outcomes of voting and planning condorcet weber and rawls locations abstract the paper is concerned with the comparison of the locations of a facility resulting from voting and planning procedures it is shown that a voting location exists and coincides with that minimizing the total distance covered by the users to go to the facility when the transportation network contains no cycles for a general network least upper bounds on the ratio of the social values of the voting and planning locations are given in the cases where the total or the maximal travelled distance is minimized

some empirical evidence on the effects of shocks to monetary policy on exchange rates this paper investigates the effects of shocks to u s monetary policy on exchange rates we consider three measures of these shocks orthogonalized shocks to the federal funds rate orthogonalized shocks to the ratio of nonborrowed to total reserves and changes in the romer and romer index of monetary policy in sharp contrast to the literature we find substantial evidence of a link between monetary policy and exchange rates specifically according to our results a contractionary shock to u s monetary policy leads to i persistent significant appreciations in u s nominal and real exchange rates and ii significant persistent deviations from uncovered interest rate parity in favor of u s interest rates

do doctors practice defensive medicine defensive medicine is a potentially serious social problem if fear of liability drives health care providers to administer treatments that do not have worthwhile medical benefits then the current liability system may generate inefficiencies much larger than the costs of compensating malpractice claimants to obtain direct empirical evidence on this question we analyze the effects of malpractice liability reforms using data on all elderly medicare beneficiaries treated for serious heart disease in 1984 1987 and 1990 we find that malpractice reforms that directly reduce provider liability pressure lead to reductions of 5 to 9 percent in medical expenditures without substantial effects on mortality or medical complications we conclude that liability reforms can reduce defensive medical practices

a statistical model for condorcet efficiency based on simulation under spatial model assumptions this essay evaluates six single winner multicandidate electoral systems with respect to their tendency to choose condorcet candidates to this end i calibrate a logistic multiple regression model from monte carlo simulations based on a multivariate normal spatial model in which i vary the number of candidates number of dimensions correlation structure and relative dispersion of candidates and voters i investigate additional spatial model variations by comparing further simulation results with predictions of the basic statistical model the results suggest that for many electoral systems condorcet efficiency would increase with perceptual uncertainty of candidates positions and would be low in a polarized society of the voting systems studied approval voting and the coombs systems appear least sensitive to variations in assumptions

democratic elections and centralized decisions condorcet and approval voting compared with median and coverage locations abstract in this study we focus on the quality of condorcet and approval voting winners using median and maximum coverage problems as benchmarks we assess the quality of solutions by democratic processes assuming many dimensions for evaluating candidates we use different norms to map multidimensional preferences into single values we perform extensive numerical experiments the condorcet winner when he she exists may have very high quality measured by the median objective function but poor quality measured by the maximum coverage problem we show that the approval voting winner is optimal when the quality is measured by the maximum coverage objective and fairs well when the median objective is employed the analyses further indicate that the number of voters and the distance norm may increase while the number of candidates and dimensions may decrease the quality of democratic methods

openness and inflation a general equilibrium model of a small open economy is developed to analyse the optimal rate of inflation under discretion once agents welfare is the sole policy objective it is possible to show that openness and inflation no longer have a simple inverse relationship a greater degree of openness may lead the policy maker to want to exploit the short run phillips curve more aggressively even if involves a smaller short run benefit because changes in export demand affect the terms of trade inflation can then be higher in a more open economy

openness and inflation a new assessment romer 1993 uses a barro gordon type model to argue that openness puts a check on the government s incentive to engage in unanticipated inflation because of induced exchange rate depreciation 2 therefore in the absence of precommitment in monetary policy more open economies will tend to have lower inflation rates romer finds that empirically over a large sample of countries and over a broad time frame average inflation rates are lower in smaller more open economies this relationship is significant quantitatively large and robust moreover these findings suggest that models in which the absence of precommitment in monetary policy leads to inefficiently high average levels of inflation are essential to understanding inflation in most of the world this comment suggests that the negative link between inflation and openness romer found may be largely driven by the responses of severely indebted countries sics to the debt crisis of the 1980s figures i and ii show the scatterplots of the logarithms of average inflation and openness for the subperiods 1973 to 1981 predebt crisis and 1982 to 1990 the debt crisis period different groups of countries are separated according to their indebtedness level 3 the solid lines in the figures represent the predicted value of inflation obtained from a regression of openness on inflation for the countries in each group as the scatterplots show there is indeed a strong negative relation between openness and inflation among sics during the debt crisis

