making the same mistake again or is this time different the world faces an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions but much of the policy response has certainly not lacked for precedent national governments and international organisations including the international monetary fund imf have looked to crises of the past for solutions to the present and austerity has become a familiar theme the inability to effectively resolve the current crisis however gives rise to the question is this time different this article provides a broad overview to the origins and development of the recent economic crisis and the resort to policies of austerity although there is historical precedent for the resort to austerity such as the uk treasury view during the 1920s and 1930s this time things are different many of the current problems are deeply rooted and reflect the impact of the shift towards free market economics that started in the 1970s 2 the origins of the crisis since the beginning of the 1970s the private sector finance in particular has reorganised on an increasingly global scale it has innovated in terms of both structure and products and it has experienced significant growth as tridico 2012 this issue shows this financialisation was characterised by a ballooning of stock exchanges as many firms decided not only to list their shares but also to become involved in speculative finance in response to pressures on firms to maximise shareholder value together with the progressive erosion of worker and trade union rights and influence labour markets became more flexible and real wages stagnated concurrently profits rebounded leading to burgeoning inequality in this context aggregate demand and consumption were bolstered by easy credit and the wealth effects of speculative bubbles first in stocks and shares and then in housing

the role of the media in fiscal consolidation programmes the case of ireland a number of european countries have implemented austerity programmes since the onset of the current economic crisis this paper focuses on fiscal consolidation a central aspect of such programmes using the case of ireland it investigates the significant role of the mass media in presenting such policies to the public a role which has so far remained unexamined conceiving of the irish experience over the past few decades as a case of neoliberalisation it uses a critical political economic conceptualisation of news organisations to consider 431 editorials and opinion articles discussing fiscal consolidation in three leading irish newspapers between 2008 and 2012 it finds that the majority of articles present viewpoints in favour of fiscal consolidation and display a preference for spending cuts over tax hikes which substantiates the claim that ireland has adopted neoliberal policies to address the crisis only a minority of articles oppose fiscal consolidation these mostly contest specific spending cuts but usually fail to criticise fiscal consolidation itself by calling for economic alternatives such as keynesian stimulus differences between newspapers are also discussed highlighting their ideological cleavages

models of stock returns a comparison in this paper a discrete mixture of normal distributions is proposed to explain the observed significant kurtosis fat tails and significant positive skewness in the distribution of daily rates of returns for a sample of common stocks and indexes stationarity tests on the parameter estimates of this discrete mixture of normal distributions model revealed significant differences in the mean estimates that can explain the observed skewness and significant differences in the variance estimates that can explain the observed kurtosis an alternative explanation for the observed fat tails is the symmetric student model the result of a comparison between the models is that the discrete mixture of normal distributions model has substantially more descriptive validity than the student model for many years both financial economists and statisticians have been concerned with the description of stock market returns the form of the distribution of stock returns is a crucial assumption for mean variance portfolio theory theoretical models of capital asset prices and the prices of contingent claims for example understanding the behavior of the variance is essential to option pricing models empirical tests of asset pricing models and the efficient markets hypothesis draw statistical inferences that are also conditional on distributional assumptions the most convenient assumption for financial theory and empirical methods is that the distribution of security rates of return be multivariate normal with parameters that are stationary over time since the normal distribution is stable under addition any arbitrary portfolio of stocks will also be normally distributed with the additional assumption of risk aversion mean variance theory follows furthermore the assumptions of normality and parameter stationarity are required for most of the econometric techniques typically used in empirical research tests of the normality hypothesis on the daily returns of the dow jones industrial stocks by fama 121 revealed more kurtosis fatter tails than that predicted from a sample of independent and identically distributed normal variates fama concluded from this evidence that the distribution of price changes conforms better to the stable paretian distribution with characteristic exponent

the austrian search for realistic foundations self designated austrian economists have two different views of modem neoclassical economics some such as f a hayek take issue with certain aspects of neoclassical economics without disputing its fundamentals others most notably ludwig von mises and murray rothbard explicitly reject the foundations of neoclassical consumer and welfare theory and construct a systematic alternative this paper analyzes the most distinctive features of the mises rothbard alternative to the neoclassical paradigm it also considers related positions defended by israel kirzner i argue that their effort to rebuild economics on nonneoclassical foundations fails and that their critique of neoclassical foundations is wrong or strongly overstated

