accurate real gdp forecasts are obtained from symmetric nonlinear models based

equity and efficiency effects of redistributive policies abstract how do various forms of redistribution affect the distributions of earnings and consumption and their intergenerational mobility do redistributive policies enhance efficiency by mitigating market imperfections or do they create a trade off between equity and efficiency to address these issues a dynamic general equilibrium model is constructed and solved numerically the effects of the degrees of targeting of money transfers and educational transfers and the relative performance of the two types of transfers are examined

intergenerational income mobility in the united states social scientists and policy analysts have long expressed concern about the extent of intergenerational income mobility in the united states but remarkably little empirical evidence is available the few existing estimates of the intergenerational correlation in income have been biased downward by measurement error unrepresentative samples or both new estimates based on intergenerational data from the panel study of income dynamics imply that the intergenerational correlation in long run income is at least 0 4 indicating dramatically less mobility than suggested by earlier research copyright 1992 by american economic association

random earnings differences lifetime liquidity constraints and altruistic intergenerational transfers abstract this paper develops a model of private savings behavior in which households care about their descendants cannot have negative net worth and have lifetime earnings depending on random draws from an exogenous distribution of abilities the elements interact very lucky parents are likely to leave large estates constrained children are unusually likely to receive intergenerational transfers the paper proves the existence of a stationary cross sectional distribution of wealth endogenously determines where liquidity constraints will bind and shows that the long term interest rate must be such that ricardian neutrality fails its last section generates several illustrative numerical simulations

circulation versus advertiser appeal in the newspaper industry an empirical investigation advertising space is not a homogeneous commodity but something whose value depends on the characteristics of a newspaper s readership it is suggested in particular that the proportion of readers belonging to the more affluent social categories will exert a strong positive influence on advertising this paper investigates the circulation readership profile relation using a simple simultaneous equation framework the model is then estimated across a sample of british and irish daily and sunday newspapers using data collected from industry sources the paper then seeks to quantify the trade off between circulation and the proportion of high income readers copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

does parents money matter abstract this paper asks whether parents income per se has a positive impact on children s abilities previous research has established that income is positively correlated across generations this does not prove that parents money matters however since income is presumably correlated with ability this paper estimates the impact of parents income by focusing on income variation due to factors union industry and job loss that arguably represent luck i find that changes in parents income due to luck have a negligible impact on children s human capital for most families although parents money does matter for families whose father has low education

beyond education and fairness a labor market taxation model for the great gatsby curve i introduction an intergenerational income elasticity he for a particular country can be thought of as the fraction of a 1 permanent income increase given to a parent that is observed on average in the permanent income of a child thus estimates of the iie are sometimes viewed as a summary measure of the intergenerational economic mobility in a particular country in a 2012 speech then chairman of the u s council of economic advisers alan krueger emphasized the importance of the strong positive cross country correlation between contemporary measures of economic inequality and economic mobility as measured by the iie he further dubbed a graph of this relationship the great gatsby curve although this witty designation is novel the correlation it refers to has been the subject of a great deal of economic research indeed even before the availability of reliable iie data for many countries seshadri and yuki 2004 as well as erosa and koreshkova 2007 provided intergenerational models calibrated to the u s economy that explored potential taxation and transfer mechanisms linking contemporary inequality and mobility however as accurate estimates of this relationship have become available for an increasing number of countries applied researchers investigating the cross country divergence of iies bjorklund and jantti 2009 blanden 2009 corak 2013b have been more heavily influenced by the theoretical model proposed by solon 1999 as later clarified and expanded in solon 2004 which builds on the fundamental model of human capital transmission proposed by becker and tomes 1979 the augmented solon model deliberately focuses on one potential mechanism underlying differences in the iie more specifically differential cross country intergenerational mobility primarily arises in the solon model from the differential government responses to the borrowing constraints faced by the parents of poor children while all parents can choose to make human capital investments in their children they can only finance these investments out of their own lifetime earnings and are unable to borrow against the future earnings of the child these borrowing constraints lead to less investment in human capital by poor parents and subsequently lower earnings for poor children the model also allows governments to address this inequality by investing in the human capital of the future generation in a progressive manner more investment at lower parental incomes thus variations in government policy choices over educational investment combine with existing constraints created by income inequality to produce varying mobility across countries this model is particularly attractive to applied researchers because it provides a clear policy relevant interpretation of the equation parameter most commonly used in the actual empirical estimation of iies another attractive feature of the solon model is that it makes a number of testable empirical claims about this he parameter intergenerational mobility should be positively correlated with cross sectional mobility as well as with government educational investment in the poor the he should also be higher in countries where labor markets provide greater returns to schooling empirical work in highly developed countries has provided preliminary evidence supporting these claims for example ichino karabarbounis and moretti 2011 find a negative relationship between government spending on education particularly at the primary level and he across a dozen countries while mayer and lopoo 2008 find the same pattern holds across u s states blanden 2009 also finds this pattern and goes further to show positive cross country correlations between he and both cross sectional inequality and the returns to education 1 while many predictions of this class of model are borne out in the data there is less evidence in support of the primary mechanism it articulates to produce cross country variation in intergenerational mobility namely a differential response to the borrowing constraints faced by some families in childhood human capital markets

