bank competition and ecb s monetary policy in a model of oligopolistic competition in the banking sector we analyse how the monetary policy rule chosen by the central bank can influence the incentive of banks to set high interest rates on loans over the business cycle we exploit the basic model to investigate the potential impact of emu implementation on collusion among banks in particular we consider the possible eaects of the european central bank s policy criteria with regard to the cost of credit in national markets 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

low inflation the behavior of financial markets and institutions this paper provides a broad overview of the potential impact of low inflation deflation on u s financial markets and institutions it is argued that the contemporary experience of japan and the historical experience of the united states in the 1920s and 1930s offer only limited insights into the potential impact of low inflation deflation on today s u s financial system a number of potential implications are discussed including a decline in secondary market trading and a trend towards reintermediation in addition low inflation deflation is likely to have a material effect on bank duration and convexity exposures

x efficiency in australian banking an empirical investigation this paper empirically investigates the x eaciency technical and allocative in australian banks a non parametric method of data envelopment analysis dea has been used to arrive at the eaciency scores banks in this sample were found to have low levels of overall eaciency compared with the banks in the european countries and in the us the results indicate that as a source of overall ineaciency the technical component was more important than the allocative component thus the ineaciency in australian banks can be attributed to wasting of inputs technical ineaciency rather than choosing the incorrect input combinations allocative ineaciency domestic banks were found to be more eacient than foreign owned banks the study has important implications such as guiding the government policy regarding deregulation and mergers since the study pinpoints the sources of ineaciency it would also help banks with strategic planning 2001 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in propagation of the great depression this paper examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s onthe path of aggregate output during that period our approach is complementary to that of friedman and schwartz who emphasized the monetary impact of the bank failures we focus on non monetary primarily credit related aspects of the financial sector output link and consider the problems of debtors as well as those of the banking system we argue that the financial disruptions of 1930 33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand evidence suggests that effects of this type can help explain the unusual length and depth of the great depression this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

irving fisher on the international transmission of booms and depressions through monetary standards the role of monetary standards in the international transmission of economic fluctuations particularly the role of the gold standard in the depression has attracted considerable recent attention for instance from choudhri and kochin 1980 hamilton 1988 temin 1989 1993 eichengreen 1992 and bernanke 1995 however this literature has overlooked a pioneering precursor irving fisher are booms and depressions transmitted internationally through monetary standards 1935 which has also been neglected in the literature on fisher i examine fisher s contribution in the context of later research on the topic and explore the place of fisher 1935 in fisher s work

pioneering price level targeting the swedish experience 1931 1937 in september 1931 sweden became the first country to make the stabilization of the domestic price level the official goal of its monetary policy actually the only country that so far has adopted such an explicit price level target starting from the issues and concepts familiar from research and policy experience of inflation targeting as contrasted to price level targeting this paper examines the evolution of the swedish price level targeting in the 1930s we bring out a number of similarities and differences between price stabilization in the 1930s and in the 1990s

back to the futures an assessment of market performance on the early winnipeg grain exchange in this paper i offer a quantitatively rich historical perspective with which to consider western canada s recent return to private grain marketing i assess how futures markets on the winnipeg grain exchange wge performed before the canadian wheat board and i consider the extent to which this performance contributed to the canadian government s decision to create the board i conclude despite significant agrarian dissatisfaction with private grain marketing on the wge the canadian government ultimately proscribed futures trading because it was incompatible with the cwb model which the canadian government needed in order to stabilize farm incomes particularly in the aftermath of the great depression resume retour aux contrats a terme une evaluation de la performance du marche au temps du winnipeg grain exchange l auteur offre une perspective historique qui s appuie sur de riches donnees quantitatives qu il utilise pour evaluer le recent retour de la mise en marche privee dans l ouest canadien il evalue la performance des marches a terme sur le winnipeg grain exchange wge avant l arrivee de la commission canadienne du ble cwb et jusqu a quel point cette performance a contribue a la decision du gouvernement du canada de mettre sur pied la cwb il conclut que malgre le mecontentement significatif du monde agricole quant a la mise en marche privee sur le wge le gouvernement du canada mit fin a ses pratiques parce que celles ci etaient incompatibles avec le modele de la cwb dont le canada avait besoin pour stabiliser les revenus des fermiers surtout dans la periode qui a suivi la grande crise

foreign owned insurer performance in the us property liability markets foreign owned property liability insurers have increased their market share in the us in the recent decades they may have achieved this by being more efficient by undercutting prices to attract away business from their domestic rivals or both we investigate return risk efficiency and determinants of efficiency performance of these insurers relative to their domestic competitors we find that these firms are less profitable and less efficient in terms of cost scale and revenue x efficiencies but more efficient in terms of cost x and revenue scale efficiencies overall the evidence shows that both of the aforementioned factors have contributed to their growth