on the optimality of activist policies with a less informed government abstract i investigate whether a government should lead an activist policy in a rigorous utility maximizing framework under rational expectations the economy is one with preset wages and is subject to both demand and supply shocks it is assumed that the government can never act on the basis of information superior to that of the private sector moreover wages are set after government policy has been carried out we find that the optimal policy is nevertheless an activist countercyclical one it has the remarkable property that although the economy is hit each period by stochastic shocks after wages have been preset this optimal policy will nevertheless succeed in keeping the economy on a full employment track

information decisions and productivity on board computers and capacity utilization in trucking productivity reflects not only how efficiently inputs are transformed into outputs but also how well information is applied to resource allocation decisions this paper examines how information technology has affected capacity utilization in the trucking industry estimates for 1997 indicate that advanced on board computers obcs have increased capacity utilization among adopting trucks by 13 percent these increases are higher than for 1992 suggesting lags in the returns to adoption and are highly skewed across hauls the 1997 estimates imply that obcs have enabled 3 percent higher capacity utilization in the industry which translates to billions of dollars of annual benefits jel d24 l92 o33 o47

a data analytic look at skewness and elongation in common stock return distributions this article explores the nature of skewness and elongation in daily common stock return distributions of individual firms using estimates of g for skewness and h for elongation obtained from tukey s g and h distributions both parametric and nonparametric bootstrap estimates of standard errors of the g estimates are computed and compared daily return distributions are first examined cross sectionally over a large sample of firms the estimates of the skewness parameter exhibit variation across individual firms but some general trends are evident across industry groups and firm sizes return distributions typically seem to be more elongated than the gaussian distribution from a time series perspective both skewness and elongation are persistent in the return distributions of individual firms and vary over a finite range first order autocorrelation coefficients of monthly g and h estimates are large and suggest a certain degree of predictability

specialization and human capital incentives for specialization trade and the production of comparative advantage through investment are shown to arise from increasing returns to utilization of human capital indivisibilities imply fixed cost elements of investment that are independent of subsequent utilization hence the rate of return is increasing in utilization and is maximized by utilizing specialized skills as intensively as possible identically endowed individuals have incentives to specialize their investments in skills and trade with each other for this reason even if production technology exhibits constant returns to scale

the basic paradigms of eu economic policy making need to be changed the anaemic growth of the european union euro area derives from its economic paradigms the principle one size fits all behind european central bank policy activates centrifugal forces diverging trends in unit labour costs external competitiveness and external balances follow german policy actively supports this excessive external surplus procedures against countries generating large surpluses at the expense of domestic consumption and the partners rising debt should be instituted the stability and growth pact needs modification the 3 fiscal deficit gdp mark may prevent automatic stabilisation insistence on the budgetary positions being close to balance or in surplus lacks rationale when the private sector s propensity to save is larger than its propensity to invest that requirement cannot be observed a permanent fiscal deficit may be a secular necessity problems related to rising public debt may also need to be addressed for the euro area these problems could be rendered far less serious than often believed

monopolistic competition as a foundation for keynesian macroeconomic models a general equilibrium macroeconomic model based on monopolistic competition is presented the model exhibits a traditional multiplier in the short run but due to free entry the multiplier disappears in the long run by construction all agents are fully rational the keynesian results are a consequence of the assumption of monopolistic competition which creates a divergence between optimal private behavior and optimal social behavior

on measuring skewness and elongation in common stock return distributions the case of the market index this article is an exploratory investigation of the distributional properties of market index returns using j w tukey s g and h distributions specifically it is shown that over sufficiently long periods of time the distribution of the market index is adequately explained as a skewed elongated g x h distribution estimates of skewness and elongation are developed that are easy to calculate and are robust with respect to outliers functional forms for the appropr iate distributions are provided the findings reported here have implications for understanding skewness and elongation developing appropriate portfolio strategies and devising pricing models incorporating higher moments copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

austrian and neoclassical economics any gains from trade austrian economics has been important to the development of modern economics but its role in current practice is much diminished the neoclassical approach dominates today s thinking many austrians bemoan this state of affairs most neoclassical economists just ignore it but austrian and neoclassical economics aren t mutually exclusive each represents a distinctive point of view although with little meaningful intellectual exchange between them these days this is unfortunate many different concepts are associated with both austrian and neoclassical economics to concentrate on where the most exchange of ideas might occur i am concerned about those aspects of austrian economics primarily dealing with the process of competition and that portion of neoclassical economics primarily dealing with the determination of economic equilibrium this in a nutshell is the main intellectual difference between them some consequences of this difference are discussed in what follows i hope to show that mutually advantageous gains from trade exist austrian economics offers a valuable perspective of the economy as an evolutionary process akin to biological evolution with entrepreneurial activities representing the main instruments of change it is primarily a macroeconomic theory of the economy as a whole with keen insights on the nature of decentralization and the process of competition that deserve more attention neoclassical economics offers a microeconomic theory of economic behavior that is especially useful for analyzing specific economic problems and for orienting analysis around more sharply described empirical phenomena and data