gasoline prices transport costs and the u s business cycles abstract the effects of gasoline prices on the u s business cycles are investigated in order to distinguish between gasoline supply and gasoline demand shocks the price of gasoline is endogenously determined through a transportation sector that uses gasoline as an input of production the model is estimated for the u s economy using five macroeconomic time series including data on transport costs and gasoline prices the results show that although standard shocks in the literature e g technology shocks monetary policy shocks have significant effects on the u s business cycles in the long run gasoline supply and demand shocks play an important role in the short run

the effects of oil price shocks on job reallocation we investigate the effect of oil price innovations on u s manufacturing job flows using a simultaneous equation model that nests symmetric and asymmetric responses we find no evidence of asymmetry in the response of job flows to positive and negative oil price innovations we then inquire whether firms when facing positive shocks shed jobs faster than they create jobs we show that positive innovations lead to a decline in net employment and an increase in job reallocation possibly due to search and matching issues yet the latter effect becomes statistically insignificant when we control for data mining we demonstrate that the cumulative one year effect of oil price shocks on job creation and destruction was smaller during the great moderation but it was larger for gross job reallocation these variations were caused by a change in the transmission channel and not by smaller oil price shocks

historical energy price shocks and their changing effects on the economy abstract the purpose of this paper is to identify the changes in the impact of energy shocks on economic activity with an interest in assessing if an economy s vulnerability and resilience to shocks improved with economic development using data on the united kingdom over the last three hundred years the paper identifies supply aggregate demand and residual shocks to energy prices and estimates their changing influence on energy prices and gdp the results suggest that the impacts of supply shocks rose with its increasing dependence on coal and declined with its partial transition to oil however the transition from exporting coal to importing oil increased the negative impacts of demand shocks more generally the results indicate that improvements in vulnerability and resilience to shocks did not progress systematically as the economy developed instead the changes in impacts depended greatly on the circumstances related to the demand for and supply of energy sources if these experiences are transferable to future markets a transition to a diversified mix of renewable energy is likely to reduce vulnerability and increase resilience to energy price shocks

a neoclassical model of unemployment and the business cycle this paper investigates a general equilibrium model of unemployment and the business cycle in which specialization of labor plays a key role a rational expectations equilibrium with fully flexible wages and prices can exhibit unemployment in which the marginal product of employed workers exceeds the reservation wage of those who are without jobs workers are unemployed either because they are in the process of relocating for a better job or because they are waiting for conditions in the depressed sector to improve moreover seemingly small disruptions in the supplies of primary commodities such as energy could be the source of fluctuations in aggregate employment and can exert surprisingly large effects on real output

the impact of oil prices on gdp in european countries an empirical investigation based on asymmetric cointegration this paper investigates the existence of a long term relationship between oil prices and gdp in 12 european countries to account for the fact that economic activity responds asymmetrically to oil price shocks we propose an approach based on asymmetric cointegration our results show that while standard cointegration is rejected there is evidence for asymmetric cointegration between oil prices and gdp in the majority of the considered european countries