state regulation and the structure conduct efficiency and performance of us auto insurers abstract this research investigates the impact of regulation on state automobile insurance markets while controlling for other state insurance market characteristics that may be related to performance data for a large sample of insurers are analyzed the results suggest that insurers in competitive and non stringently regulated states may benefit from market power by charging higher unit prices however insurers in these states are on average more cost x efficient and cost x efficient insurers charge lower prices and earn smaller profits the empirical results also suggest that insurers in some rate regulated states are less revenue and cost scale efficient than in competitive states

was the deflation during the great depression anticipated evidence from the commodity futures market futures prices were well above spot prices for most commodities during most of the great depression evidently the spectacular declines in agricultural prices caught many people by surprise based on the historical correlations between commodity prices and consumer prices commodity markets anticipated stable consumer prices during the first year of the great depression the dramatic drop in nominal treasury bill yields thus should be read as a drop in ex ante real rates later in the great depression markets anticipated deflation but not as severe as actually occurred copyright 1992 by american economic association

seigniorage operating rules and the high inflation trap there may be both a high and a low inflation equilibrium when the government finances the deficit through seigniorage under rational expectations the high inflation equilibrium is stable and the low inflation equilibrium unstable under adaptive expectations or lagged adjustment of money balances with rational expectations the low inflation equilibrium may be stable adding bond financing dual equilibria remain if the government fixes the real interest rate but a unique equilibrium is attained when the government sets a nominal anchor for the economy the existence of dual equilibria is thus a result of the government s operating rules

were price changes during the great depression anticipated abstract this paper reassesses whether the large swings in prices during the 1930 s were anticipated we argue that uncertainty about monetary fiscal and exchange rate policies induced systematic differences between the rate of price change expected by economic agents at the time and the time series forecasts of inflation our analysis of nominal interest rates and ex post inflation strongly supports this view in fact our results suggest that the deflation of the early depression years and the inflation that followed were both largely unanticipated

could a monetary base rule have prevented the great depression abstract this paper continues an ongoing investigation of the properties of a policy rule that specifies settings of the monetary base that are designed to keep nominal gnp growing smoothly at a noninflationary rate counterfactual historical simulations for 1923 1941 are conducted with the rule and a small model of nominal gnp determination estimated with u s quarterly data with residuals fed in as estimates of the behavioral shocks that occurred the simulation results indicate that nominal gnp would have been kept reasonably close to a steady three percent path over 1923 1941 if the rule had been in effect

detecting spot price forecasts in futures prices futures markets are often described as having two important social functions first they facilitate the transfer of commodity price risk and second they provide forecasts of commodity prices the evidence that futures markets transfer price risk is irrefutable however there is some debate about the markets forecasting ability in particular forecasts based on the current spot price are often as good as those based on the futures price some economists cite a failure to detect superior forecast power in futures prices as evidence of market inefficiency see e g leuthold 1974 and martin and garcia 1981 there are at least two other explanations first there may be nothing for the futures market to forecast if the current spot price equals the true expectation of the future spot price the futures market cannot provide a better forecast second a superior futures market forecast may be obscured by the unexpected component of the realized spot price the true expectation of the future spot price is unobservable one must approximate this expectation with the actual future spot price

can futures market data be used to understand the behavior of real interest rates this paper examines whether futures market data can be used to understand the behavior of real interest rates several ways of examining the data indicate that futures market data are not particularly informative about real interest rates not only does this evidence cast some doubt on results in previous research that make use of futures market data to draw inferences about real interest rates but it also indicates that future research on real interest rates may need to turn to a different line of attack understanding the behavior of real interest rates is a central issue in financial economics in previous research on this topic several approaches have been used to measure real interest rates in one approach real interest rates have been calculated by subtracting survey data on inflation expectations such as the livingston data from nominal interest rates the problem with survey based measures of real interest rates is that they are only as good as the survey measure of inflation expectations and there may be little incentive for the survey respondents to answer accurately an even more telling criticism of survey based measures often ignored in the literature is that the behavior of market expectations in driven by economic agents ai the margin who are eliminating unexploited profit opportunities market expectations are unlikely therefore to be well measured by the average expectations of survey respondents 2 because of doubts about survey based measures of real interest rates other

