dynamic inefficiency endogenous growth and ponzi games we show that in competitive endogenous growth models without externalities balanced growth equilibria are dynamically efficient with learning by doing externalities dynamic inefficiency may exist but due to the mix of capital rather than its scale these results are obtained independent of whether or not lifetimes are finite or generations overlap in olg models with externalities we show that ponzi games may be feasible even though equilibria are characterized by undersaving

ethnicity neighborhoods and human capital externalities the socioeconomic performance of today s workers depends not only on parental skills but also on the average skills of the ethnic group in the parents generation or ethnic capital this paper investigates the link between the ethnic externality and ethnic neighborhoods the evidence indicates that residential segregation and the external effect of ethnicity are linked partly because ethnic capital summarizes the socioeconomic background of the neighborhood where the children were raised ethnicity has an external effect even among persons who grow up in the same neighborhood when children are exposed frequently to persons who share the same ethnic background copyright 1995 by american economic association

public versus private investment in human capital endogenous growth and income inequality in this paper we present an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents in which human capital investment through formal schooling is the engine of growth we use simple functional forms for preferences technologies and income distribution to highlight the distinction between economies with public education and those with private education we find that income inequality declines more quickly under public education on the other hand private education yields greater per capita incomes unless the initial income inequality is sufficiently high we also find that societies will choose public education if a majority of agents have incomes below average

deficits and intergenerational welfare in open economies this paper deals with public debt in open economies extending diamond s overlapping generations model to a small open economy as well as an international equilibrium of two large economies it focuses on the intergenerational welfare redistributions caused by an increase in public debt triggered by a temporary government budget deficit and shows how these redistributions differ in open and closed economies the interplay between the deficits in the government budget and the current account is also analyzed it is shown how a single period with a government deficit can be followed by a sequence of periods with a deficit in the current account

simple monetary policy rules and exchange rate uncertainty abstract we analyze the performance and robustness of some common simple rules for monetary policy in a new keynesian open economy model under different assumptions about the exchange rate model adding the exchange rate to an optimized taylor rule that responds to cpi inflation gives only small improvements in terms of economic stability in most model configurations the taylor rule is also slightly more robust to uncertainty about the exchange rate model than are rules that respond to the rate of exchange rate depreciation our results thus indicate that the taylor rule is sufficient to stabilize a small open economy also under exchange rate model uncertainty

pricing to market in swedish exports fluctuations in prices of swedish exports to five countries are investigated in this paper we test whether there are systematic differences between prices to different markets and whether relative export prices are affected by macroeconomic conditions in destination countries the test results indicate that deviations from no pricing to market and neutrality of money are quite common and persistent over a sample of 15 years long run monetary neutrality is rejected in almost half of the cases in most cases the degree of pricing to market is also affected by aggregate demand in export markets

money and endogenous growth the ramsey romer model of endogenous growth is extended to allow for holdings of real money balances and government debt as well as capital and for non interconnected generations of households tax financed increases in government consumption and debt depress growth prospects and boost inflation as long as a positive birth rate ensures that future taxes are shouldered by future yet unborn generations debt financed increases in government consumption depress growth and boost inflation even more money financed increases in government consumption depress growth less but increase inflation by more giving subsidies through an increase in monetary growth is non neutral since this increases real growth and thus inflation increases by a lesser amount than monetary growth bond financed increases in monetary growth lead to a larger increase in real growth and a smaller increase in inflation if there are cost adjustment for investment cuts in monetary growth and increases in government debt and government consumption induce an increase in the real interest rate copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

price discrimination by u s and german exporters the insensitivity of the u s trade balance to the sharp depreciation of the dollar in the past three years has revived interest in the relationship between exchange rates and the trade balance a central issue in most analyses of the relation between the current account and the exchange rate concerns the price adjustment process the simple integrated competitive market model predicts that local currency prices should change in proportion to the nominal exchange rate for a country too small to influence world prices the relationship between local currency import prices and exchange rates has been referred to as the pass through relationship in the empirical literature in international economics if the proportional relationship between import prices and exchange rates holds pass through is said to be complete accounts of recent u s experience cite the failure of dollar prices of imported goods to rise in proportion to exchange rates i e incomplete pass through as an important factor in explaining the persistence of the trade deficit unfortunately observations on pass through alone provide limited insight into the behavior of markets since incomplete pass through is consistent with at least two fundamentally different paradigms one is the standard competitive model of trade in which the law of one price holds but exchange rate fluctuations are associated with large changes in import demand due to other factors for example if dollar appreciation is correlated with increases in world demand and industry marginal cost is increasing then pass through will be less than complete the other is an imperfectly competitive model in which exporters are capable of price discriminating across destination markets a phenomenon paul krugman 1987 has labeled pricing to market in this model incomplete pass through is typically associated with fluctuations in the markup of price over marginal cost on exports 2 these fluctuations in markups are believed to be countryspecific they do not reflect the behavior of prices to other export destinations both models are plausible explanations of recent u s experience unfortunately it is impossible to distinguish between these competing models using only information on import prices and exchange rates for a single country in order to distinguish between the competing models an empirical analysis of goods prices and exchange rates must be capable of measuring either marginal cost or the markup over marginal cost either of these tasks poses formidable empirical problems much of the empirical literature in industrial organization has been concerned with precisely these issues since markups are an important measure of the competitiveness of industries