does globalization affect growth evidence from a new index of globalization the study develops an index of globalization covering its three main dimensions economic integration social integration and political integration using panel data for 123 countries in 1970 2000 it is analysed empirically whether the overall index of globalization as well as sub indexes constructed to measure the single dimensions affect economic growth as the results show globalization indeed promotes growth the dimensions most robustly related with growth refer to actual economic flows and restrictions in developed countries although less robustly information flows also promote growth whereas political integration has no effect

a note on romer s openness inflation relation the responsiveness of as and ad to economic openness and monetary policy temple 2002 empirically challenges romer s 1993 negative openness inflation relation on empirical grounds this article links economic openness to the slopes of aggregate supply as and aggregate demand ad to explain why the openness inflation relation can be ambiguous starting with a widely used assumption initiated by romer 1993 that more open economies face greater output inflation tradeoffs we demonstrate that greater output inflation tradeoffs in more open economies reflected in the steeper as induce policymakers to adopt more aggressive optimal monetary policy reflected in the flatter ad empirical results from 15 developed countries data support our theoretical explanation on the recent empirical failure in finding the negative openness inflation relation

have the free trade agreements reduced inflation rates abstract most previous studies have examined extensively the economic effects of free trade agreements ftas such as their effects on economic growth income distribution across industries price competitiveness for international trade trade volume and the price of a commodity but not very much on inflation rates this study empirically estimates how much ftas affect domestic inflation rates from the cross country panel data analysis of 34 oecd countries over the period 1980 2014 the expansion of ftas shows a significant negative effect on the consumer price index inflation which is more apparent than the traditionally used openness measure the inflation reduction effect is more significant in countries with a low level of openness than those with a high level of openness

trade openness and inflation the role of real and nominal price rigidities the paper revisits the long standing question of the impact of trade openness on the inflation output trade off by accounting for the effects of product market competition on price flexibility the study develops a new keynesian open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with non constant price elasticity of demand and calvo price setting in which the frequency of price adjustment is endogenously determined it demonstrates that trade openness has two opposing effects on the sensitivity of inflation to output fluctuations on the one hand it raises strategic complementarity in firms pricing decisions and the degree of real price rigidities which makes inflation less responsive to changes in real marginal cost on the other hand it strengthens firms incentives to adjust their prices thereby reducing the degree of nominal price rigidities and increasing the sensitivity of inflation to changes in marginal cost the study explains the positive relationship between competition and the frequency of price adjustment observed in the data it also provides new insights into the effects of global economic integration on the phillips curve

a near rational model of the business cycle with wage and price inertia this paper presents a model in which insignificantly suboptimal behavior causes aggregate demand shocks to have significant real effects the individual loss to agents with inertial price wage behavior is second order in terms of the parameter describing the shock while the effect on real economic variables is first order thus significant changes in business activity can be generated by anticipated money supply changes provided that some agents are willing to engage in nonmaximizing behavior which results in small losses

the evidence on globalisation globalisation is blamed for many socioeconomic shortcomings i discuss the consequences of globalisation by surveying the empirical globalisation literature my focus is on the kof indices of globalisation that have been used in more than 100 studies early studies using the kof index reported correlations between globalisation and several outcome variables studies published more recently identify causal effects the evidence shows that globalisation has spurred economic growth promoted gender equality and improved human rights moreover globalisation did not erode welfare state activities did not have any significant effect on labour market interaction and hardly influenced market deregulation it increased however within country income inequality the consequences of globalisation thus turn out to be overall much more favourable than often conjectured in the public discourse