risk the financial market and macroeconomic equilibrium growing recognition of the importance of stock market phenomena to the real economy underscores the need for models linking exogenous uncertainty asset market performance and the rest of the economy in an optimizing framework without certainty equivalence this paper constructs a three agent model with continuous time stochastic variables uncertain private production and government expenditure and forward looking rational agents the growth rate of output physical capital accumulation financial asset returns and uncertain inflation are determined as functions of the exogenous uncertainty in the economy analysis of the model finds that increased risk associated with government policy often reverses in an explainable way the conventional comparative static predictions of nonstochastic macro models

financial factors in the great depression eginning with irving fisher 1933 and john maynard keynes 1931 b 1963 macroeconomists have argued that financial markets were important sources and propagators of decline during the great depression turning points during the depression often coincided with or were preceded by dramatic events in financial markets stock market collapse waves of bankruptcy and bank failure and contractions in the money stock but the mechanism through which financial factors contributed to the depression has been a source of controversy as has been the relative importance of financial factors in explaining the origins and persistence of the depression this essay reviews the literature on the role of financial factors in the depression and draws some lessons that have more general relevance for the study of the depression and for macroeconomics i argue that much of the recent progress that has been made in understanding some of the most important and puzzling aspects of financial real links in the depression followed a paradigm shift in economics a central neglected theoretical piece of the story for financial factors was the allocative effects of imperfections in capital markets which can imply links between disruptions in financial markets and subsequent economic activity also the increasing emphasis on learning and path dependence in economics has helped to explain why financial shocks during the 1930s were so severe and why policy makers failed to prevent the depression

market structure and the efficiency of european insurance companies a stochastic frontier analysis abstract this paper is motivated by the progressive liberalisation of the european insurance market in recent years it uses stochastic frontier analysis to estimate flexible fourier cost functions for european insurance companies separate frontiers are estimated for life non life and composite companies we adopt a maximum likelihood approach to estimation in which the variance of both one sided and two sided error terms is modelled jointly with the frontiers this approach allows us to simultaneously control for the impact of heteroskedasticity on the estimation of scale economies as well as estimating the effect of firm size and market structure on x inefficiency the study draws on standard poor s eurothesys data set of financial reports for the period 1995 to 2001 this provides technical and non technical accounts at year end for life non life and composite insurance businesses in 14 major european countries our estimates suggest that over this period most european insurers were operating under conditions of decreasing costs increasing returns to scale and that company size and domestic market share were significant factors determining x inefficiency larger firms and those with high market shares tend to have higher levels of cost inefficiency

great expectations and the end of the depression what ended the great depression in the united states this paper suggests that the recovery was driven by a shift in expectations this shift was triggered by president franklin delano roosevelt s fdr policy actions on the monetary policy side roosevelt abolished the gold standard and announced an explicit policy objective of inflating the price level to pre depression levels on the fiscal policy side roosevelt expanded real and deficit spending which helped make his policy objective credible the key to the recovery was the successful management of expecta tions about future policy roosevelt s rise to power is modeled as a policy regime change as in thomas sargent 1983 and peter temin and barry wigmore 1990 this paper formalizes temin and wigmore s argu ment in a repeated game setting using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model and argues that the regime change can account for the recovery in the model a regime change means the elimination of certain policy dogmas that constrain the actions of the government the regime change generates an endogenous shift in expectations due to a coordination of mon etary and fiscal policy this coordination ended the great depression by engineering a shift in expectations from contractionary i e the private sector expected future economic contrac tion and deflation to expansionary i e the public expected future economic expansion and inflation the expectation of higher future inflation lowered real interest rates thus stimulating demand while the expectation of higher future income stimulated demand by raising permanent income

profit efficiency for spanish savings banks abstract frontier profit efficiency is examined for spanish savings banks over 1986 1991 a period in which the spanish banking has seen considerable deregulation in spain the standard assumption that firms operate in a perfectly competitive output market is unlikely to be met thus we use an alternative profit function specification which allows for market power in the output market profit efficiency is determined using the thick frontier approach and estimated using both alternative and standard profit function specifications to illustrate the effect of different assumptions regarding the competitiveness of the output market estimation of the alternative profit function suggests that the profit inefficiency of spanish savings banks which averaged 28 fell by forty percent between 1986 to 1991 the standard profit function which we believe yields less reliable results generated greater average inefficiency there was no significant shift up or down in the profit frontier itself

