debt and financial expectations an individual and household level analysis in this article we show that optimistic financial expectations impact positively on both the quantity of debt and the growth in debt at the individual and household levels our theoretical model shows that this association is predicted under a variety of plausible scenarios in the empirical analysis we explore the determinants of debt and of growth in debt using british data we find convincing support for our theoretical priors and show that it is optimistic financial expectations per se that are important in influencing debt rather than the accuracy of individuals predictions regarding their future financial situation jel d18 d84 d91

a search theoretic model of legal and illegal currency abstract using a search theoretic model of money we explore the conditions under which two currencies domestic and foreign will co exist despite legal restrictions on the use of foreign currency for internal trade we study how changes in government policy i e its enforcement of currency laws through fines or the rate of enforcement affects the acceptability of illegal currency the equilibrium value of both currencies and the implicit exchange rate first we construct a model with indivisible goods to show conditions under which legal currency is fully acceptable but illegal currency circulates with varying acceptability we then introduce bargaining to determine prices in legal and illegal currency we show that some enforcement polices can create multiple equilibria while others will not also some methods of enforcement are capable of driving the illegal currency out of circulation while others are not

household risk management and optimal mortgage choice the portfolio of the typical american household is quite unlike the diversie ed portfolio of liquid assets discussed in e nance textbooks the major asset in the portfolio is a house a relatively illiquid asset with an uncertain capital value the value of the house generally exceeds the net worth of the household which e nances its homeownership through a mortgage contract to create a leveraged position in residential real estate other e nancial assets and liabilities are typically far less important than the house and its associated mortgage contract the importance of housing in household wealth is illustrated in figure i this e gure plots the fraction of household assets in housing and in equities against the wealth percentile of the household poor households appear at the left of the e gure and wealthy households at the right data come from the 1989 and 1998 survey of consumer finances the e gure shows that middle class american families from roughly the fortieth to the eightieth percentile of the wealth distribution have more than half their assets in the form of housing even after the expansion of equity ownership during the 1990s equities are of negligible importance for these households 1

foreign direct investment and inflation author affiliation selin sayek department of economics bilkent university bilkent ankara 06800 turkey e mail sayek bilkent edu tr acknowledgment i am very grateful to my advisor kent kimbrough for his support and help without which this research wouldn t have been possible i would also like to thank robert conrad enrique mendoza ed tower and dennis yang for their guidance and helpful comments i have also received valuable comments from duke university macroeconomics workshop participants and royal economic society 2001 conference participants as well as the two referees all errors remain mine 1 introductionin recent years interest in understanding the determinants of foreign direct investment fdi has intensified hand in hand with an increasing volume of fdi flows from 1990 to 2005 the total worldwide fdi inflows increased from 203 billion to 974 billion almost all developing countries are competing to attract a major share of these inflows in fact the share of net fdi inflows in the gross domestic product gdp of middle income countries has risen from 0 74 in the 1970s to 1 08 between 1985 and 1994 and to 2 85 between 1995 and 2005 1 the intensified competition to attract more fdi has led to changes in the regulatory frameworks provided by almost all countries according to the recent world investment report unctad 2003 during the period 1991 2002 around 95 of the changes in worldwide laws governing fdi have been favorable to multinational firm activity establishment of investment promotion agencies as well as provision of fiscal incentives have accompanied these improvements in local regulatory environments given the objectives of host countries to attract high quality investments and to ensure benefits from such foreign activity it is important to fully understand the factors influencing the fdi flows this article primarily studies the role of inflation among the factors that drive fdi inflation rates have increased from around 5 to 10 on average in developing countries during the 1970s followed by an increase of 49 on average among developing countries between 1985 and 1994 this trend of increasing inflation rates has been reversed in the late 1990s the inflation rates in developing countries have on average declined to 9 2 during 1995 2004 a period during which the net fdi inflows as a share of gdp have more than doubled in the middle income countries given the focus among developing countries to attract more fdi it is interesting to analyze whether the increasing inflation rates in the 1970s and 1980s might have been a deterrent for fdi inflows and whether their reversal in the 1990s might have contributed to the increase in fdi inflows to these economies despite not providing conclusive evidence the coincidences of high inflation and low fdi versus the low inflation and high fdi inflows into these developing countries motivates investigation of the possible links between the two variables therefore the broad objective of this framework is to study the effects of inflation on the investment decision of multinational enterprises mnes changes in inflation rates of the domestic or foreign country are anticipated to alter the net returns and optimal investment decisions of the mne in studying the explicit role of inflation in determining the investment pattern of mnes across domestic and foreign locations i use a model that is in fact discussing an investment smoothing behavior of the mne that faces domestic and foreign nominal shocks in this framework the act of investment smoothing captures a shift of investments across locations and not across time my argument is in line with aizenman 1992 who notes that the goal of diversifying exposure to country specific shocks induces producers to become multinationals this investment smoothing behavior can further be thought of as a production flexibility approach where the mne can shift production and trade decisions depending on the relative favorability of conditions in the two countries as discussed in sung and lapan 2000

