arch and bilinearity as competing models for nonlinear dependence in this article we consider whether the wide acceptance of autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity arch models may be at the expense of other nonlinear processes such as bilinear models we first propose a joint test for arch and bilinearity a nonnested test is then suggested to determine whether nonlinear dependence should be attributed to arch or bilinearity the tests are then applied to three series when generalized arch garch models are taken as the null hypothesis we fail to reject it for all the data series when bilinearity is taken as the null however it is rejected in two cases moreover an out of sample forecasting exercise shows that the garch model is superior the results therefore indicate a strong preference for the garch model

energy disruptions interfirm price effects and the aggregate economy in an economy with many imperfect competitors monopolistic competition firms that pass through higher oil prices during a disruption will affect the demand for firms in other industries firms that charge higher prices for their final product will include the effect on their own final product in their private decisions but will exclude the effect on the final products of other firms although a pecuniary externality these actions will reduce society s welfare unlike the case of a perfectly competitive market this situation creates a societal risk that is much wider than an externality in any single market policy interest shifts from one of punishing persian gulf oil producers to one of cushioning an industrialized economy from sudden disruptions caused by political and military conflicts although the value of reducing oil use depends upon a number of unknown parameters with wide distributions a representative numerical example suggests that it may approach 5 per barrel

semi nonparametric estimates of interfuel substitution in u s energy demand abstract this paper focuses on the demand for crude oil natural gas and coal in the united states in the context of two globally flexible functional forms the fourier and the asymptotically ideal model aim estimated subject to full regularity using methods suggested over 20 years ago by gallant and golub gallant a ronald and golub gene h imposing curvature restrictions on flexible functional forms journal of econometrics 26 1984 295 321 and recently used by serletis and shahmoradi serletis a shahmoradi a 2005 semi nonparametric estimates of the demand for money in the united states macroeconomic dynamics 9 542 559 in the monetary demand systems literature we provide a comparison in terms of a full set of elasticities and also a policy perspective using for the first time parameter estimates that are consistent with global regularity

evidence of nonlinearity in daily stock returns this article applies a newly developed statistical technique to time series of daily rates of return of 15 common stocks the technique involves estimating the bispectrum of the observed time series the bispectrum is defined as the double fourier transform of the third order cumulant function if the process generating rates of return is linear with independent innovations then the skewness of the bispectrum will be constant the article describes a test that can detect nonconstant skewness in the bispectrum hence if the test rejects constant skewness a nonlinear process is implied as a consequence the test can distinguish between white noise and purely random noise the results suggest that daily stock returns are generated by a nonlinear process

oil price uncertainty and the canadian economy evidence from a varma garch in mean asymmetric bekk model abstract in this paper we build on recent work by elder and serletis 2010 forthcoming and rahman and serletis forthcoming and investigate the relationship between oil price uncertainty and the level of economic activity using quarterly canadian data over the period from 1974 1 to 2010 1 in doing so we use a bivariate varma garch in mean asymmetric bekk model as detailed in engle and kroner 1995 grier et al 2004 and shields et al 2005 we show that the conditional variance covariance process underlying output growth and the change in the real price of oil exhibits significant non diagonality and asymmetry we also present evidence that increased uncertainty about the change in the real price of oil is associated with a lower average growth rate of real economic activity in canada consistent with the results in elder and serletis 2010 forthcoming and rahman and serletis forthcoming for the united states and elder and serletis 2009 for canada our results are robust to alternative measures of the price of oil alternative measures of the level of economic activity and alternative data frequencies

temporal aggregation of an estar process some implications for purchasing power parity adjustment nonlinear models of deviations from ppp have recently provided an important theoretically well motivated contribution to the ppp puzzle most of these studies use temporally aggregated data to empirically estimate the nonlinear models as noted by taylor 2001 if the true dgp is nonlinear the temporally aggregated data could exhibit misleading properties regarding the adjustment speeds we examine the effects of different levels of temporal aggregation on estimates of estar models of real exchange rates our monte carlo results show that temporal aggregation does not imply the disappearance of nonlinearity and that adjustment speeds are significantly slower in temporally aggregated data than in the true dgp furthermore the autoregressive structure of some monthly estar estimates found in the literature is suggestive that adjustment speeds are even faster than implied by the monthly estimates