the role of the gold standard in keynesian monetary theory i introduction the primary motivation for this paper was provided by ambiguities within the general theory regarding the efficacy of monetary policy remedies to a depression i will argue that rather than being a fixed price or depression model the general theory is best thought of as a gold standard model thus i show that keynes s statements on monetary policy ineffectiveness implicitly assumed the existence of a monetary system with some linkage to gold and that some of the general theory s most distinctive features make more sense if viewed from that perspective this hypothesis may appear surprising in light of the popular perception that in the general theory keynes tried to move away from the open economy international gold standard framework employed in the treatise on money i will argue that he failed to do this even if keynes did not explicitly regard the general theory as a gold standard model during the 1930s he began to view the economic problems that we associate with the gold standard monetary policy ineffectiveness occasional episodes of deflation and so on as being inherently characteristic of a modern capitalist economy ironically keynes made this change just as many countries were beginning to deemphasize the role of gold keynes is regarded as one of the most severe critics of an international gold standard with rigid parities thus it is odd that he would develop a monetary ineffectiveness proposition that has little or no applicability to a country operating under a fiat money regime an essential part of my argument will be to show that keynes viewed a pure fiat regime as being both highly unlikely and highly undesirable an important implication of this paper is that the gradual replacement of the gold standard by fiat money regimes should have led modern keynesian economists to move away from some of the most distinctive features of 1930s keynesianism such as monetary policy ineffectiveness deficit spending the paradox of thrift and protectionism i will show that the recent metamorphosis of new keynesian macroeconomics represents a natural response of economists to a radically altered monetary environment ii keynes s views on monetary policy to better understand the role played by the gold standard in keynes s work it will be helpful to start with the monetary ineffectiveness proposition in current usage this phrase generally refers to the new classical view that money has no impact on real output in contrast most would interpret the pessimistic views expressed by keynes during the 1930s as reflecting a belief that monetary expansion might be incapable of increasing nominal output because keynes clearly did not believe that an expansionary monetary policy would reduce real output this interpretation suggests that keynes viewed the ineffectiveness proposition as also applying to the price level unfortunately there is great uncertainty as to how pessimistic keynes actually was regarding the effectiveness of monetary policy the 31 december 1933 issue of the new york times times p 2xx published a long letter by keynes in which he evaluated the first year of the new deal after a lengthy critique of the national recovery act keynes turned his attention to roosevelt s gold buying program 1 the other set of fallacies arises out of a crude economic doctrine commonly known as the quantity theory of money rising output and rising incomes will suffer a setback sooner or later if the quantity of money is rigidly fixed some people seem to infer from this that output and income can be raised by increasing the quantity of money but this is like trying to get fat by buying a larger belt this is a clear example of what is often referred to as the pushing on a string view of monetary policy ineffectiveness but notice how keynes subtly shifts his argument in the very next paragraph as he turns from money s effect on real output to its effect on prices it is an even more foolish application of the same ideas to believe that there is a mathematical relation between the price of gold and the price of other things

the spectre of deflation a review of empirical evidence what explains the widespread fear of deflation this article reviews the history of thought economic history and empirical evidence on deflation with a view to answering this question it also outlines informally the main effects of deflation in applied monetary models the main finding is that for both historical and contemporary deflations there are many open empirical questions that could be answered using the tools economists use to study inflation and monetary policy more generally qu est ce qui explique la peur tres repandue de la deflation ce memoire fait un tour d horizon de l histoire de la pensee economique de l histoire economique et des resultats empiriques quant aux effets de la deflation en vue de repondre a cette question on fait aussi echo informellement aux effets principaux de la deflation dans les modeles monetaires appliques ce qui ressort principalement de ce travail est que tant pour les deflations dans l histoire que dans le monde contemporain il y a bien des questions empiriques encore irresolues auxquelles on pourrait donner une reponse en utilisant l outillage mental que les economistes utilisent pour etudier l inflation et la politique monetaire plus generalement sp c tre n thing that is thought to be seen but has no material existence haunting presentiment of ruin war madness etc

the missing transmission mechanism in the monetary explanation of the great depression for many friedman and schwartz s monetary history of the united states 1963 is synonymous with the notion that monetary contraction and errors by the federal reserve caused the great depression but this quick summary both sells the book short and oversells its findings about the 1930s it sells the book short because the contributions of the monetary history extend far beyond the depression friedman and schwartz use an extensive reading of the historical record over nearly a century to identify times when the money supply moved for reasons unrelated to current or prospective macroeconomic conditions that output moved in the same direction as money following these crucial experiments remains some of the strongest evidence we have that monetary shocks have real effects but saying the book proves that monetary shocks caused the depression is a stretch of the monetary shocks friedman and schwartz identify those early in the depression are arguably the most tenuous and crucially the book provides scant discussion of how monetary shocks affect the economy this weakness is most pressing in the analysis of the depression because nominal interest rates fell precipitously early in the depression and remained low throughout it is hard to appeal to the standard transmission mechanism operating through the nominal cost of credit this paper seeks to fill in the missing transmission mechanism in friedman and schwartz s explanation of the depression in section i we describe previous work showing that falling