inflationary finance and currency substitution in a public finance framework abstract this paper analyzes the impact of currency substitution on inflationary finance in a public finance framework it is shown that if foreign money balances can be taxed or subsidized the optimal inflation tax is always zero in the more realistic case in which foreign money cannot be taxed the optimal inflation tax is positive whenever there are revenue needs moreover the optimal inflation tax is an increasing function of government spending and the foreign nominal interest rate

rational prepayment and the valuation of mortgage backed securities this article presents a new model of mortgage prepayments based on rational decisions by mortgage holders these mortgage bolders face beterogeneous transaction costs which are explicitly modeled the model is estimated using a version of hansen s 1982 generalized method of moments and is sbown to capture many of the empirical features of mortgage prepayment estimation results indicate that mortgage holders act as tbougb tbey face transaction costs tbat far exceed tbe explicit costs usually incurred on refinancing they also wait an average of more than a year before refinancing even when it is optimal to do so the model fits observed prepayment behavior as well as thee recent empirical model of schwartz and torous 1989 implications for pricing mortgage backed securities are discussed

the optimum quantity of money rule in the theory of public finance this paper examines optimal tax policy in a monetary economy in which money serves as an intermediate good that helps facilitate the conversion of scarce resources into tinal consumption goods by enabling consumers to economize on the costs of transacting it is shown that in such an environment even though distorting taxes must be levied for revenue purposes the optimal tax structure calls for abstaining from inflationary finance and adopting the optimum quantity of money rule

interest rate targeting abstract the paper develops a model in which the monetary authority successfully targets the nominal interest rate while also holding down the forecast variance of the price level the latter objective pins down the extent of monetary accommodation to shifts in the demand for money and other shocks and thereby makes determinate the levels of money and prices at each date empirical evidence for the united states suggests that the model s predictions accord reasonably well with observed behavior for nominal interest rates growth rates of the monetary base and rates of inflation

an economic analysis of the protestant reformation this paper seeks to explain the initial successes and failures of protestantism on economic grounds it argues that the medieval roman catholic church through doctrinal manipulation the exclusion of rivals and various forms of price discrimination ultimately placed members seeking the z good spiritual services on the margin of defection these monopolistic practices encouraged entry by rival firms some of which were aligned with civil governments the paper hypothesizes that protestant entry was facilitated in emergent entrepreneurial societies characterized by the decline of feudalism and relatively unstable distribution of wealth and repressed in more homogeneous rent seeking societies that were mostly dissipating rather than creating wealth in these societies the roman church was more able to continue the practice of price discrimination informal tests of this proposition are conducted by considering primogeniture and urban growth as proxies for wealth stability