oil price shocks and the macroeconomy this paper examines the impact of oil price shocks and attempts to explain why the rise in oil prices up to 2008 had little impact on the world economy it makes three main arguments first that oil prices have never been as important as is popularly thought second that the most important route through which oil prices affect output is monetary policy when oil prices pass through to core inflation monetary authorities raise interest rates slowing growth based on the second argument the third argument is that high oil prices have not reduced growth in recent years because they no longer pass through to core inflation so the monetary tightening previously seen in response to high oil prices is absent it also argues that oil prices had little impact on the global recession of 20089

testing for non linearity in an artificial financial market a recurrence quantification approach abstract in this paper earlier work on testing for non linear dynamics on realizations from an artificial financial market is extended in two ways on the one hand hinich s bispectral test and white s neural network test are computed on the other hand a recently developed methodology to test for hidden structures in data inherited from physics is successfully applied on the realizations of the artificial market results among alternative tests are compared

modelling business cycle nonlinearity in conditional mean and conditional variance some international and sectoral evidence this paper tests for the presence of output mean and variance nonlinearities in international industrial production and uk and us sectoral production growth rates using armagqarch bilinear bl and joint bl gqarch models arma gqarch models confirm the presence of asymmetric variance effects in italian uk and us industrial production and in all sectors other than us nondurables and such that the conditional variance of output is increased following negative shocks bl models are identified for german italian and us industrial production and us manufacturing while bl gqarch models of joint nonlinearity in both conditional mean and conditional variance are also found to hold for us industrial production and manufacturing moreover with the exception of italy all bl and bl qarch models provide superior out of sample mean forecasts relative to forecasts from both naive models and models of the arma gqarch class

changes to gate closure and its impact on wholesale electricity prices the case of the uk abstract the electricity supply industry in the united kingdom underwent a number of regulatory reforms since late 80 s that have transformed the trading and pricing of the energy market herein we provide empirical evidence that the modification proposal p12 mod p12 that took place in 7 2 2002 moving the gate closure gc interval from 3 5 h to 1 h before real time has caused a permanent alteration in the uk spot price volatility using a combination of recurrence plot rp and recurrence quantification analysis rqa we find that after the the change in the gc time short term price volatility significantly decreased between 2001 and 2008 while long term price volatility is not affected by cg change similar results are obtained by means of spectral analysis on the price series showing a significant reduction in its variability the results of our analysis suggest that a dynamical regime shift of the price occurred and such shift is linked to the gc change whereby shorter gc intervals facilitate short term forecasting on electricity demand and better reliability on the supply side therefore gc closer to real time is associated to reduced price fluctuations in the wholesale market

the effects of oil price shocks on expenditure category cpi in this study we apply a two block structural vector autoregressive var model proposed by kilian and park 2009 in order to investigate the dynamic effects of changes in oil price on the expenditure category consumer price index cpi in the united states and japan our results confirm that each expenditure category price index responded very differently to the same structural shock and that whether changes in oil price function as a positive stimulus or a negative shock for the individual expenditure category prices also depends on the kind of underlying shock that drives the changes in oil price finally our results also reveal that the manner in which changes in oil price affect each expenditure category price differs between the united states and japan and these detailed level differences may lead to aggregate level differences in the price response of both countries to changes in oil price

nonparametric modeling of carbon prices this paper constitutes the first exercise of nonparametric modeling applied to carbon markets the framework of analysis is carefully detailed and the empirical application unfolds in the case of bluenext spot and ecx futures prices the data is gathered in daily frequency from april 2005 to april 2010 first we document the presence of strong nonlinearities in the conditional mean functions second the conditional volatility functions reveal an asymmetric and heteroskedastic behavior which is dramatically different between carbon spot and futures logreturns the results for spot prices are also robust to subsamples decomposition third we show in an out of sample forecasting exercise that nonparametric modeling allows reducing the prediction error by almost 15 compared to linear ar models this latter result is confirmed by the diebold mariano pairwise test statistic

monetary mystique secrecy and central banking abstract the paper contains a discussion of the role of secrecy in the implementation of monetary policy it documents the federal reserve s defense of secrecy as argued in a recent freedom of information act suit the federal reserve s arguments are evaluated on the basis of economic theory theoretical papers related to the secrecy issue are reviewed the discussion highlights a number of potential benefits and costs of central bank secrecy and identifies some conditions under which secrecy could be socially beneficial

the equilibrium degree of transparency and control in monetary policy we examine a central bank s endogenous choice of degree of control and degree of transparency under both commitment and discretion we argue that discretion is the more realistic assumption for the choice of control and that commitment is more realistic for the choice of transparency for the choice of control under discretion maximum degree of control is the only equilibrium for the choice of transparency under commitment a su ciently patient bank with su ciently low average in ation bias will always choose minimum transparency thus a maximum feasible degree of control with a minimum degree of transparency is a likely outcome the bundesbank and the federal reserve system are arguably examples of this jel classi cation e52 e58