does school quality matter returns to education and the characteristics of public schools in the united states this paper estimates the effects of school quality measured by the pupil teacher ratio average term length and relative teacher pay on the rate of return to education for men born between 1920 and 1949 using earnings data from the 1980 census we find that men who were educated in states with higher quality schools have a higher return to additional years of schooling rates of return are also higher for individuals from states with better educated teachers and with a higher fraction of female teachers holding constant school quality measures however we find no evidence that parental income or education affects average state level rates of return

oil and the macroeconomy since the 1970s economists have long been intrigued by empirical evidence that suggests that oil price shocks may be closely related to macroeconomic performance this interest dates back to the 1970s the 1970s were a period of growing dependence on imported oil unprecedented disruptions in the global oil market and poor macroeconomic performance in the united states thus it was natural to suspect a causal relationship from oil prices to u s macroeconomic aggregates since then a large body of work has accumulated that purports to establish this link on theoretical grounds and to provide empirical evidence in its support we do not attempt a comprehensive survey of this literature but rather provide an idiosyncratic synthesis of what we view as the key issues in this debate and the insights gained over the last 30 years the timing seems right for such an account although the experience of the 1970s continues to play an important role in discussions of the link between oil and the macroeconomy there have been a number of new oil price shocks since the 1970s notably the 1986 collapse of oil prices and the 2000 boom in oil prices as well as the oil price increases associated with the 1990 1991 gulf war and the 2003 iraq war given this richer case history we are arguably in a better position than two decades ago to distinguish the idiosyncratic features of each oil crisis from the systematic effects increases in oil prices have been held responsible for recessions periods of excessive inflation reduced productivity and lower economic growth in this paper we review the arguments supporting such views first we highlight some of the conceptual difficulties in assigning a central role to oil price shocks in explaining

heterogeneity and unemployment dynamics many previous articles have studied the contribution of inflows and outflows to the cyclical variation in unemployment but ignored the critical role of unobserved heterogeneity across workers thi

oil price uncertainty in canada bernanke bernanke ben s irreversibility uncertainty and cyclical investment quarterly journal of economics 98 1983 85 106 shows how uncertainty about energy prices may induce optimizing firms to postpone investment decisions thereby leading to a decline in aggregate output elder and serletis elder john and serletis apostolos oil price uncertainty http ssrn com abstract 908675 2009 find empirical evidence that uncertainty about oil prices has tended to depress investment in the united states in this paper we assess the robustness of these results by investigating the effects of oil price uncertainty in canada our results are remarkably similar to existing results for the united states providing additional evidence that uncertainty about oil prices may provide another explanation for why the sharp oil price declines of 1985 failed to produce rapid output growth impulse response analysis suggests that uncertainty about oil prices may tend to reinforce the negative response of output to positive oil shocks

this is what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract many of the quarterly oil price increases observed since 1985 are corrections to even bigger oil price decreases the previous quarter when one looks at the net increase in oil prices over the year recent data are consistent with the historical correlation between oil shocks and recessions

tax and education policy in a heterogeneous agent economy what levels of redistribution maximize growth and efficiency this paper studies the effects of progressive income taxes and education finance in a dynamic heterogeneous agent economy such redistributive policies entail distortions to labor supply and savings but also serve as partial substitutes for missing credit and insurance markets the resulting tradeoffs for growth and efficiency are explored both theoretically and quantitatively in a model that yields complete analytical solutions progressive education finance always leads to higher income growth than taxes and transfers but at the cost of lower insurance overall efficiency is assessed using a new measure that properly reflects aggregate resources and idiosyncratic risks but unlike a standard social welfare function does not reward equality per se simulations using empirical parameter estimates show that the efficiency costs and benefits of redistribution are generally of the same order of magnitude resulting in plausible values for the optimal rates aggregate income and aggregate welfare provide only crude lower and upper bounds around the true efficiency tradeoff

money and output viewed through a rolling window abstract we examine the extent to which fluctuations in the money stock anticipate or granger cause fluctuations in real output using a variety of rolling window and increasing window estimation techniques various models are considered using simple sum as well as divisia measures of m 1 and m 2 income prices and both the t bill rate and the commercial paper rate findings indicate that the relation between income money prices and interest rates is stable as long as sufficient data are used and that there is cointegration among the variables considered although cointegration spaces become very difficult to estimate precisely when smaller windows of data are used further both m 1 and m 2 are shown to be important predictors of income for the entire period from 1960 2 1996 3 based on modified versions of what we term the most damaging specifications from friedman and kuttner 1993 and thoma 1994 our new evidence is based in part on a rather novel model selection approach to examining the relationship between money and income 1998 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

