can learning affect exchange rate behavior the case of the dollar in the early 1980 s this paper demonstrates that a change in parameters of the money market that is not immediately understood will affect the behavior of exchange rate forecast errors while the market is learning the analysis is applied to the behavior of u s dollar german mark forecast errors during the early 1980 s when the market appeared to systematically underpredict the strength of the dollar consistent with this observation empirical estimates of implied forecast errors based upon bayesian learning suggest that forecast errors would have been on average negative during the period as the market came to realize the increase in u s money demand

money supply announcements and interest rates another view in this paper i use a new approach to analyze the impact of money supply announcements on the bond market before 1980 the only available work on this subject consisted of a few unpublished papers by conrad 1978 sivesind 1978 and urich 1979 1 more recently published papers by grossman 1981 and urich and wachtel 1981 have appeared roley 1982 extends the grossman study to incorporate data after the federal reserve policy statement of october 6 1979 both grossman and urich and wachtel are primarily concerned with the question of money market efficiency using survey data made available by money market services of san francisco and data on treasury bill yields each finds that the market responds quickly to unanticipated changes in the money supply but that anticipated changes have no effect on interest rates in addition grossman finds that when he adds other variables such as past changes in the money

why interest rates react to money announcements an explanation from the foreign exchange market abstract when the fed announces a money supply greater than had been expected interest rates rise why one explanation is that the market raises its estimate of the future rates of money growth and inflation and bids up nominal interest rates we offer contrary evidence on such days the dollar appreciates not depreciates an alternative explanation is that the market perceives the change in the money stock as a transitory fluctuation that the fed will reverse in the future the anticipated future tightening raises today s real interest rate causes a capital inflow and appreciates the dollar the result in fact observed

economic news exchange rates and interest rates the paper esamines the post october 1979 response of exchange rates and interest rates to the new information contained in the first announcement of fifteen us macroeconomic series illarkets respond primarily to monetary news but also to news about the trade deficit domestic inflation and variables that reflect the state of the business cycle for all fifteen macroeconomic variables an increase decrease in interest rates is accompanied by an appreciation depreciation of the dollar which is consistent with models that stress price rigidity and absence of purchasing power parity the effect of economic news on asset prices has received increasing attention in the economic literature because an outcome of the efficient markets rational expectations hypothesis is that flesible asset prices change the moment new information about future fundamentals arrives in the market in the exchange rate literature the role of news has gained importance because structural models have failed to predict most of the variation in exchange rates during the 1970s see imeese and rogoff 1983 researchers were naturally led to investigate the types of news that make exchange rates so volatile and to utilize news in order to test which model of exchange rate determination is consistent with the floating eschange rate experience notable studies are those of dornbusch 1980 frenkel 1981 edwards 1982a b 1983 copeland 1984 and rose 1984 in this paper i also examine the effects of macroeconomic news on eschange rates but i adopt a different more direct strategy one that complements previous work avoids some of its shortcomings and promises interesting conclusions i examine the instantaneous response of exchange rates the moment a piece of economic news hits the market if one can isolate the exact time during a business day when news arrives it is straightforward to examine the response of exchange rates because financial data are continuously available the advantages of the present methodology are many first it is possible to identify the exact types of economic news and how they affect exchange rates second the simultaneity bias which plagues the previous literature on exchange rates and news is not present here the independent variables that represent news can be interpreted as causal the paper was presented at the 1985 meeting ofthe american economic association the author wishes to thank sebastian edwards r w hafer nicholas karamouzis andrew rose and two anonymous referees for helpful comments kim rupert of the money market services for providing the survey data soo kounne for able research assistance and barnard college for research support

an evolutionary model of bertrand oligopoly we analyze the long run outcome of markets in which boundedly rational firms with a decreasing returns to scale technology compete in prices the behavior of these firms is based on limitation of success and experimentation in this framework we introduce a new approach to model boundedly rational behavior based on the idea of behavioral principles i e formal descriptions even with the simplest ones the result is that the prices announced are a strict refinement of the set of nash equilibria with more sophisticated behavioral principles the long run outcome corresponds to the concept of central prices wich are also nash equilibria introduced here this is a robust and clear cut prediction wich under quadratic costs and arbitrary demand essentially coincides with the walrasian equilibrium

the persistence of the peso problem when policy is noisy abstract the peso problem the market s belief that a discrete event may occur has frequently been blamed for the persistence of on average mistaken forecasts of macroeconomic variables this paper demonstrates how beliefs that a policy process may have switched can induce apparent ex post biased forecasts of exchange rates even after the switch has occurred furthermore during this peso problem period exchange rates may appear to contain a speculative bubble component since they will systematically deviate from the levels implied by observing fundamentals ex post and the conditional variance of exchange rates will exceed the variance implied by observing fundamentals