the role of energy in real business cycle models abstract this paper modifies hansen s 1985 analysis of a real business cycle mode with indivisible labor by explicitly including energy as a productive input and modelling the relative price of energy as an exogenous random process one goal is to determine the extent to which the introduction of energy price shocks reduces the reliance of the real business cycle model on unobserved technology shocks the other goal following christiano and eichenbaum 1991 is to compare the correlation between real wages and hours predicted by the energy inclusive model to that predicted by hansen s model

testing for non linear structure in an artificial financial market abstract we present a stochastic simulation model of a prototype financial market our market is populated by both noise traders and fundamentalist speculators the dynamics covers switches in the prevailing mood among noise traders optimistic or pessimistic as well as switches of agents between the noise trader and fundamentalist group in response to observed differences in profits the particular behavioral variant adopted by an agent also determines his decision to enter on the long or short side of the market short run imbalances between demand and supply lead to price adjustments by a market maker or auctioneer in the usual walrasian manner our interest in this paper is in exploring the behavior of the model when testing for the presence of chaos or non linearity in the simulated data as it turns out attempts to determine the fractal dimension of the underlying process give unsatisfactory results in that we experience a lack of convergence of the estimate explicit tests for non linearity and dependence the bds and kaplan tests also give very unstable results in that both acceptance and strong rejection of iidness can be found in different realizations of our model all in all this behavior is very similar to experience collected with empirical data and our results may point towards an explanation of why robustness of inference in this area is low however when testing for dependence in second moments and estimating garch models the results appear much more robust and the chosen garch specification closely resembles the typical outcome of empirical studies

when and how much to talk credibility and flexibility in monetary policy with private information abstract this paper analyzes the role of noisy or imprecise announcements in mitigating the basic credibility problem in monetary policy based on a model where the monetary authority s private information gives rise to an unavoidable trade off between flexibility and credibility the analysis finds that noisy announcements can serve as a meaningful form of communication to make that trade off more favorable however such talk is not cheap the analysis predicts that those central banks who can speak more precisely are those who are less likely to speak at all

role of oil price shocks on macroeconomic activities an svar approach to the malaysian economy and monetary responses abstract this study examines the impact of oil price uncertainty on malaysian macroeconomic activities and monetary responses we use a structural var svar model based on monthly data over the period 1986 2009 the egarch model estimates show an important asymmetric effect of oil price shocks on the conditional oil price volatility dynamic impulse response functions obtained from the svar model show a prolonged dampening effect of oil price volatility shock on malaysian industrial production we also find that levels of consumer price index cpi decline with a positive shock to oil price uncertainty this is the result of negative demand shock due to the postponement of consumption of big ticket items by individuals households and other sectors of the economy we also found that the malaysian central bank adopts an expansionary monetary policy in response to oil price uncertainty variance decomposition analysis reconfirms that volatility in the oil price is the second most important factor to explain the variance of industrial production after its own shocks these results shed some light on how the central bank of malaysia can use controlling mechanisms to stabilize aggregate output and price level

unemployment equilibria and input prices theory and evidence from the united states the paper develops an efficiency wage model where input prices affect the equlibrium rate of unemployment we show that a simple framework based on only two prices the real price of oil and the real rate of interest is able to explain the main post war movements in the rate of u s joblessnss the equations do well in forecasting unemployment many out of sample and provide evidence that the oil price spike associated with iraq s invasion of kuweit appears to be a component of the mystery recession which followed

collusive equilibrium in cournot oligopolies with unknown costs the article studies collusive equilibria in an infinitely repeated cournot oligopoly with unknown costs i look at collusive pooled perfect bayesian equilibria and separating equilibria either with signaling or with communication in the separating equilibria with signaling the firms play the strictly separating bayesian nash equilibrium in period 1 and produce the optimal incentive compatible collusive quantity vector from period 2 onwards in the separating equilibrium with communication the optimal incentive compatible quantity vector is produced from period 1 onwards among these the optimal separating equilibrium with communication gives the highest expected discounted joint profits