a generalized valuation model for fixed rate residential mortgages this paper uses option pricing techniques to rationally price mortgage instruments subject to both default and prepayment risk attention is given to terminations due to purely financial consideration of the mortgage contract itself as well as to personally induced terminations explicit inclusion of default in the mortgage valuation procedure also permits the valuation of insurance against such default qualitatively it is found that default differs significantly in the behavior from either prepayment or nonfinancial termination quantitatively however there is significant substitution between prepayment and default so that the addition of a default feature to the contract has only a modest impact on mortgage values unless there is substantial price volatility in the housing market or a high loan to value ratio copyright 1992 by ohio state university press

racial integration as an innovation empirical evidence from sports leagues this paper treats racial integration as an innovation in economic process in which economic entities find it advantageous to utilize potentially more productive inputs previously unavailable due to law custom or managerial discretion data on the racial integration of major league baseball and atlantic coast conference basketball are employed to address this issue the central question examined is which type of team integrated first losers or winners the results strongly support the idea that entrepreneurship trumps competitive rivalry that is winning teams led the process of racial integration jel li j7 one of the watershed events in u s history is the struggle to achieve a racially integrated society while the civil rights laws and court rulings in the 195o s 196o s and 197o s are among the major changes in public policy that gradually led to a breakdown of jim crow rule in the american south other changes in law and custom also motivated the process of racial integration across time and place indeed segregation was not limited to the south but was a prominent feature of many national organizations and markets despite the extensive commentary on these events from various perspectives there has been very little economic analysis of the actual process of racial integration economists have focused their efforts on the economics of discriminatio n while the actual process by which individuals firms and

an intertemporal general equilibrium model of asset prices this paper develops a continuous time general equilibrium model of a simple but complete economy and uses it to examine the behavior of asset prices in this model asset prices and their stochastic properties are determined endogenously one principal result is a partial differential equation which asset prices must satisfy the solution of this equation gives the equilibrium price of any asset in terms of the underlying real variables in the economy in this paper we develop a general equilibrium asset pricing model for use in applied research an important feature of the model is its integration of real and financial markets among other things the model endogenously determines the stochastic process followed by the equilibrium price of any financial asset and shows how this process depends on the underlying real variables the model is fully consistent with rational expectations and maximizing behavior on the part of all agents our framework is general enough to include many of the fundamental forces affecting asset markets yet it is tractable enough to be specialized easily to produce specific testable results furthermore the model can be extended in a number of straightforward ways consequently it is well suited to a wide variety of applications for example in a companion paper cox ingersoll and ross 7 we use the model to develop a theory of the term structure of interest rates many studies have been concerned with various aspects of asset pricing under uncertainty the most relevant to our work are the important papers on intertemporal asset pricing by merton 19 and lucas 16 working in a continuous time framework merton derives a relationship among the equilibrium expected rates of return on assets he shows that when investment opportunities are changing randomly over time this relationship will include effects which have no analogue in a static one period model lucas considers an economy with homogeneous individuals and a single consumption good which is produced by a number of processes the random output of these processes is exogenously determined and perishable assets are defined as claims to all or a part of the output of a process and the equilibrium determines the asset prices our theory draws on some elements of both of these papers like merton we formulate our model in continuous time and make full use of the analytical tractability that this affords the economic structure of our model is somewhat similar to that of lucas however we include both endogenous production and

currency substitution and the optimal inflation tax abstract there exist conflicting results on the optimal inflation tax in open economies subject to currency substitution this paper reconciles the different results and concludes that except in very special cases the optimal inflation tax is positive