fiscal policy and entrepreneurship abstract this paper reexamines the effect of expansionary fiscal policy on real gdp in the presence of entrepreneurship when government expenditure partially crowds out private consumption as government expenditure cannot reflect changes in consumers tastes expansionary fiscal policy weakens the social role of firms activities to predict and adapt to idiosyncratic changes in consumers taste i show that expansionary fiscal policy can lower real gdp when idiosyncratic risk and the substitutability of goods are large and when firms have a strong ability to predict changes in consumer tastes i also investigate how expansionary fiscal policy influences firms investments in prediction ability

retrospectives lange and von mises large scale enterprises and the economic case for socialism in the debates over economic calculation launched by ludwig von mises in 1920 and extending well into the 1940s the central issue concerned the ability of a socialist economy to achieve allocative efficiency von mises emphasized that a collectivist state would have great difficulty in gathering and acting on relevant information therefore under socialism even well intentioned bureaucrats would lack a meaningful system of values on which to calculate defenders of socialism such as oskar lange countered that a market socialism could match demand to supply just as well as capitalism and meet the range of static conditions required for pareto optimality that debate is a rich and interesting story that has been told many times before but in all that has been written an important aspect of the original debate has been lost somewhat oddly both the socialists like oskar lange and the advocates of private ownership like von mises and friedrich hayek maintained that they were defending the progressive tendencies of competitive capitalism against the deadening hand of monopoly power this historic paradox deserves consideration if only because it serves to focus attention on our still incomplete theories of large scale enterprises under socialism and capitalism

extracting probabilistic information from the prices of interest rate options tests of distributional assumptions return distributions in general and interest rates in particular have been observed to exhibit skewness and kurtosis that cannot be explained by the log normal distribution using g and h distribution we derived a closed form option pricing formula for pricing european options we measured its performance using interest rate cap data and compared it with the option prices based on the lognormal burr 3 weibull and gb2 distributions we observed that the g and h distribution exhibited a high degree of accuracy in pricing options much better than those other distributions in extracting probabilistic information from the option market

information aggregation and policy the function of monetary policy to alter the informational content of money price signals is examined in a model where traders can observe an economy wide financial signal and a local commodity price under a passive policy money demand disturbances which are not directly observable are shown to be confused with real productivity shocks and thereby preclude prices from fully reflecting all information even when the policy authority has no informational advantage prospective money growth feedback rules can improve the structure of available information applications of the rational expectations hypothesis to monetary theory have focused on the informational aspects of money price signals a key element of the models of lucas 1972 1975 barro 1976 and sargent and wallace 1975 is that agents have limited powers of information acquisition and use prices as imperfect summaries from the rest of the world those works have suggested that monetary policy can affect the informational content of observed price signals and thereby affect real variables in weiss 1980a it was shown systematic money growth feedback rules can contribute to economic efficiency when the money demands of one group are based on factors not directly observed by all in this context monetary policy can alter the information content transmitted from the informed to the uninformed through observation of nominal price signals a limitation of these analyses is the omission of economy wide financial signals clearly stock and bond prices are observed accurately and costlessly empirically there are strong comovements between financial signals and economic activity traditional keynesian theory argues that financial signals exert an important influence on output by affecting the demand for new capital goods understanding the informational role of such signals is crucial to any theory which explains fluctuations as arising from incomplete information the present analysis investigates the structure of available information with its implications for real variables in a model where agents trade on both an economy wide capital market and a local commodity market the model has positive implications for the comovements of money demand disturbances aggregate investment expected and realized returns as well as normative implications for the conduct of policy the structure of exogenous information in the model differs from that of my earlier paper rather than assuming two types of traders informed and uninformed the model considers traders to have symmetric although noisy exogenous private information in this framework the economy wide market both aggregates and transmits individuals information about an aggregate structural variable this modification is both analytically convenient and illustrates how noise in the price system alters the importance of public relative to private sources of information the idea that prices aggregate individual information was first formalized in grossman 1976 in that paper a non monetary model of a speculative market was developed in which the price system conveyed all relevant information so as to yield an efficient allocation however this feature was also shown to break down if prices are influenced by