a theory of ambiguity credibility and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information this paper develops a positive theory of credibility ambiguity and inflation under discretion and asymmetric information the monetary policymaker maximizes his own politically motivated objective function that is positively related to economic stimulation through monetary surprises and negatively related to monetary growth the relative importance he assigns to each target shifts stochastically through time his current preference trade off is known to him but not to the public when choosing the state contingent path of money growth for the present and the future the policymaker compares the benefits from current stimulation with the costs associated with higher future inflation expectations current monetary growth conveys information to the public about future money growth because there is persistence in the policymaker s objectives although expectations are rational information is imperfect because monetary control procedures are imprecise as a result the public cannot correctly distinguish persistent changes of emphasis on different policy objectives from transitory monetary control errors the public becomes aware of changes gradually by observing past monetary growth credibility is defined in terms of the speed with which the public recognizes changes in the objectives of the policymaker credibility is lower the noisier monetary control and the more stable the objectives of the policymaker looser monetary control and a higher degree of time preference on the part of the policymaker induce him to produce higher and more variable monetary growth when the policymaker is free to determine the accuracy of monetary control he does not always choose the most effective control available in spite of the fact that monetary surprises always have an expected value of zero the reason is that ambiguous control procedures enable the policymaker to generate positive surprises when he cares more than on average about economic stimulation he leaves the inevitable negative surprises for periods in which he cares more about inflation prevention this result provides an explanation for the fed s preference for ambiguity recently documented by goodfriend 1986 the policymaker is more likely to pick more ambiguous control procedures the more uncertain his objectives and the higher his time preference the paper also provides a theoretical underpinning for the well documented crosscountry positive correlation between the level and the variability of inflation

a positive theory of discretionary policy the cost of democratic government and the benefits of a constitution we offer an explanation of government s preference for discretionary policy action the main elements are asymmetric information and the ability and desire of governments to maximize reelection prospects discretionary policy imposes a social cost we show that the cost is eliminated if all voters have the same information as the government an optimal state contingent policy rule that precommits government through a constitution eliminates the cost by removing government s opportunities to exploit its informational advantage rules of this kind and constitutional restrictions are difficult to enforce in the presence of uncertainty and different information available to government and the public

developments in the nonlinear analysis of economic series various aspects of the analysis of nonlinearities are surveyed in this paper a possibility of distinguishing between a low dimensional deterministic chaotic process and a white noise stochastic process using estimates of the correlation dimension is discussed it is concluded that there is no evidence of chaos as opposed to nonlinearity in the economic data the modes of testing for nonlinearity are briefly surveyed with particular attention paid to a new test based on a neural network specification it is found that aggregation can reduce nonlinearity and a definition of long memory is proposed that suggests a nonlinear generalization of cointegration

central bank secrecy in the foreign exchange market abstract this paper argues that with sticky goods prices and a forward looking exchange rate the central bank will only want a partial dissemination of its information about shocks to the economy it is shown that in such a model the central bank may prefer to intervene secretly in the foreign exchange markets when responding in anticipation of future shocks but openly when reacting to current shocks the model thus provides a rationale for secrecy in central bank foreign exchange operations the model also elucidates the relationship between the signaling and portfolio balance channels of sterilized intervention

announcements inflation targeting and central bank incentives this paper studies the incentives a central bank faces in announcing inflation targets when the central bank has private information about the economy and the public is uncertain about the central bank s preferences targeting rules in the absence of announcements reduce the inflationary bias of discretionary policy but they distort the central bank s response to private information about the economy this distortion is eliminated when the central bank is allowed to announce the inflation target announcements also affect credibility although the way they do so depends on the exact definition of credibility that is employed in standard models of monetary policy in which dynamic inconsistency plays a prominent role announcements from the central bank about its policy inten tions are not believable the central bank has an incentive to lie yet central banks often do make announcements and they are legally required to do so in some cases the bank of england for example must issue periodic inflation reports the chairman of the federal reserve is required by the humphrey hawkins act to testify before congress twice each year to explain the fed s policy actions and to detail the fed s outlook for future economic develop ments similarly the reserve bank of new zealand is required under the reserve bank act of 1989 to publish policy statements that spell out its plans the january 1994 legislation governing the banque de france requires its gov ernor to appear before parliament and the european central bank must under the maastricht treaty report at least annually to the european parlia ment if public statements about policy intentions are not credible the question naturally arises as to why central banks are frequently required to make them the answer of course is that announcements do provide the public with some information given the growing interest in policy transparency particu larly among those central banks that have adopted some form of inflation targeting it is perhaps surprising that there has been relatively little explicit analysis of how inflation targeting requirements might combine with reporting requirements to influence the informational content of announcements the conduct of stabilization policies and the central bank s credibility the purpose of this paper is to analyse the way inflation targeting affects the incentives the central bank faces in announcing targets when the central bank has private information about the economy and the public is uncertain about the central bank s preferences inflation targeting has seen increased popularity in recent years but a fixed target for inflation is generally suboptimal in the face of supply shocks while state contingent targets are viewed as not feasible an important result of this paper is that allowing the central bank to announce its own inflation target