the disinterest in deregulation in the analysis of the costs of monopoly power the usual experiment is to convert a competitive industry into a monopoly and observe the consequent change in consumer s surplus modern contributions have emphasized the deadweight cost of monopoly arnold harberger 1954 and the possibility of an associated rent seeking cost of monopoly gordon tullock 1967 the harberger cost of course refers to the lost consumer s surplus triangle the tullock cost concerns the role of competition for monopoly returns taken together and assuming that the competition for monopoly rents is perfect the total cost of monopoly power is a trapezoid the rectangle of monopoly profits plus the triangle of lost consumer s surplus richard posner 1975 in this paper we approach the monopoly problem in a different spirit we compare three states of the world competition regulation and deregulation in this setting we ask what happens if a monopoly is eliminated through deregulation our analysis suggests that because under most conditions tullock costs cannot be recouped the returns to deregulation are lower than previously thought rent seeking expenditures in the past leave the economy permanently poorer even if competition is restored to the industry in contrast the returns to preventing monopoly in the first place are relatively high in our model an insight afforded by the analysis is an explanation of the persistence of laws and regulations which appear to serve no interest in this regard the example of railroad regulation in the united states comes to mind the standard explanation for such regulation is either that voters and government decision makers are ignorant of basic economics or that a small interest group like railroad firms wins rents at the expense of uninformed or economically rational consumers of rail services who do not find it cost effective to seek deregulation we offer another and perhaps more plausible explanation for the persistence of regulation and the apathy of consumers about the costs of regulation namely the costs of such regulations are for the most part the original rent seeking expenditures that lead to the regulation in the first place and these costs are sunk abolishing so called uneconomic laws does nothing to recover these losses hence there is little political support from any quarter to return to the status quo ante in fact as we shall show such a deregulatory program can easily impose more costs than it is worth there are numerous examples of this point including tariffs and quotas of all sorts subsidies to farmers the postal monopoly organized labor s antitrust exemption the licensing of doctors and so forth the traditional explanations of these monopoly rights namely ignorance of economic common sense and special interest groups are neither sufficient nor necessary since the primary costs of these laws are rent seeking expenditures which are made prior to their passage there is simply little to be gained by changing them now gains would accrue in the form of reduced harberger costs costs would be borne in passing and implementing the deregulatory program it is not that the potential gainers from deregulation are large in number diffuse heterogeneous and face high organizational costs rather they do not exist to any degree interpreted in this light efforts by political action groups such as the right to work foundation stand to be a drain on society s resources they cannot produce anything unless they prevent further monopolization through regulation we do not of course mccormick and shughart clemson university clemson sc 29631 tollison center for the study of public choice george mason university fairfax va 22030 thanks go to james buchanan rex cottle and gordon tullock for helpful comments the usual caveat applies

recourse and residential mortgage default evidence from us states we quantify the effect of recourse on default and find that recourse affects default by lowering the borrower s sensitivity to negative equity at the mean value of the default option for defaulted loans borrowers are 30 more likely to default in non recourse states furthermore for homes appraised at 500 000 to 750 000 borrowers are twice as likely to default in non recourse states we also find that defaults are more likely to occur through a lender friendly procedure such as a deed in lieu in states that allow deficiency judgments we find no evidence that mortgage interest rates are lower in recourse states the author 2011 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oup com oxford university press