pre harvest price expectations for corn the information content of usda reports and new crop futures this article examines the puzzle of why futures prices continue to react to usda crop reports despite the fact that reports appear to be no longer newsworthy that is provide no better production estimates than private forecasts the information value of reports is measured in terms of their influence on rational agents harvest time corn price expectations which are uncovered using a hamilton type modeling approach results show that reports are still newsworthy as they would contribute to agents price expectations if released a day early thus futures price reactions which closely reflect price expectations are rational and consistent with efficient markets hypothesis copyright 2008 oxford university press

hayek s monetary theory and policy a critical reconstruction friedrich a hayek s critique of price level stabilization was based on the theoretical claim that only a constant money stock m or constant volume of nominal spending mv allows intertemporal price equilibrium the claim is not generally correct hayek s case in principle for constant mv and his critique of the automatic gold standard for not delivering it are thus uncompelling the injection effects of his business cycle theory provided a sounder basis for his prescription in the 1970s hayek switched to endorsing price level stabilization in doing so he was logically compelled to repudiate his business cycle theory

tobin s q and the structure performance relationship comment the exchange of comments between william shepherd and michael smirlock thomas gilligan and william marshall this review december 1986 raised two key points that remain unresolved the first point is whether tobin s q ratio a firm s financial market value divided by replacement cost of its assets is a better measure of firm performance than accounting rates of return the second point of contention is whether superior performance however measured can be attributed to efficiency rather than market power this paper offers further clarification on both of these points in section i the performance measure choice is shown to be influenced by fundamental differences between finance and economics in section ii the structure performance model employed by smirlock gilligan and marshall hereafter sgm and shepherd is shown to be a special case of a more general model allowing for a dependence of the market share performance relationship on the concentration ratio the same data from the original study by sgm 1984 are used in section iii to provide a comparison of sgm s findings with empirical results from an alternative specification of the structure performance model this comparison suggests that attributing superior firm performance exclusively to efficiency is not well founded concluding remarks are found in section iv

inventories as factors of production and economic fluctuations this paper presents a theory of inventory investment by stage of processing and uses it to examine the role of inventory investment in economic fluctuations the model in which inventories are treated as factors of production is estimated for four durable goods industries three conclusions emerge from the estimation first the estimates generally satisfy the theoretical restrictions second the elasticity of inventory demand with respect to output is high indicating an important accelerator effect finally the estimates suggest that shifts in the demand for inventories are an important source of economic fluctuations copyright 1989 by american economic association

the great depression versus the great recession in the u s how fiscal monetary and financial polices compare abstract this study reviews the financial distress that triggered and amplified the financial crises of the great depression and great recession and compares macroeconomic and financial policy responses shadow banking funded the build up of the financial excesses that preceded both the quicker and forceful response of monetary and fiscal policy during the great recession and stronger action to restore market functionality mitigated the downturn and aided recovery nevertheless actions to address the mortgage debt overhang were slower post depression reforms focused on preventing deposit runs and post great recession reforms on preventing runs on bank debt and shadow banks while boosting capital buffers

the effects of reform on china s bank structure and performance abstract this paper investigates the relationship between market structure and performance in china s banking system from 1985 to 2002 a period when this sector was subject to gradual but notable reform using panel data estimation techniques both the market power and efficient structure hypotheses are tested in addition the model is extended to consider issues such as the impact of bank size ownership and whether the big four banks enjoy a quiet life on average x efficiency declined significantly and most banks were operating below scale efficient levels estimation of the structure performance models lends some support to the relative market power hypothesis in the early period the reforms had little impact on the structure of china s banking sector though the joint stock banks became relatively more x efficient there was no evidence to support the quiet life hypothesis probably because strict interest rate controls prevented the state banks from earning monopoly profits thus the ongoing liberalisation of interest rates should be accompanied by reduced concentration overall to improve competitive structure new policies should be directed at encouraging market entry and increasing the market share of the most efficient banks

what is the impact of bankrupt and restructured loans on japanese bank efficiency the japanese banking system provides a distinctive platform for the examination of the long lasting effect of problem loans on efficiency we measure technical efficiency by modifying a translog enhanced hyperbolic distance function with two undesirable outputs identified as problem loans and problem other earning assets our unique database allows us to distinguish between bankrupt and restructured loans to investigate the underlying causality between these loans and efficiency from the flexible panel vector autoregression specification primary results reveal that bankrupt loans have a positive impact on efficiency related to the moral hazard skimping hypothesis with the causality originating from bankrupt loans in contrast findings for the relationship between restructured loans and efficiency support the bad luck hypothesis