bertrand competition and cournot outcomes further results the model of kreps and scheinkman where firms choose capacities and then compete in price is extended to oligopoly further capacity is an imperfect commitment device firms can produce beyond capacities at an additional unit cost when is larger than the cournot price the cournot outcome obtains in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium when decreases from the cournot price towards zero the whole range of prices from cournot to bertrand is obtained in equilibrium

exchange rates and news a multi currency approach abstract in this paper a multi currency model is used to investigate the relationship between spot exchange rates forward rates market efficiency and new information it is shown that in a world with more than two countries the error term in the standard market efficiency tests will be correlated across rates it is also shown that the exchange rate can be expressed as a function of factors known in advance which are captured by the forward rate determined in the previous period and news the empirical results presented in the paper tend to support the model s implications

learning and the volatility of exchange rates abstract this paper investigates the implications for the volatility of exchange rates of specifying market uncertainty as parameter uncertainty private agents learn by means of bayes rule about a parameter of the stochastic process generating the exogenous variables learning is shown to magnify the reaction of exchange rates to random shocks to the market fundamentals this magnification effect of learning can explain the rejections of the econometric tests on the variance bounds and on the absence of bubbles that have been reported in the literature

stock prices and economic news this paper examines the daily response of stock prices to announcements about the money supply inflation real economic activity and the discountrate except for the discount rate survey data on market participants expectations of these announcements are used to identify the unexpected component of the announcements in order to test the efficient markets hypothesis that only the unexpected part of any announcement the surprise moves stock prices the empirical results support this hypothesis and indicate further that surprises related to monetary policy significantly affect stock prices there is only limited evidence of an impact from inflation surprises and no evidence of an impact from real activity surprises on the announcement days there is also only weak evidence of stock price responses to surprises beyond the announcement day this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

exchange rates interest rates and money stock announcements a theoretical exposition abstract when the federal reserve announce a larger than anticipated weekly level of the us money stock m1 the dollar appreciates and short term interest rates increase because of an expected liquidity effect but long term interest rates and particularly long run forward interest rates increase because of an expected inflation effect the two effects are not mutually exclusive but coexist when market participants are not completely sure of the fed s policy rule and thus react in a weighted average manner with weights that reflect subjective probabilities about different federal reserve money growth policies

changing interest rate responses to money announcements 1977 1983 abstract this paper investigates when and how the response of interest rates to money announcements changed in recent years the response of both short and long rates rises in october 1979 but drops during 1981 during mid 1982 the response of long rates raises again but without a change in the response of short rates despite a number of ex post explanations for these shifts none of the major hypotheses of why interest rates respond to money announcements provides a complete ex ante explanation of these response shifts

money supply announcements interest rates and foreign exchange abstract this paper presents a test of the joint hypothesis that money supply announcements affect the real interest rate and that changes in the real interest rate affect the exchange rate in the short run the test results are consistent with the joint hypothesis for example it is found that announcement of an unexpected jump in the money supply is accompanied by an increase in interest rates and an appreciation of the dollar if the rise in interest rates was entirely due to higher inflationary expectations the dollar should not appreciate

comparing bertrand and cournot in mixed markets abstract we revisit the classic comparison between bertrand and cournot outcomes in a mixed market with private and public firms the results are often strikingly different and opposite to the ones obtained from a similar comparison in the standard setting with all profit maximizing firms

a bargaining model based on the commitment tactic abstract this paper studies a one shot simultaneous move bargaining game each bargainer makes a partial commitment a share of the unit size cake that she would like to get which can later be revoked at some cost to the player the payoffs are defined in part by the nash bargaining solution where the feasible utility set is affected by the players partial commitments under certain assumptions on the two cost of revoking functions we establish that the model has a unique nash equilibrium it is shown that a player s equilibrium share of the cake is strictly increasing in her marginal cost of revoking a partial commitment an application of our model selects a unique equilibrium in nash s demand game journal of economic literature classification number c78

equilibrium prices in the bertrand and cournot oligopolies abstract the equilibrium prices for the bertrand and cournot oligopolies with product differentiation are compared if all firms have linear demand and cost functions and if in addition the jacobian matrix of the demand functions has a dominant negative diagonal the cournot equilibrium prices are not lower than the bertrand ones the general condition for the comparison of the bertrand and cournot equilibrium prices can be derived even if the nonlinearity is involved in the cost and or demand functions