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

income velocity of money in agricultural developing economies t he response of income velocity of money to economic growth has implications for monetary planning in a developing economy velocity is the ratio of nominal income to money stock and decreases only if money stock rises at a faster rate than nominal income a well known hypothesis in this context is that of friedman 1959 which states that in countries experiencing a secular rise in real income per capita the stock of money generally rises over long periods at a decidedly higher rate than does money income i e velocity declines ezekiel and adekunle 1969 and melitz and correa 1970 in their international crosscountry comparisons have found evidence largely in favour of the friedman hypothesis this in its turn has strengthened the hope for active growthoriented monetary planning the extent of resources that can be transferred for investment purposes through non inflationary monetary expansion increases as development proceeds cross section studies involving developed and developing economies do not provide satisfactory indications of what happens to velocity over time in any individual developing economy firstly velocities have not behaved uniformly in all the developing economies secondly international cross country comparisons do not adequately explain why velocity changes in any individual economy is it because money is a luxury good i e income elasticity of demand for money is greater than unity to the agents in the economy is it because economic development brings about structural changes in the economy which lead to the observed behaviour of velocity is it because monetary habits change in a systematic way it is important to have time series analyses of developing economies to provide answers to such questions for example in a study of malaysia and singapore short 1973 found that though velocity did move inversely to per capita income this negative impact was overpowered by the change in monetary habits which the increase in bank offices caused the aim of this paper is to analyse the temporal behaviour of income velocity of money in agricultural developing economies in the literature on velocity and demand for money in developing economies attention is focussed mainly on three issues i the incomeelasticity of demand for money and in particular whether money is a luxury good or not ii the growth of monetisation and changes in monetary habits and iii the effect of the cost of holding money one important factor which has suffered total neglect is the role of sectoral differences in money demand behaviour and the structural shifts in the sectoral composition of income that accompany development money demand behaviour may vary across sectors this is true not only in developing economies but also in developed economies for example goldfeld 1976 has found that the business sector and the household sector in the united states have different money demand functions an implicit specification error is committed in the aggregative money demand or velocity equation whenever the sectoral income composition factor is omitted on a priori grounds this factor should have special significance in developing economies where sectoral shares in national income change over time in the absence of flow offunds accounts and adequate data on sectoral money holdings for most of the developing economies direct estimation of sectoral demand functions is not possible thus an aggregative specification which incorporates the sectoral income composition factor is necessary to analyse the behaviour of velocity

on the flexibility of monetary policy the case of the optimal inflation tax this paper examines optimal monetary policy under uncertainty in a context in which policy makers are able to make credible policy commitments we study an optimal taxation problem of minimizing the social cost of financing a stochastic and exogenous level of government transfers since in the basic model the welfare costs of inflation derive only from expected inflation the optimal monetary policy is highly responsive to the state of nature in a benchmark case in which all shocks are transitory the optimal policy calls for loading all the variability of government transfers on the shoulders of the inflation tax

inflation openness and exchange rate regimes the quest for short term commitment abstract this paper further tests romer s romer d 1993 openness and inflation theory and evidence quarterly journal of economics 58 869 903 extension of kydland and prescott s kydland f prescott e 1977 rules rather than discretion the inconsistency of optimal plans journal of political economy 85 473 491 predictions for dynamic inconsistency problems in open economies in a panel data set of developed and developing countries from 1973 to 1998 i find that openness does not play a role in restricting inflation in the short run on the other hand a fixed exchange rate regime plays a significant role the results are robust to controlling for other variables that determine inflation performing sensitivity analysis and using a de facto exchange rate regime classification

traded goods competitiveness and aggregate fluctuations in the united kingdom this paper presents an investigation of the relations between wage adjustment competitiveness and aggregate fluctuations in the united kingdom it uses a real business cycle model based on the distinction between internationally traded and nontraded goods the traded goods sector is assumed a price taker and the focus is on the supply side the model can account quite well for fluctuations in competitiveness output wages and the terms of trade the results suggest output flexibility and wage price rigidity a combination that produces interesting patterns of macroeconomic adjustment which parallel the predictions of more traditional keynesian models copyright 1990 by royal economic society

globalisation institutional reforms and financial development in east asian economies this study investigates the dynamic effects of globalisation on institutions and financial development in east asian economies using panel data tests our empirical results demonstrate that globalisation has a significant influence on institutional quality and that institutional reforms in turn facilitate and support financial development in particular the development of the banking sector in east asia globalisation is also found to have a favourable direct impact on stock market development without passing through an institutional quality channel

does regulation of physicians reduce health care spending the medical community argues that physician fear of legal liability increases health care spending theoretically though the effect could be positive or negative and empirical evidence has supported both cases previous studies however have ignored the fact that physicians face risk from industry oversight groups like state level medical licensing boards in addition to civil litigation risk this article addresses this omission by incorporating previously unused data on punishments by oversight groups against physicians known as adverse actions along with malpractice payments data to study state level health care spending my analysis suggests that contrary to conventional wisdom spending does not rise in response to increased risk an increase in adverse actions of 16 the year to year average is associated with statistically significant annual decreases in state spending on hospital care of approximately 22 million and on prescription drugs of nearly 10 million malpractice payments are estimated to have smaller statistically insignificant effects