inflationary expectations and the fisher effect prior to world war i we use univariate and multivariate techniques to estimate the expected price level changes for the u s during the pre world war i period we also examine contemporaneous evidence from agricultural commodity futures markets to measure inflationary expectations using previously neglected data on consumer prices and a variety of techniques we draw three main conclusions not traditionally found for this period 1 price level changes were not white noise 2 a significant portion of deflationary and inflationary episodes was indeed expected and 3 expected inflation is positively and significantly correlated with nominal interest rates thus providing support for a short run fisher effect

the determinants and profitability of switching costs in chinese banking this article models the determinants of bank switching costs in china in terms of bank characteristics and non bank variables it also determines the contribution of switching costs to banks profits using a sample of 151 banks over the period 2003 2013 it reports a positive relationship between bank profitability and switching costs the main result is that bank size measured by total assets has a complex relationship with switching costs competition between small banks creates the incentive for lock in and increased switching costs whereas very large banks are less exercised by lock in and switching costs

determinants of commercial bank interest margins and profitability using bank level data for 80 countries in the years 1988 9s this article shows that differences in interest margins and bank profitability reflect a variety of determinants bank characteristics macroeconomic conditions explicit and implicit bank taxation deposit insurance regulation overall financial structure and underlying legal and institutional indicators a larger ratio of bank assets to gross domestic product and a lower market concentration ratio lead to lower margins and profits controlling for differences in bank activity leverage and the macroeconomic environment foreign banks have higher margins and profits than domestic banks in developing countries while the opposite holds in industrial countries also there is evidence that the corporate tax burden is fully passed onto bank customers while higher reserve requirements are not especially in developing countries

on the relationship among efficiency capitalization and risk does management matter in local banking market abstractby employing a granger causality methodology in a panel data framework this article explores the relationship among efficiency capitalization and credit risk within the local italian banking system focusing the attention on cooperative banks we specifically test whether managers take more risks in highly concentrated markets i e monopoly than in partially competitive markets i e duopoly the evidence shows that in more concentrated markets management efficiency generates a decrease in risk taking rejecting the bad management hypothesis with respect to the partially competitive markets results are consistent with the idea that banks with less local competition are able to increase their profits by indulging more freely in rent seeking behaviour minimizing their risk taking and consequently improving the quality of their assets through additional screening processes the financial crisis does not seem to affect the conduct of management in terms of bank investment decisions and risk

who anticipated the great depression gustav cassel versus keynes and hayek on the interwar gold standard the intellectual response to the great depression is often portrayed as a battle between the ideas of friedrich hayek and john maynard keynes yet both the austrian and the keynesian interpretations of the depression were incomplete austrians could explain how a country might get into a depression bust following a credit fueled investment boom but not how to get out of one liquidation keynesians could explain how a country might get out of a depression government spending on public works but not how it got into one animal spirits by contrast the monetary approach of gustav cassel has been ignored as early as 1920 cassel warned that mismanagement of the gold standard could lead to a severe depression cassel not only explained how this could occur but his explanation anticipates the way that scholars today describe how the great depression actually occurred unlike keynes or hayek cassel analyzed both how a country could get into a depression deflation due to tight monetary policies and how it could get out of one monetary expansion

forecasting the depression harvard versus yale was the depression forecastable after the crash how long should it have taken contempo rary forecasters to realize how severe the downturn was going to be these questions are addressed by studying the predictions of the harv ard economic service and yale s irving fisher during 1929 and the ear ly 1930s the data assembled by the harvard and yale forecasters tog ether with modern historical data are subjected to statistical analy sis to learn whether their verbal pronouncements were consistent with the data both the harvard and yale forecasters were systematically too optimistic yet nothing in the data suggests that the optimism w as unwarranted copyright 1988 by american economic association

determinants of bank market structure efficiency and political economy variables abstract this paper analyzes the influence of bank efficiency and political economy variables on bank market structure market share and market concentration using a panel data of 2 592 banks from 69 countries over the 1996 2002 period results indicate that the validity of the efficiency structure hypothesis to explain bank market structure varies across countries depending on national political economy variables in particular higher entry requirements more generous deposit insurance and higher extent of government bank ownership reduce the positive influence of bank efficiency on market share and market concentration however tighter restrictions on bank activities better quality of the contracting environment more market monitoring and more market orientation and development of the financial system increase the positive influence of bank efficiency on market share and market concentration jel classification g18 g21 g28 keywords banking structure efficiency regulations supervision institutions