market response to the weekly money supply announcements in the 1970s the hypothesis that the weekly announcement of the money supply affects interest rates is examined the announcement effect is interpreted as a policy anticipation effect that is an unanticipated increase in the money supply leads to an increase in interest rates in anticipation of future tightening by the federal reserve estimates of this effect with proxies for the unanticipated change constructed from a survey of money supply forecasts and an arima model indicate that a financial markets respond very quickly to the announcement and b the response was largest when policymakers emphasized the importance of the monetary aggregates financial market participants are careful observers of the weekly money supply announcement and generally agree that the announcement often leads to changes in interest rates this occurs because the announcement leads market participants to revise their expectations both of future federal reserve policy actions and of future economic conditions in this paper we examine the response of yields on treasury bills to the announcement of the money supply and the extent to which that response has varied in the last ten years money supply announcements may affect market interest rates in three ways first actual expansion of the money supply leads to lower interest rates through a liquidity effect however rapid monetary growth which is not anticipated leads market participants to expect the federal reserve to counteract such growth in the future as a consequence there may be a policy anticipation effect which causes higher interest rates in anticipation of future tightening furthermore prolonged rapid monetary growth also creates inflation and inflationary expectations which lead to higher interest rates thus there may exist a third effect the inflationary expectations effect which also leads to higher interest rates our interest in this paper is in the immediate market response to the weekly announcement of the money supply which as we argue below is most likely to be a policy anticipation effect the policy anticipation effect is best described by example suppose that the announced change in the money supply exceeds that which was expected by

equilibrium vertical differentiation in a bertrand model with capacity precommitment both quality differentiation and capacity commitment have been shown to relax price competition however their joint influence on the outcome of price competition has not yet been assessed in this article we consider a three stage game in which firms choose quality then commit to capacity and finally compete in price when the cost of quality is negligible we show that firms do not differentiate their products in a subgame perfect equilibrium in other words capacity precommitment completely eliminates the incentive to differentiate by quality

welfare consequence of an asymmetric regulation in a mixed bertrand duopoly abstract i investigate an asymmetric duopoly where a public enterprise must supply the demand it faces while a private enterprise has no such obligation i show that such an asymmetric regulation yields the first best outcome walrasian equilibrium

money supply announcements and the ex ante volatility of asset prices previous empirical studies have documented more volatile money grow th and money surprises more volatile asset price changes and increased responsiveness of asset prices to money surprises since the october 1 979 change in fed policy this paper studies the associations between money announcements and the ex ante volatility of asset prices in th e recent past results indicate that revisions of ex ante asset price volatility as measured from prices of stock index government debt gold and foreign currency options are significantly correlated with the surprise component of the weekly m1 release there is also evidence that money releases reduce volatility by resolving uncertainty copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

market perceptions of federal reserve policy and the weekly monetary announcements abstract in october 1979 the federal reserve altered its operating procedures emphasizing control of the growth rate of the money stock was the fed able to gain credibility in the market the paper investigates this question by examining the reactions of spot and expected future exchange rates foreign interest rates and long run domestic forward interest rates to the weekly federal reserve announcements of m l both before and after october 1979 the empirical evidence points out that the fed did gain credibility but was unable to establish full credibility the market reactions are consistent with the hypothesis that market participants attached a positive probability to the event that the fed may at some point in the future abandon its money stock targets

prices capacities and service levels in a congestible bertrand duopoly we study the duopolistic interaction between congestible facilities that supply perfect substitutes and that make sequential decisions on capacities and prices the consumers time cost of accessing or using a facility is determined by the volume capacity ratio we analyze duopoly prices capacities and service quality defined as the inverse of time costs of using the facility and compare the results to monopoly and first best outcomes findings include the following first while price competition between duopolists is beneficial for consumers introducing capacity competition is harmful the duopolist offers lower service quality than the monopolist who does provide the socially optimal quality level second higher marginal costs of capacity may increase profits third asymmetric nash equilibria may result even when firms are ex ante identical more specifically when capacity is cheap or demand is relatively inelastic the only stable equilibria are asymmetric in such an equilibrium the large facility provides high quality at a high price and the smaller facility offers lower quality at lower prices in other words there is endogenous product differentiation by ex ante identical firms