oil and the macroeconomy since world war ii all but one of the u s recessions since world war ii have been preceded typically with a lag of around three fourths of a year by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum this does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions evidence is presented however that even over the period 1948 72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the u s recessions prior to 1972 by extension energy price increases may account for much of post opec macroeconomic performance

crude oil and the macroeconomy tests of some popular notions a note perhaps no other economic events in the post world war ii era have generated as much attention as the series of crude oil price shocks that have jolted the world economy since the opec boycott of 1973 a tremendous amount of space in the popular and professional literature has been devoted to analyzing the impacts of these shocks on the developed economies and the adjustments these shocks have induced one residual of this literature has been a general impression that since 1973 the functional relationship between crude oil prices and the developed macroeconomies has been dramatically and fundamentally altered yet to our knowledge no one has formally tested this impression recent evidence of hamilton 1983 suggests that crude oil prices had a strong impact on the u s business cycle well before 1973 further while textbook treatments of oil price shocks tend to highlight cost push inflationary effects the research of berndt and wood 1975 1979 and wilcox 1983 indicates the net complementarity between energy and capital in the u s economy is quite strong both before and after 1973 thus oil price shocks may have stronger real effects than generally believed in this paper we formally test three popular notions associated with the so called

imperfect competition and the effects of energy price increases on economic activity the authors show that modifying the standard neoclassical growth model by assuming that competition is imperfect makes it easier to explain the size of the declines in output and real wages that follow increases in the price of oil plausibly parameterized models of this type are able to mimic the response of output and real wages in the united states the responses are particularly consistent with a model of implicit collusion where markups depend positively on the ratio of the expected present value of future profits to the current level of output copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

oil and stock market volatility a multivariate stochastic volatility perspective abstract this paper models the volatility of stock and oil futures markets using the multivariate stochastic volatility structure in an attempt to extract information intertwined in both markets for risk prediction it offers four major findings first the stock and oil futures prices are inter related their correlation follows a time varying dynamic process and tends to increase when the markets are more volatile second conditioned on the past information the volatility in each market is very persistent i e it varies in a predictable manner third there is inter market dependence in volatility innovations that hit either market can affect the volatility in the other market in other words conditioned on the persistence and the past volatility in their respective markets the past volatility of the stock oil futures market also has predictive power over the future volatility of the oil futures stock market finally the model produces more accurate value at risk estimates than other benchmarks commonly used in the financial industry

martingales nonlinearity and chaos abstract in this article we provide a review of the literature with respect to the efficient markets hypothesis and chaos in doing so we contrast the martingale behavior of asset prices to nonlinear chaotic dynamics discuss some recent techniques used in distinguishing between probabilistic and deterministic behavior in asset prices and report some evidence moreover we look at the controversies that have arisen about the available tests and results and raise the issue of whether dynamical systems theory is practical in finance

sectoral shifts and cyclical unemployment a substantial fraction of cyclical unemployment is better characterized as fluctuations of the frictional or natural rate than as deviations from some relatively stable natural rate shifts of employment demand between sectors of the economy necessitate continuous labor reallocation since it takes time for workers to find new jobs some unemployment is unavoidable this paper presents evidence that most of the unemployment fluctuations of the seventies unlike those in the sixties were induced by unusual structural shifts within the u s economy simple time series models of layoffs and unemployment are constructed that include a measure of structural shifts within the labor market these models are estimated and a derived natural rate series is constructed

truthful equilibria in dynamic bayesian games this paper characterizes an equilibrium payoff subset for markovian games with private information as discounting vanishes monitoring might be imperfect transitions depend on actions types correlated or not values private or interdependent it focuses on equilibria in which players report their information truthfully this characterization generalizes those for repeated games and reduces to a collection of one shot bayesian games with transfers with independent private values the restriction to truthful equilibria is shown to be without loss except for individual rationality in the case of correlated types results from static mechanism design can be applied resulting in a folk theorem