the evolution of hayek s thought on gold and monetary standards early in his career hayek viewed attempts to stabilize exchange rates by facilitating cooperation between central banks with respect to their demand for gold to be at odds with the fundamental mechanisms of the gold standard he opposed proposals by irving fisher gustav cassel and ralph hawtrey that promoted stabilization of demand for gold and price levels as a next best option hayek viewed the nations that refused to devalue their currency after monetary expansion during wartime as complicit in degrading the international gold standard in 1935 hayek s emphasis began to change his position sounding much like the arguments of cassel and hawtrey though he eventually gave up hope that the international gold standard would be reestablished his later work on money provides theoretical underpinnings for systems that would promote the same sort of stability and predictability that the classical gold standard had provided

efficiency in the savings and loan industry abstract the stochastic econometric cost frontier approach is modified to investigate efficiency in mutual and stock s ls using 1991 data on u s s ls this methodology allows both the cost frontier and error structures to differ between s ls of these two ownership forms a likelihood ratio test indicates that the data support this unrestricted model which implies efficient mutual and stock s ls use different production technologies various measures of inefficiency show that on average stock s ls are less efficient than mutual s ls the second part of the article relates the inefficiency measures to several correlates

does market structure matter on banks profitability and stability emerging vs advanced economies abstract we empirically investigate the effects of market structure on profitability and stability for 1929 banks in 40 emerging and advanced economies over 1999 2008 by incorporating the traditional structure conduct performance scp and relative market power rmp hypotheses we observe that a greater market share leads to higher bank profitability being biased toward the rmp hypothesis in advanced economies yet neither of the hypotheses is supported for profitability in emerging economies the scp appears to exert a destabilising effect on advanced banks suggesting that a more concentrated banking system may be vulnerable to financial instability however the rmp seems to perform a stabilising effect in both economies evidence also highlights that profitability and stability increase with an increased interest margin revenues in a less competitive environment for emerging markets overall these results suggest that although policy measures to promote competition may dampen economic rent excessive implementation may have an undesired destabilising impact on banks

policy implications in an adaptive financial economy abstract this paper investigates the policy implications of a discrete time flex price financial economy with micro agents optimizing decisions under uncertainty government policies are most effective with constrained households money demand monetary and government spending policies are more potent in changing real debt than output but vice versa for income tax policy an income tax cut does not necessarily lead to an inflation reduction unlike what the supply siders conceived an inviable crisis can occur when assets returns are correlated this leads to the disruption of the self adjusting mechanism to equilibrium in addition a fisherian like equation is produced showing positive correlation between inflation and nominal interest rates

impact of bank competition on the interest rate pass through in the euro area this article analyses the impact of loan market competition on the interest rates applied by euro area banks to loans during the period 1994 2004 using a novel measure of competition called the boone indicator we find evidence that stronger competition implies significantly lower spreads between bank and market interest rates for most loan market products in line with expectations this result implies that stronger competition causes both lower bank interest rates and a stronger pass through of market rate changes into bank rates evidence of the latter is also presented by our error correction model ecm for bank rates further banks compensate income losses from increased loan market competition by offering lower deposit rates our findings with respect to the loan market rates have important monetary policy implications as they suggest that measures to promote competition in the european banking sector are likely to render the monetary policy transmission mechanism more effective

the price concentration relationship in banking a reply berger allen n and timothy h hannon the price concentration relationship in banking this review 71 may 1989 291 299 demsetz harold industry structure market rivalry and public policy journal of law and economics 16 apr 1973 1 9 jackson william e iii market structure and price adjustments evidence from the banking industry unpublished ph d dissertation university of chicago june 1989 peltzman samuel the gains and losses from industrial concentration journal of law and economics 20 oct 1977 229 263 salinger michael the concentration margins relationship reconsidered in brookings papers on economic activity microeconomics martin n bailey and clifford winston eds brookings washington d c brookings institution 1990 5 no formal statistical tests of the differences in the estimated coefficients of conc across subsamples were conducted this analysis was concerned more with the sign and significance level of each subsample estimated conc coefficient

regulations market structure institutions and the cost of financial intermediation this paper examines the impact of bank regulations market structure and national institutions on bank net interest margins and overhead costs using data on over 1400 banks across 72 countries while controlling for bankspecific characteristics the data indicate that tighter regulations on bank entry and bank activities boost the cost of financial intermediation inflation also exerts a robust positive impact on bank margins and overhead costs while concentration is positively associated with net interest margins this relationship breaksdownwhencontrolling for regulatory impediments to competition and inflation furthermore bank regulations become insignificant when controlling for national indicators of economic freedom or property rights protection while these institutional indicators robustly explain cross bank net interest margins and overhead expenditures thus bank regulations cannot be viewed in isolation they reflect broad national approaches to private property and competition