international currency substitution and seigniorage in a simple model of money i introduction currency substitution describes the change in the holdings of domestic and foreign real balances in response to fluctuations in the relative prices of these currencies so far the empirical evidence on the strength of currency substitution has been mixed miles 1978 finds evidence in favor of strong currency substitution between the canadian dollar and the u s dollar bordo and choudhri 1982 criticize miles on the ground that miles has a misspecified model and their estimates of a canadian money demand function indicate little currency substitution in a recent paper rogers 1992 finds that dollarization in a high inflation economy such as mexico s is quite strong and statistically significant imrohoroglu 1994 on the other hand estimates the extent of currency substitution between the canadian dollar and the u s dollar using a gmm approach and finds that the elasticity of currency substitution in canada is quite low between 0 29 and 0 43 depending on the instruments used furthermore the estimate of the share of u s dollar denominated deposits in producing canadian liquidity services is on the order of 1 percent to 3 percent the policy implications of currency substitution have been extensively analyzed most of these studies concentrate on the impact of currency substitution on the volatility of exchange rates and the autonomy of domestic monetary policy under a flexible exchange rate regime 1 recently researchers have started to explore whether currency substitution alters the results in the optimal inflation tax literature for example vegh 1989 shows that it may be optimal to resort to the inflation tax under currency substitution since it reduces the distortion introduced by an exogenously given positive foreign interest rate in his model a positive foreign interest rate creates a distortion because it acts as an indirect consumption tax kimbrough 1991 analyzes a small open economy under currency substitution where domestic agents are required to use domestic real balances to purchase the domestic nontraded good foreign real balances to purchase the imported good and either domestic or foreign real balances to purchase the exportable good he finds that it is optimal to follow the friedman rule of a zero nominal interest rate in this setup since money serves as an intermediate good guidotti and vegh 1993 however argue that kimbrough s 1991 result only applies under very restrictive assumptions on the transactions technology and that in general the optimal inflation rate is positive under currency substitution aizenman 1992 considers a multi country money in the utility function model in a common currency area where there are collection costs associated with income taxation he shows that in the absence of a cartel agreement on how to share the seigniorage revenue the optimal inflation rate for individual countries will exceed the optimal inflation rate under a cooperative solution canzoneri and diba 1992 study the role of currency substitution in a two country money in the utility function model under a flexible exchange rate regime where there are collection costs of lump sum taxes they show that the outcome of a noncooperative seigniorage maximization or welfare maximization game is characterized by the friedman rule the cooperative outcome on the other hand includes the inflation tax as part of an optimal tax package since lump sum taxes are costly to collect the theoretical literature summarized above suggests that currency substitution may have important economic implications most of the attention has been on the role of the elasticity of currency substitution the share of foreign real balances in the residents domestic portfolio has largely been ignored laney radcliffe and willett 1984 and joines 1985 emphasize the distinction between the elasticity of substitution and the cross elasticity of money demand and argue that a high cross elasticity is necessary for currency substitution to have a major destabilizing impact on domestic money demand

characterization of the optimal tax on money when it functions as a medium of exchange abstract this paper compares the relative efficiency of the implicit taxation of money and the explicit taxation of real commodities to finance a given amount of government expenditures in the model used money has the property of reducing transactions costs a sufficient condition for a tax on money to be welfare dominated by a linear tax on consumption expenditures is characterized in terms of a few parameters very familiar in macroeconomics this characterization is especially useful in the cases of heterogeneous consumers and increasing returns to scale in transactions since then the optimal tax on money may in principle be positive

what motivates a subprime borrower to default this paper uses a real options approach to analyse the exercise of the default option embedded in mortgages in particular it examines a subprime household who borrows at a premium but hopes to refinance at prime rates if their house appreciates we show how these optimal default decisions can be used to calculate probabilities of default an important input for risk management and pricing purposes numerical examples are provided calibrated to us data in a low interest rate environment the credit upgrade potential may discourage subprime borrowers from defaulting however default probabilities are highly sensitive to changes in interest rates and house prices this provides a rational explanation for the prevalence of adjustable rate mortgages among subprime borrowers and the subsequent large numbers of defaults when interest rates rose and house prices declined

the tradeoff between mortgage prepayments and tax deferred retirement savings abstract many households face the tradeoff between paying an extra dollar off the remaining mortgage on their house and saving that extra dollar in tax deferred accounts tdas used for retirement we show that under certain conditions it becomes a tax arbitrage to reduce mortgage prepayments and to increase tda contributions because of the tax deductibility of mortgage interest and tax exemption of qualified retirement savings using data from the survey of consumer finances we document that a significant number of households that are accelerating their mortgage payments instead of saving in tdas forgo a profitable tax arbitrage opportunity finally we show empirically that this inefficient behavior is unlikely to be driven by liquidity or other financial constraints rather the observed behavior can be attributed to a certain extent to the reluctance of many households to participate in financial markets as either lenders or borrowers

optimal financing of the government s budget taxes bonds or money financing of the government s budget in particular we consider taxation bond issuance and money creation as alternative means of financing these issues are not new some of them were extensively explored in the public finance literature some of them were explored in the monetary theory literature what we believe to be new however is that our work integrates the relevant elements from both strands of literature into a unified general equilibrium framework with this approach we are able to jointly determine the optimal combination of tax rates the rate of inflation and the interest rate on government bonds this type of analysis enables us to ask whether the rate of inflation should be positive or negative and to provide simple conditions on compensated demand elasticities which determine the answer it also enables us to reconsider milton friedman s optimum quantity of money rule in a public finance framework without lump sum taxes and to show how this rule should be modified in addition we provide insight into the desirability of a social security scheme by showing that such a program is undesirable when social security payments are financed