endogenous growth and government debt the feasibility of the policy of perpetual debt financing given a particular path for expenditures and taxation has been questioned over the years sargent and wallace 17 argue that such a policy is not feasible in the sense that the debt gnp ratio will explode mccallum 8 and darby 2 argue that this policy will be feasible if and only if the long run growth rate of gnp exceeds the after tax real interest rate this particular condition was derived under the assumption of ricardian equivalence where the growth rate of gnp and the interest rate are exogenously given and are not affected by the path of debt miller and sargent 9 and weil 20 make the point that once the assumption of ricardian equivalence is dropped then simple comparisons of long run growth rates and interest rates are not sufficient to determine stability tirole 19 and o connell and zeldes 10 demonstrate in diamond s 3 model without ricardian equivalence that ponzi games such as this are feasible if and only if the economy is dynamically inefficient without debt all of these studies assume that the long run growth rate of gnp is exogenously given this assumption is particularly strong in the absence of ricardian equivalence in a separate literature a new generation of equilibrium growth models has recently been developed with positive sustained growth in the long run equilibrium in these models long run growth is endogenously determined rather than being imposed on the model as some exogenously given process 7 11 12 14 15 1 all of these models find some way of introducing increasing returns to scale into the neoclassical growth model and yet preserving the fact that it can be interpreted as a decentralized equilibrium this paper considers the feasibility of perpetual debt financing in an economy where the growth rate of gnp is endogenously determined and is a function of debt levels the model of endogenous growth presented here is a modified version of the one given in prescott and boyd 12 this particular model is chosen for two reasons first agents live for finite lengths of time so ricardian equivalence will not hold in general in this model also the production function is linear in the capital stock as will become clear below this implies that the equilibrium paths of the state variables can be characterized as first order linear difference equations

government debt and economic growth in an overlapping generations model prior studies have shown that an increase in government debt raises the real interest rate and lowers the rate of economic growth in an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth this paper shows that an increase in government debt may not increase the real interest rate with the real interest rate being greater than the growth and that an introduction of government debt will increase the growth rate of per capita output if the growth rate is greater than the real interest rate and will decrease the growth rate if the growth rate is less than the real interest rate recent decades have seen a large increase in the share of government debt in national income in many countries this paper develops an endogenous growth model of overlapping generations to examine the effect of government debt on the rate of economic growth most prior studies of the effects of government policies on economic growth have assumed that government debt is absent romer 1986 jones and manuelli 1990 king and rebelo 1990 and rebelo 1991 showed that when government spending is not productive an increase in the income tax rate will lower the rate of per capita output growth 2 barro 1990 showed that an increase in government spending may either increase or decrease the rate of growth in a model with productive government spending government debt was incorporated in endogenous growth models by king 1992 and van der ploeg and alogoskoufis 1994 king 1992 developed a model of endogenous growth and showed that a necessary condition for the feasibility of perpetual debt finance is that labor s share of income must be greater than two thirds van der ploeg and alogoskoufis 1994 developed a blanchard type overlapping generations og model of endogenous growth and found that an increase in government debt arising from an intertemporal shift in taxation reduces the growth rate this paper analyzes the effect of government debt by developing a diamond type of og

taxing capital in a large open economy abstract this paper analyzes capital taxation in a dynamic optimizing equilibrium model of a large open economy it is shown that the existence of current account imbalances may yield surprising results for example if a country has a current account deficit the tendency of an increased tax on investment to lower wages is dampened if the deficit is sufficiently large an increased investment tax may actually increase both wages and welfare in the long run a country with a current account surplus may find that temporary investment incentives improve its current account in all but the short run