prices during the great depression was the deflation of 1930 1932 really unanticipated this paper examines inflationary expectations in order to investigate whether the deflation of 1930 32 could have been anticipated the major conclusion is that beginning in late 1930 and possibly as early as late 1929 deflation could have been anticipated at horizons of three six months this implies in turn that short run ex ante real interest rates were very high during the initial phases of the great depression these results provide further support for the proposition that monetary contraction was the driving force behind the economic decline copyright 1992 by american economic association

estimates of the variance of u s inflation based upon the arch model it is generally agreed that the unpredictability of future inflation is a major component of the welfare loss associated with inflation perfectly predicted inflation might induce some costs through institutional rigidities governmental interference and transaction costs but in the long run these should be rather minimal as these institutions adopt various forms of indexing when inflation is unpredictable risk averse economic agents will incur a loss even if prices and quantities are perfectly flexible in all markets inflation is a measure of the relative price of goods today and goods tomorrow thus uncertainty in tomorrow s price impairs the efficiency of today s allocation decisions friedman in his nobel lecture 8 argues convincingly that higher variability of inflation would lead to decreased output ceteris paribus he then conjectures that higher rates of inflation are generally associated with higher variability of inflation and presumably greater uncertainty about future rates if this is true then higher rates of inflation would also be associated with low levels of output which implies a positively sloped phillips curve this paper uses a new statistical technique arch to estimate the conditional mean and variance of inflation from u s time series data the main finding is that the variance of inflation in the seventies was only slightly greater than in the sixties

the structure performance relationship for european banking abstract the relationship between market structure and performance has been studied extensively for american banking in contrast little work has been done to investigate this relationship for european banking two explanations of a positive correlation between profitability and concentration have been advanced the traditional structure performance hypothesis scp and the efficient structure hypothesis previous empirical tests of the alternative hypotheses have yielded mixed results but the tests were not robust because they did not incorporate measures of efficiency directly in the model this study applies a stochastic cost frontier as proposed by aigner et al 1977 to derive measures of x inefficiency and scale inefficiency under the assumption that the errors are distributed half normal we incorporate these measures of inefficiencies directly into the tests as proposed by berger and hannan 1993 we do not find a positive and significant relationship between concentration and profitability for a sample of banks across 11 european countries over a four year period 1988 1991 however we do find evidence to support one of the two versions of the efficient structure hypothesis for banks located in countries with low concentration of banks since little support is found for either of the scp hypotheses a simple policy of strict limitations on cross border acquisitions and growth is not warranted

did hayek and robbins deepen the great depression contrary to some accounts the hayek robbins austrian theory of the business cycle did not prescribe a monetary policy of liquidationism in the sense of passive indifference to sharp deflation during the early years of the great depression there is no evidence that hayek or robbins influenced any liquidationist in the hoover administration or the federal reserve system federal reserve policy during the great depression was instead influenced by the real bills doctrine which despite some apparent similarities was diametrically opposed in key respects to hayek s norms for central bank policy

concentration and other determinants of bank profitability in europe north america and australia abstract this study reviews the performance of banks in twelve countries or territories in europe north america and australia and examines the internal and external determination of profitability to circumvent some of the difficulties in making comparisons between banks in different countries the concept of value added is introduced results parallel those in domestic u s studies and provide some support for the edwards heggestad mingo hypothesis of risk avoidance by banks with a high degree of market power

the case of the negative nominal interest rates new estimates of the term structure of interest rates during the great depression throughout the 1930s and early 1940s u s treasury bonds and notes appeared to have negative nominal yields as they approached maturity but negative nominal interest rates are impossible in a world in which one can always hold cash the resolution to this puzzle is that treasury securities in addition to making coupon payments gave the owner the right to buy a new security on a future date this paper describes the institutional environment that led to the apparent negative nominal interest rates develops a method for valuing the exchange privilege and computes accurate measures of the yield to the coupon bearing component of these composite bond options these corrected bond and not yields are then used to calculate new estimates of the term structure of interest rates from 1929 to 1949

the price concentration relationship in banking the commonly observed positive correlation between market concentration and profitability may be explained by noncompetitive pricing behavior as argued by the structure performance hypothesis or by the greater efficiency of firms with dominant market shares as argued by the efficient structure hypothesis by examining the price concentration relationship instead of the profit concentration relationship this paper tests the structure performance hypothesis in a manner that excludes the efficient structure hypothesis as an alternative explanation of the results the results strongly support the structure performance hypothesis and are robust with respect to model specification measurement of concentration and econometric technique copyright 1989 by mit press