optimal taxation and inflation in an open economy abstract this paper examines the role of the inflation tax in the optimal revenue raising tax package for a small open economy where money is held because it serves to reduce transacttions costs associated with purchasing goods consumers choose whether domestic money or foreign money will serve as the medium of exchange for various goods purchases so as to minimize such costs results are derived regarding the appropriate role of taxes on domestic and foreign money in the optimal tax structure it is demonstrated that with a sufficiently rich tax structure friedman s rule which calls for a monetary policy that drives the nominal interest rate to zero is a component of the optimal tax policy

optimal monetary policies and policy interdependence in the world economy the literature on strategic policy interactions has focused on the implications of alternative strategic policy interactions cooperative versus noncooperative for equilibrium macroeconomic policies given the state of the world economy this paper asks how changes in world economic conditions alter equilibrium policies given the nature of policy interdependence among nations the paper considers a world economy comprised of two countries operating under a system of flexible exchange rates both governments act noncooperatively and choose the rate of growth of their money supply so as to maximize the utility of their country s residents given the rate of growth of the other country s money supply the resulting nash equilibrium rates of growth of the home and foreign money supplies are determined and the dependence of international differences in money growth and inflation rates on international differences in technology jel e52 e60 f41 f42 the international transmission of monetary and fiscal policies has been studied a great deal by economists however policy interdependence how one country s policies depend on the policies enacted by other countries has only recently begun to be explored hamada s 1976 paper was one of the first major contributions in this regard hamada considered a world economy comprised of n countries operating under a fixed exchange rate system in which policymakers set domestic credit growth so as to maximize an objective function depending on inflation and the rate of accumulation of international reserves using this framework hamada demonstrated that in equilibrium optimal domestic credit policies are generally not pareto efficient when they are chosen noncooperatively but are pareto efficient when they are set cooperatively in subsequent work hamada 1979 1985 has elaborated on this and various other aspects of cooperative and noncooperative monetary policies under both fixed and flexible exchange rates many others have followed hamada s lead by comparing the properties of cooperative and noncooperative monetary policies eichengreen 1985 for instance considers discount rates as the instrument of monetary policy and examines issues of leadership and cooperation during the interwar years under the gold standard oudiz and sachs 1985 have used simulation methods to

loss severities on residential real estate debt during the great recession abstract this study develops estimates of expected loss severities on mortgage exposures using data from florida during the great recession this paper marks the first attempt at addressing sample selectivity in the context of loss models we also construct measures of home equity that are more accurate than those employed in previous studies we find that failing to address sample selection and the use of noisy equity measures in loss models can bias loss estimates significantly we also find significantly higher loss severities and a greater sensitivity of loss severity to equity than what previous studies report

deleveraging and mortgage curtailment abstract using monthly loan level data individual partial prepayments curtailments from january 2001 to june 2011 are observed for mortgages in twenty metropolitan statistical areas contrary to some earlier assertions american homeowners now frequently commit funds towards their mortgage payments in excess of the amount due over 30 of loans outstanding have made at least one curtailment payment after controlling for borrower and loan level variables we show that the latent propensity to curtail has steadily risen from 2003 to 2006 and remains at elevated levels therefore curtailment provides an example of consumer deleveraging behavior that began prior to the great recession

the optimal inflation tax in the presence of currency substitution abstract an important result in the optimal inflation tax literature is that if money is modeled as reducing transactions costs the optimal nominal interest rate is zero this paper examines this issue in the context of a small open economy where both domestic and foreign currency circulate as media of exchange it is shown that the presence of foreign money enables the government to reduce the distortion introduced into the economy by a positive foreign nominal interest rate by setting a positive domestic nominal interest rate