small menu costs and large business cycles a macroeconomic model of monopoly i introduction the conflict between modern neoclassical and traditional keynesian theories of the business cycle centers upon the pricing mechanism in neoclassical models prices are fully flexible they represent the continuous optimization of economic agents and the continuous intersection of supply and demand in keynesian models prices are often assumed to be sticky they do not necessarily equilibrate all markets at all times one of the reasons for the resurgence of the equilibrium approach to macroeconomics has been the absence of a theoretical underpinning for this keynesian price stickiness this note shows that sticky prices can be both privately efficient and socially inefficient the business cycle results from the suboptimal adjustment of prices in response to a demand shock to the extent that policy can stabilize aggregate demand it can mitigate the social loss due to this suboptimal adjustment in some keynesian models prices are simply exogenously fixed 2 in others agents must set their prices in advance of the transaction date the act of altering a posted price is certainly costly these costs include such items as printing new catalogs and informing salesmen of the new price yet these menu costs are small and therefore generally perceived as providing only a weak foundation for these fixed price models however this inference is flawed small menu costs can cause large welfare losses the claim that price adjustment costs are small does not rebut the claim that they are central to understanding economic fluctuations

inflation in open economies abstract this paper relates the time consistent inflation rate to the degree of trade openness of an economy the mechanism linking the welfare effects of monetary surprises and hence the incentives to inflate to openness does not rely on a large country terms of trade effect but rather is due to imperfect competition and nominal price rigidity in the non traded sector the empirical evidence supports the main predictions of the model 1997 elsevier science b v

first do no harm tort reform and birth outcomes in the 1980s and 1990s many states adopted tort reforms it has been argued that these reforms have reduced the practice of defensive medicine arising from excess tort liability we find that this does not appear to be true for a large and important class of cases childbirth in the united states using data from national vital statistics natality files on millions of individual births from 1989 to 2001 we ask whether specific tort reforms affect the types of procedures that are performed and the health outcomes of mothers and their infants we find that reform of the joint and several liability rule or the deep pockets rule reduces complications of labor and procedure use whereas caps on noneconomic damages increase them we show that these results are consistent with a model of tort reform that explicitly allows for variations in patient condition

judge don t vote this article explains why 1 the traditional model of the theory of social choice misrepresents reality 2 it cannot lead to acceptable methods of ranking and electing in any case and 3 a more realistic model leads inevitably to one method of ranking and electing majority judgment that best meets the traditional criteria of what constitutes a good method

openness and inflation new empirical panel data evidence abstract the purpose of this paper is to test the hypothesis first documented by romer 1993 that inflation is lower in more open economies according to this hypothesis central banks have a smaller incentive to engineer surprise inflations in economies that are more open because the phillips curve is steeper in this paper the panel data technique has been employed to examine the aforementioned hypothesis concerning the developed and developing countries over the last two decades also comparing with other empirical studies this paper has estimated the relationship between economic globalization as one dimension of the new kof globalization index and inflation the paper s results cast substantial doubts on the conventional view that suggests a robust and negative relationship between trade openness and inflation the estimation result regarding the traditional measure of trade openness indicates a positive and significant association between trade openness and inflation which opposes the view of the romer 1993 hypothesis in contrast the estimation results regarding a new economic globalization index the kof index suggest that higher economic globalization will decrease inflation as supported by the romer 1993 hypothesis for both developed and developing countries during 1990 9 and 2000 9 thus it seems that the new economic globalization measure the kof index which is a broader comprehensive index is a better proxy for openness

trade linkages and the globalisation of inflation in asia and the pacific abstract some observers argue that increased real integration has led to greater co movement of prices internationally we examine the evidence for cross border price spillovers among economies participating in the pan asian cross border production networks starting with country level data we find that both producer price and consumer price inflation rates move more closely together between those asian economies that trade more with one another ie that share a higher degree of trade intensity next using a novel data set based on the world input output database wiod we examine the importance of the supply chain for cross border price spillovers at the sectoral level we document the increasing importance of imported intermediate inputs for economies in the asia pacific region and examine the impact on domestic producer prices of changes in costs of imported intermediate inputs our results suggest that real integration through the supply chain matters for domestic price dynamics in the asia pacific region