risky higher education and subsidies abstract tertiary education in the u s requires large investments that are risky lumpy and well timed tertiary education is also heavily subsidized our model suggests that despite adverse selection arising from encouraging poorly prepared students to enroll observed collegiate subsidies improve outcomes substantially relative to the fully decentralized case this result occurs because increases in subsidy rates for college education generate reductions in college failure risk without altering mean returns we find that this mechanism is robust and that tertiary subsidy rates well in excess of those observed in the u s can be justified by failure risk alone

does the volatility of commodity prices reflect macroeconomic uncertainty abstract while there exists numerous studies on the macroeconomic effects of oil and commodity shocks the literature is quite silent on the impact of macroeconomic uncertainty on oil and commodity prices and especially on their volatility this paper tackles this issue through the estimation of a structural threshold vector autoregressive tvar model on a sample of 19 commodity markets we aim at i assessing whether the effect of macroeconomic uncertainty shocks on commodity price returns depends on the degree of uncertainty and ii investigating the transfer from macroeconomic uncertainty to price uncertainty using a newly developed measure of commodity price uncertainty our findings show that both agricultural and industrial markets are highly sensitive to the variability and the level of macroeconomic uncertainty while the impact on precious metals is more parsimonious given their well identified safe haven role in time of economic turmoil in addition we find evidence that the recent 2007 09 recession has generated an unprecedented episode of high uncertainty in numerous commodity prices interestingly our analysis further reveals that volatility and uncertainty in prices can be disconnected this is especially true for the oil market as most important shocks in the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s that lead to price volatility do not generate price uncertainty highlighting the relevance of our uncertainty measure in linking uncertainty to predictability rather than to volatility

the intergenerational transfer of welfare dependency some statistical evidence does a mother s welfare receipt increase the future dependency of her children does the welfare system thus stimulate the dependency of future generations parameter estimates reported here suggest such intergenerational effects the sample comprises young girls and their mothers after control for observed and unobserved heterogeneity a mother s welfare participation is found to increase her daughter s later welfare dependency copyright 1992 by mit press

oil prices and economic downturns the case of spain abstractwe address the macroeconomic effects of an oil price shock in spain we apply a vector autoregression model var analysis to quarterly data for the spanish economy since 1986 to elucidate the effects of variations in the oil price on the economy considering the three main causes of disruptions in the oil markets oil supply shocks oil demand shocks and oil specific precautionary demand shocks we conclude that the effects in spain strongly depend on the type of shock the consumer price index cpi has mainly been influenced by oil demand shocks output has only reacted to oil supply shocks and monetary policy has mainly reacted after precautionary shocks second round effects caused by the behaviour of nominal wages have not been found additionally we discuss two facts the ability of firms to increase markups in a context of rising demand and the procyclical role of monetary policy when faced with oil demand shocks

the family inheritance and the intergenerational transmission of inequality unequal inheritance of material wealth is commonly considered a major cause of inequality in consumption however theoretical models of the intergenerational transmission of inequality by becker blinder and ishikawa imply that unequal inheritance may either increase or reduce consumption inequality differences in inherited wealth resulting from unequal parental incomes increase inequality in recipients consumption however unequal bequests caused by differences among families in the endowed ability of children or the costs of producing human capital are equalizing empirical results confirm these predictions the inheritance received by children is inversely related to both children s income and parental education thus bequests are compensatory in that ceteris paribus low income children inherit more than their advantaged contemporaries