interest rates aggregate information and monetary policy abstract interest rates set on economy wide markets represent an important source of information to economic agents within the class of business cycle models advanced by lucas and barro this paper explores the information conveyed by such aggregate signals and the types of monetary policies that can influence economic activity by changing the information content of interest rates

monopolistic competition and the effects of aggregate demand how important is monopolistic competition to an understanding of the effects of aggregate demand on output we ask the question at three levels can monopolistic competition by itself explain why aggregate demand movements affect output can it together with other imperfections generate effects of aggregate demand in a way that perfect competition cannot if so can it give an accurate account of the response of the economy to aggregate demand movements the answers are no yes and yes

william j baumol an entrepreneurial economist on the economics of entrepreneurship william j baumol is the 2003 winner of the international award for entrepreneurship and small business research throughout his career baumol has urged the profession to pay attention to the instrumental role of entrepreneurship in economic renewal and growth at the same time he has insisted that economists continue to use their usual tool box when the purview of analysis is extended to entrepreneurship hence baumol can be characterized as a revolutionary from within in this article we present and discuss baumol s research contribution in the areas of entrepreneurship and small business economics notably from a growth perspective in addition to placing his work in these areas into the wider context of his full contribution we emphasize baumol s findings that growth cannot be explained by the accumulation of various factors of production per se human creativity and productive entrepreneurship are needed to combine the inputs in profitable ways as a result an institutional environment that encourages productive entrepreneurship and human experimentation becomes the ultimate determinant of economic growth

austrian economics neoclassicism and the market test professor sherwin rosen correctly suggests that the austrian and neoclassical schools can be complementary each accepting much from the other however his recognition of austrian strengths needs to be amplified and his criticisms need softening his appeal to the market test risks encouraging anti intellectual attitudes and practices

restoring banking stability beyond supervised capital requirements emerging economies have been particularly prone to financial sector crises reflecting marked information asymmetries and political interference as well as the substantial volatility in underlying economic conditions and the vulnerability of banking and finance when structural economic changes create a new and uncharted operating environment the standard regulatory paradigm relies mainly on supervised capital adequacy but it may not be enough other measures to improve the incentive structure for bankers regulators and other market participants could effectively increase the number of concerned skilled and watchful eyes intermittent application of supplementary blunt instruments could also be useful

monetary policy and the information content of prices rational expectations and cleared markets lead to the proposition that feedback monetary policy is irrelevant to real activity as in the analyses of sargent and wallace however if agents are differentially informed and have access to a common price then prospective monetary policy actions future feedback to imperfectly known current circumstances can alter real activity by changing the information content of prices

a general distribution for describing security price returns this paper introduces a generalized distribution called the gb2 distribution for describing security returns the distribution is extremely flexible containing a large number of well known distributions such as the lognormal log t and log cauchy distribu tions as special or limiting cases and allowing large even infinite higher moments this flexibility allows a direct representation of different degrees of fat tails in the distribution the properties of the gb2 make it useful in empirical estimation of security returns and in facilitating the development of option pricing models and other models that depend on the specification and mathematical manipulation of distributions copyright 1987 by the university of chicago

a sectoral net lending perspective on europe the paper investigates net lending and net borrowing flows of the institutional sectors in europe since the introduction of the euro in 1999 applying a simple statistical apparatus this paper is novel in describing the sectoral behavior leading up to and during the crisis we find that 1 many countries of the northern group were characterized by low public deficits or even budget surpluses current account surpluses and a private sector in a net lending position in countries of the southern periphery in the anglo saxon countries as well as in many eastern european economies private sector net borrowing coincided with a budget deficit and substantial current account deficits 2 with the onset of the crisis private net lending soared in all countries while all governments incurred deficits consistent with the notion of a balance sheet recession 3 private net lending is pro cyclical reinforcing the economic downturn while public net lending is countercyclical in all countries 4 household net lending tends to lead the business cycle while corporate net lending tends to lag it especially in the northern group 5 prominent concepts asserting causal relationships in sectoral net lending such as ricardian equivalence and the twin deficit hypothesis are not supported by the data authors abstract

how big a problem is too big to fail a review of gary stern and ron feldman s too big to fail the hazards of bank bailouts this review essay examines whether too big to fail is as serious a problem as gary stern and ron feldman contend this essay argues that stern and feldman overstate the importance of the too big to fail problem and do not give enough credit to the fdicia legislation of 1991 for improving bank regulation and supervision however this criticism of the stern and feldman book does not detract from many of its messages the policy recommendations in their book have merit even if the too big to fail problem is currently not that serious because these policies make it less likely that a banking crisis will occur even if driven by other factors