is the business cycle characterized by deterministic chaos abstract tests are conducted on u s macroeconomic data for the presence of low dimensional deterministic chaos where deterministic chaos is defined as in grandmont s 1985 walras bowley lecture or in brock 1986 the idea is to test for evidence of endogenous instability causing the business cycle low order autoregressions are hard to reject with our methods evidence of chaos is weak but our tests may be too weak to detect it evidence of nonlinearity is present in employment 1950 i to 1983 iv unemployment 1949 i to 1982 iv monthly post war industrial production and pig iron production 1877 1937

energy sector pricing on the role of neglected nonlinearity modern economies have been subjected to a number of shocks during the past several years such as the burst of the internet bubble terrorist attacks corporate scandals the war in iraq the uncertainty about energy prices and the recent subprime mortgage crisis in particular during the last few years the energy shock has caused concerns for potential stagflation for both the united states and numerous other countries we perform numerous univariate tests for non linearity and chaotic structure using price data from the energy sector to resolve whether the sector s fundamentals or exogenous shocks drive these prices

a reappraisal of the chaotic paradigm for energy commodity prices abstract energy commodity prices have been examined over the last 20 years to detect the presence of chaos as an alternative to stochastic models with contrasting results in this paper we wish to reassess the chaotic paradigm in the light of two new pieces of information with respect to the literature the appearance of noise aware estimation methods for the correlation entropy and the availability of longer time series our analysis shows that the literature has heavily underestimated the presence of noise and that chaotic characteristics coexist with stochastic ones in the time series of prices through the recurrence quantification analysis we have also observed the presence of intermittency where periods of regular behaviour are replaced by periods of chaotic behaviour which could explain the emergence of bubbles

modeling secrecy and deception in a multiple period attacker defender signaling game abstract in this paper we apply game theory to model strategies of secrecy and deception in a multiple period attacker defender resource allocation and signaling game with incomplete information at each period we allow one of the three possible types of defender signals truthful disclosure secrecy and deception we also allow two types of information updating the attacker updates his knowledge about the defender type after observing the defender s signals and also after observing the result of a contest if one occurs in any given time period our multiple period model provides insights into the balance between capital and expense for defensive investments and the effects of defender private information such as defense effectiveness target valuations and costs and also shows that defenders can achieve more cost effective security through secrecy and deception possibly lasting more than one period in a multiple period game this paper helps to fill a significant gap in the literature in particular to our knowledge no past work has studied defender secrecy and deception in a multiple period game moreover we believe that the solution approach developed and applied in this paper would prove useful in other types of multiple period games

imperfect competition and business cycles an empirical investigation imperfect competition and business cycles an empirical investigation does imperfect competition increase the magnitude of business cycles if so the variability of an industry s employment and output should be positively related to the market power of firms in that industry this paper demonstrates that the opposite is true u s manufacturing industries with high price cost margins display less employment variability than do low markup industries these high markup industries display less price variability as well highly concentrated industries however do display more employment variability to some degree markups may reflect labor hoarding rather than market power this may account for part but not all of the negative correlation between markups and variability i introduction recent research has investigated whether deviations from perfect competition either in goods or labor markets help explain the existence and magnitude of business cycles in particular both theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that imperfectly competitive firms hold prices more rigid in the face of demand shocks than do more competitive firms 1 this finding raises the question of whether imperfectly competitive industries also exhibit larger fluctuations in output and employment this paper examines employment and output data for 446 u s manufacturing industries over the years 1958 to 1984 if employment and output fluctuations have been smaller in more competitive industries this would suggest that imperfect competition may indeed lead to larger business cycle fluctuations in fact my results suggest the opposite industries with larger price marginal cost margins display less variability in employment and output although the output results are not robust the finding for employment is remarkably robust to a wide range of specifications in particular it holds for two different methods of estimating the price marginal cost margin in contrast i find that highly concentrated industries as opposed to those with high price marginal cost margins do display more variability in output and employment than do less concentrated industries in addition i confirm the finding of previous studies that industries with high price cost margins display less price variability thus it appears that imperfect competition may reduce variability in both prices and quantities the paper proceeds as follows section ii outlines the theoretical literature and surveys previous empirical work in this area section iii describes the methodology of the paper and section iv describes the estimation of the price marginal cost margin section v presents the results and section vi discusses possible explanations section vii concludes ii theoretical literature and previous work many theoretical models suggest that imperfectly competitive industries ought to display more cyclical variability of output than perfectly competitive industries the common thread in all these theories is real price rigidity 2 some reason is offered why an imperfectly competitive firm does not adjust its relative price in response to a demand shock as much as would a perfectly competitive firm the less prices adjust the more output and employment must adjust therefore the argument goes imperfect competition may exacerbate the size of business cycle fluctuations 3 this basic argument dates back to means 1935 prices may be relatively acyclical or even countercyclical in industries with market power for one of two reasons either marginal cost is relatively flat or markups are relatively countercyclical the following theories of real price rigidity may be classified as falling into one of these two categories firms with market power are assumed to maintain excess capacity perhaps as a barrier to entry by new firms