energy price shocks and the macroeconomy the role of consumer durables so far the literature on dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models with energy price shocks uses energy on the production side only in these models energy shocks are responsible for only a negligible share of output fluctuations we study the robustness of this finding by explicitly modeling private consumption of energy at the household level in addition to energy use at the firm level to account for total energy use in the economy additionally we distinguish between investment in consumer durables and investment in capital goods the model economy is calibrated to match total energy use and durable goods consumption as observed in the u s data simulation results indicate that despite higher total energy use this economy has an even smaller proportion of output fluctuations attributable to energy price shocks productivity shocks continue to be the primary force behind business cycle fluctuations the driving force behind our results is that the household now has the flexibility to rebalance its investment portfolio specifically the energy price hike is absorbed by reducing durable goods investment more than investment in capital goods thereby cushioning the hit to future production at the expense of current consumption hence our model better matches the consumption volatility observed in the data jel classification e32 q43

a crude shock explaining the short run impact of the 2014 16 oil price decline across exporters abstract the sharp long lasting decline in oil prices in 2014 16 tested the resilience of oil exporters we examine the degree to which economic fundamentals entering the oil price decline explain the impact on economic growth across oil exporting economies and derive policy implications as to what factors help to mitigate the negative effects we find that pre existing fundamentals account for about half of the cross country variation in the impact of the shock oil exporters that weathered the shock better tended to have a stronger fiscal position higher foreign currency liquidity buffers a more diversified export base a history of price stability and a more flexible exchange rate regime within this group of countries the impact of the shock is not found to be related to the size of oil exports or the share of oil in fiscal revenue or economic activity

volatility spillovers and cross hedging between gold oil and equities evidence from the gulf cooperation council countries the paper examines the return and volatility spillovers between crude oil gold and equities and investigates the usefulness of the two commodities in hedging equity portfolios using daily data from january 20043 to may 2016 for the gulf cooperation council countries a dcc garch model is used to estimate dynamic correlations and hedge ratios we find significant spillovers from oil to equities highlighting the heavy dependence of the local economies on oil moreover the spillovers of gold on the stock markets are insignificant suggesting that gold price fluctuations do not necessarily influence equity investment decisions in the opposite direction we find that equities do not exert significant influence on the two commodities which we attribute to the relatively small capitalisation of the exchanges our results reveal low dynamic correlations and hedge ratios with a few spikes during crises indicating that oil and gold are cheap hedges for stocks albeit not good ones while they could be considered as weak safe havens but at a considerable cost

automobile externalities and policies this paper discusses the nature and magnitude of externalities associated with automobile use including local and global pollution oil dependence traffic congestion and traffic accidents it then discusses current federal policies affecting these externalities including fuel taxes fuel economy and emissions standards and alternative fuel policies summarizing insofar as possible the welfare effects of those policies finally we discuss emerging pricing policies including congestion tolls and insurance reform and summarize the appropriate combination of policies to address automobile externalities

sectoral shifts labor market sorting and aggregate fluctuations a model of sectoral reallocation is constructed where intersectoral friction is not caused by search or mobility costs instead a sectoral disturbance has a negative effect on production possibilities because it reduces the value of previous sorting in the labor market in equilibrium a measure of sectoral dispersion is positively correlated with the unemployment rate an increase in the incidence of sectoral disturbances increases unemployment at cyclical peaks and at cyclical troughs copyright 1990 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the timing of redistribution we investigate whether late redistribution programs that can be targeted toward low income families but that may distort savings decisions can dominate early redistribution programs that cannot be targeted as a result of information constraints we use simple two period overlapping generations models with heterogeneous agents under six policy regimes a model calibrated to the u s economy benchmark two early redistribution lump sum regimes two targeted late redistribution regimes and finally a model without taxes and redistribution redistribution programs are financed by a labor tax on the young generation and a capital tax on the old generation we argue that if the programs are small in size late redistribution can dominate early redistribution in terms of welfare but not in terms of real output better targeting of low income households cannot completely offset savings distortions in addition we find that the optimal transfer and tax policy implies a capital tax of 100 and transfers exclusively to the young generation

the role of model uncertainty and learning in the u s postwar policy response to oil prices abstract this paper studies optimal monetary policy in a framework that explicitly accounts for policymakers uncertainty about the channels of transmission of oil prices into the economy more specifically using postwar us data i examine the evolution of the policy recommendations originating from an optimal linear regulator problem that encompasses model uncertainty and learning as proposed by cogley and sargent 2005b in this environment i find that one of the underlying models dominates the robust interest rate response to oil prices and i show that this result is due to the instability of this specification in the sample period under analysis