on the efficiency of bertrand and cournot equilibria with product differentation in a differentiated products setting with n varieties it is shown under certain regularity conditions that if the demand structure is symmetric and bertrand and cournot equilibria are unique then prices and profits are larger and quantities smaller in cournot than in bertrand competition and as n grows both equilibria converge to the efficient outcome at a rate of at least 1n if bertrand reaction functions slope upwards and are continuous then even with an asymmetric demand structure given any cournot equilibrium price vector one can find a bertrand equilibrium with lower prices in particular if the bertrand equilibrium is unique then it has lower prices than any cournot equilibrium

anything goes with heterogeneous but not always with homogeneous oligopoly abstract corchon and mas colell 1996 on the stability of best reply and gradient systems with applications to imperfectly competitive models economics letters 51 59 65 showed that in heterogeneous oligopoly almost everything is possible in order to obtain a similar result for homogeneous oligopoly either one needs an externality in the cost function or the reaction correspondences should fulfill a special condition

bertrand edgeworth equilibria when firms avoid turning customers away this paper provides a simple solution to the problem of nonexistence of pure strategy equilibria in bertrand edgeworth models with strictly convex costs the voluntary trading constraint in standard bertrand edgeworth models is generalized to allow for there being costs incurred when customers are turned away so long as the industry is sufficiently large the presence of such costs ensures that the competitive price will be an equilibrium there will be other single price equilibria but if the offense costs are small all equilibria will be close to the competitive outcome

on stackelberg games in a homogeneous product market abstract in a homogeneous product duopoly with concave demand and strictly convex costs we bring together all the standard results of quantity stackelberg games provide some new results with price stackelberg games and compare the equilibrium configuration of the quantity games with the price games in the price stackelberg game we show there is a unique spne where the leader chooses a lower price than the follower but both get equal payoffs we prove that generally quantity stackelberg games are less competitive than price stackelberg games however we also demonstrate the possibility of a reversal of this result

learning and the exchange rate exchange rate responses to money announcements in the early 1980s abstract the paper develops a monetary model of exchange rate determination with transitory monetary shocks and bayesian learning the model implies that exchange rate responses to monetary surprises are time varying and asymmetric furthermore the two variables become increasingly negatively correlated as beliefs converge an empirical section reexamines the evidence of dollar exchange rate responses to monetary announcements in the 1979 1984 period during which two monetary reforms took place in the usa there is strong support for the presence of learning behavior during the october 1979 to october 1982 period in the german mark and japanese yen equations

the structure of expectations of the weekly money supply announcement abstract this paper examines the structure of expectations of the weekly money supply announcement in the late 1970s the data used are from a weekly telephone survey of money market participants the rationality and structure of expectations are explored with the data organized in three ways the mean response to each weekly survey the pooled sample of individual responses and time series of responses by each individual in the survey the effect of data aggregation on rationality tests is investigated the structure of the expectations data are also examined and it is found that both strong regressive influences and adaptive learning characterize the data

on the markovian efficiency of bertrand and cournot equilibria we characterize and compare closed loop feedback price and quantity strategies within a full fledged dynamic model of oligopolistic competition in which production requires exploitation of a renewable productive asset unlike previous papers on the strategic exploitation of productive assets we allow for imperfect product substitutability which enables us to deal with price competition we show that the traditional result that the bertrand equilibrium is more efficient than the cournot equilibrium does not necessarily hold in a markovian environment either in the short run or at the stationary equilibrium or using the discounted sum of welfare as a criterion for relative efficiency

price vs quantity competition in a vertically related market this paper demonstrates that the standard conclusions regarding the comparison of cournot and bertrand competition are reversed in a vertically related market with upstream monopoly and trading via two part tariffs in such a market downstream cournot competition yields higher output lower wholesale prices lower final prices higher consumers surplus and higher total welfare than bertrand competition

comparing cournot and bertrand in a homogeneous product market abstract this paper examines some general notions relating to the comparison of cournot and bertrand equilibrium outcomes results obtained by vives in this connection are reconsidered in a homogeneous product market and it is shown that these results are sensitive to the market sharing rules it is found that the results are always true under those market sharing rules which have the property of including the competitive equilibrium in the set of bertrand equilibria for example the capacity sharing rule if however the sharing rule does not have this property for example the equal sharing rule then the results referred to above may not hold when costs are asymmetric journal of economic literatureclassification numbers l13

the reaction of exchange rates to economic news this paper examines the short run responses of spot exchange rates to several types of economic news survey data are used to divide economic announcements into expected and unexpected components with the latter measuring news the results indicate that exchange rates are systematically related to unexpected money announcements after the october 1979 switch in federal reserve operating procedures but not before this response does not appear to have changed however after the october 1982 federal reserve regime change short run exchange rate movements are not systematically related to news on inflation or real activity