oil shocks and monetary policy rules in emerging economies we examine the effects of shocks in the oil market on key macroeconomic variables in small open economies using a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with sticky prices and imperfect competition under different monetary policy rules the numerical solutions show that the types of exchange rate regimes and monetary policies could partly explain the trends in macroeconomic volatilities considering negative shocks to oil supply hamilton 1983 and positive shocks to oil demand kilian 2009 these findings are confirmed in vector autoregressive responses for chile and israel with inflation targeting under flexible exchange regimes and hong kong with fixed regime

does the s p500 index lead the crude oil dynamics a complexity based approach abstract taking the complex property of nonlinear feedback connectivity into consideration the goal of this paper is to apprehend the interdependences between the financial and energy sectors our contribution is both theoretical and methodological we conduct a multivariate analysis employing nonlinear tools namely the partial transfer entropy and the asymmetric mackey glass causality test in particular we build a system comprising the petroleum complex crude oil gasoline and heating oil the s p500 index and the 1 month futures spot spread for crude oil by adopting a rolling window approach we observe a persistent lead lag relationship between the s p500 index and the market participants expectations for crude oil from 2004 to 2009 depending on the bubble period in the stock market it appears that the resulting coupling becomes subject to the deterioration of global economic activity induced by large common shocks

oil price shocks and the dispersion hypothesis recent research by david lilien shows that a significant fraction of aggregate unemployment can be explained by the dispersion of employment growth across industries this paper presents two new results in this area first it is shown that a significant fraction of the variation in lilien s dispersion index is due to the differential impact of oil shocks across industries second and more important it is shown that once the dispersion in employment growth due to oil shocks is accounted for the residual dispersion has no explanatory power for unemployment

does the source of oil price shocks matter for south african stock returns a structural var approach abstract in this paper we investigate the dynamic relationship between different oil price shocks and the south african stock market using a sign restriction structural var approach for the period 1973 01 to 2011 07 the results show that for an oil importing country like south africa stock returns only increase with oil prices when global economic activity improves in response to oil supply shocks and speculative demand shocks stock returns and the real price of oil move in opposite directions the analysis of the variance decomposition shows that the oil supply shock contributes more to the variability in real stock prices the main conclusion is that different oil price shocks affect stock returns differently and policy makers and investors should always consider the source of the shock before implementing a policy and making investment decisions

oil price fluctuations and u s dollar exchange rates adding oil prices to the monetary model of exchange rates we find that oil prices significantly explain movements in the value of the u s dollar usd against major currencies from the 1970s to 2008 our long run and forecasting results are remarkably consistent with an oil exchange rate relationship increases in real oil prices lead to a significant depreciation of the usd against net oil exporter currencies such as canada mexico and russia on the other hand the currencies of oil importers such as japan depreciate relative to the usd when the real oil price goes up

are oil shocks inflationary asymmetric and nonlinear specifications versus changes in regime this paper identifies a structural break in core u s inflation phillips curves such that oil prices contributed substantially before 1981 but since that time pass through has been negligible this characterization is robust to a variety of re specifications and fits the data better than asymmetric and nonlinear oil price alternatives evidence does not support the hypotheses that declining energy intensity or deregulation of energy producing and consuming industries played an important role monetary policy did not itself become less accommodative of oil shocks but may have helped create a regime where inflation is less sensitive to price shocks more generally

social benefit expenditures and stagflation evidence from the united states abstractstagflation refers to the terrible economic malaise associated with declining growth hyperinflation and high unemployment unlike previous cost push explanations such as an overheated labour market and oil prices this article suggests that social benefit expenditures are a potential cause of stagflation we investigate the impact of social benefit expenditures on stagflation in the u s over the 1950 2014 period by employing an autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach to cointegration which was developed by pesaran shin and smith the influence of social benefit expenditures on economic growth and inflation and unemployment rates is estimated the empirical results from the u s suggest that economic growth responds negatively to social benefit expenditures while inflation and unemployment rates are both positively associated with social benefit expenditures thus government led rigid welfare could contribute to stagflation in the u s instead of increasing people s hap