labor income taxation and human capital accumulation abstract this paper provides alternative analytical results concerning the effect of labor income taxation on human capital accumulation with the tax revenues being consumed by the government and savings being negatively related to the labor tax rate an increase in the labor income tax rate reduces the incentive for human capital accumulation and thus decreases human capital with tax revenues being consumed by government and savings being positively related to the labor tax rate an increase in the tax rate increases the incentive for human capital accumulation and increases human capital with the tax revenues being used to compensate the individuals who pay the taxes an increase in the tax rate has no effect on human capital

pricing to market in a small open economy the determinants of norwegian import prices of manufactures are investigated over the period 1970 1 1991 4 multivariate cointegration analysis establishes a long run relationship between import prices foreign prices the exchange rate and domestic unit labour costs normalized on import prices the long run elasticities are 0 63 foreign prices and the exchange rate and 0 37 domestic costs deviations from this relationship are highly significant in a structural import price equation which also contains positive effects of growth in domestic demand and inflation as well as a negative effect from the norwegian unemployment rate the estimated parameters appear reasonably stable within the sample

exchange rates and traded goods prices abstract this paper presents a partial equilibrium model of the determination of domestic and export prices by a monopolistic competitive firm the model stresses the role of exchange rate uncertainty and expectations the most important result of the analysis is that the stochastic properties of deviations from the law of one price are crucially affected by the currency of denomination of export prices using data on domestic and dollar export prices of japanese goods i find that deviations from the law of one price are due to exchange rate surprises but also to price staggering and ex ante price discrimination

an in depth economic restructuring framework by using particle swarm optimization abstract the aim of this paper is the development of an integrated framework based on environmental input output analysis for optimizing the economic structure of an economy the restructuring process is approached as a constraint optimization problem where the optimized variables are the elements of the matrix of domestic technical coefficients a method for determining the optimal level of the productive linkages of an economy in order to maximize its output with the minimal greenhouse gas emissions the possible is suggested the proposed methodology is able to join both environmental and economic policy targets in the form of predefined constraints the objective function which is going to be minimized expresses the greenhouse gas emissions ghg intensity or ghg emissions per unit of output a particle swarm algorithm is employed for the solution of the optimization problem an illustrative application to the greek economy was carried out the experimental results revealed that if the greek economy will apply policies for boosting the sectors of high and medium high r d intensity then the greenhouse gas emission per unit of gross domestic product of greece would be reduced furthermore the promotion of high and medium high r d intensity sectors is connected with an important improvement of the production linkages to a wide range of sectors highlighting the important spillover effect of the suggested restructuring process

errors in import demand estimates based upon unit value indexes disaggregated import demand elasticity estimates based on import unit value indexes are used in virtually all trade policy simulation models however unit value indexes have been criticized especially by kravis and lipsey 1974 to examine the effect of using unit value indexes on estimates of disaggregated import demand elasticities this paper compares regression results using unit value indexes with results using u s bureau of labor statistics import price indexes for several detailed trade categories based on quarterly data for 1978 88 results show that using unit value indexes does not greatly affect estimated import demand elasticities

goods prices and exchange rates what have we learned import prices typically change by a smaller proportion than the exchange rate between the exporting and importing country recent research indicates that common currency relative prices for similar goods exported to different markets are highly correlated with exchange rates between those markets this evidence suggests that incomplete pass through is a consequence of third degree price discrimination while distance matters for market segmentation borders have independent effects the source of the border effect has not been clearly identified furthermore there is little evidence yet to suggest substantial market power is implied by the observed price discrimination

adjustment costs and pricing to market theory and evidence abstract this paper develops an adjustment cost model of pricing to market the model consists of a monopolist who supplies an identical nondurable good to two foreign markets it is shown that the degree of pricing to market increases with the relative importance of the transitory component in exchange rates customs data from 1978 through 1987 on u s and canadian imports of seven german commodities are used to estimate the model s parameters and test its over identifying restrictions

export price responses to exogenous exchange rate movements the export price responses to three different exogenous exchange rate movements are investigated using data on swedish exports of automobiles and kraft paper to three destination countries a pric

exchange rates and prices the adjustment of relative prices to exchange rate movements is explained in an industrial organization approach given labor costs in the respective currencies exchange rate movements change costs for firms selling in the home market and thus disturb the industry equilibrium the extent of absolute and relative price adjustment is shown to depend on market integration product substitutability the relative number of domestic and foreign firms and the market structure the impact of exchange rates on prices is illustrated in a variety of approaches including the cournot a dixit and j stiglitz 1977 and s salop 1979 models some empirical evidence is offered in support of the theory copyright 1987 by american economic association