nonconvex costs and the behavior of inventories this paper explores one possible explanation for the apparent excess volatility of production relative to sales nonconvexities in the technology facing firms it is shown that if firms operate in a region of declining marginal costs then small shifts in demand can cause production to jump substantially estimates for six production to stock industries as well as the automobile industry suggest that all these industries behave as if they were operating in the region of nonconvex costs the results have important implications not only for inventory investment but also for the cyclical behavior of productivity and prices

oil shocks and aggregate macroeconomic behavior the role of monetary policy a recent paper by bernanke gertler and watson 1997 suggests that monetary policy could be used to eliminate any recessionary consequences of an oil price shock this paper challenges this conclusion on two grounds first we question whether the federal reserve actually has the power to implement such a policy for example we consider it unlikely that additional money creation would have succeeded in reducing the fed funds rate by 900 basis points relative to the values seen in 1974 second we point out that the size of the effect that bernanke gertler and watson attribute to oil shocks is substantially smaller than that reported by other researchers primarily due to their choice of a shorter lag length than that used by other researchers we offer evidence in favor of the longer lag length employed by previous research and show that under this specification even the aggressive federal reserve policies proposed would not have succeeded in averting a downturn

short term contracts and long term agency relationships abstract long term contracts are valuable only if optimal contracting requires commitment to a plan today that would not otherwise be adopted tomorrow we show that commitments are unnecessary and hence short term contracts are sufficient if 1 all public information can be used in contracting 2 the agent can acess a bank on equal terms with the principal 3 recontracting takes place with common knowledge about technology and preferences and 4 the frontier of expected utility payoffs generated by the set of incentive compatible contracts is downward sloping at all times

efficiency in games with markovian private information we study repeated bayesian games with communication and observable actions in which the players privately known payoffs evolve according to an irreducible markov chain whose transitions are independent across players our main result implies that generically any pareto efficient payoff vector above a stationary minmax value can be approximated arbitrarily closely in a perfect bayesian equilibrium as the discount factor goes to 1 as an intermediate step we construct an approximately efficient dynamic mechanism for long finite horizons without assuming transferable utility publication abstract

dynamic cyclical comovements between oil prices and us gdp a wavelet perspective abstract in this paper we use wavelet analysis to investigate the cyclical comovements between crude oil prices and us gdp taking into account the decline in the volatility of us gdp growth that has occurred since the mid 1980s our main findings suggest that before 1984 q1 the crude oil prices were leading the us gdp cycle by 3 quarters and granger cause us gdp in contrast after 1984 q1 the crude oil prices were lagging the us business cycle and a reverse causality is found to run from us gdp to oil prices the multiscale granger causality tests globally corroborate theses results

restricted feedback in long term relationships abstract this paper studies long term relationships modeled as repeated games with restricted feedback players condition current play on summary statistics of past play rather than the entire history as may be the case in online markets our state strategy equilibrium framework allows for arbitrary restrictions on strategies we derive a recursive characterization for the set of equilibrium payoffs similar to that of abreu pearce and stacchetti 1986 1990 2 3 for perfect public equilibria and show that the set of equilibrium payoffs is the largest fixed point of a monotone operator we use our characterization to derive necessary and sufficient conditions for efficient trade in a repeated product choice game where costumers condition their purchase decisions only on the last performance signal

realized volatility transmission between crude oil and equity futures markets a multivariate har approach this paper differs from extant literature because it studies volatility co movements with a multivariate orthogonalized har model a flexible specification for the time series of realized volatility which is able to identify short mid and long term spillover effects we examine volatility transmission mechanisms using high frequency data of the stock index futures on s p 500 nikkei 225 ftse 100 and the futures on the west texas intermediate crude oil during the period from september 2002 to september 2012 considering the full sample the short term volatility of the equity futures contains information about future oil volatility incremental to the information inherent in the time series of oil volatility on the other hand weekly and monthly volatilities do not exhibit a significant spillover effect breaking the whole sample into three subsamples no significant granger causalities are observed in the pre crisis period while in the crisis time and its aftermath we document that the us and uk equity market volatilities to granger cause the oil futures volatility which itself leads the japanese market in terms of magnitude we observe an increase in the short term volatility spillover over time studying the residuals of the har transmission models within a ccc dcc garch framework reveals increasing instantaneous correlation between the energy and equity volatilities in the course of time

the politics of ambiguity politicians face a trade off between the policies that maximize their chances of reelection and their most preferred policies or the policies most preferred by the constituency which they represent this paper analyzes this trade off in a dynamic electoral model in which the voters are not fully informed about the preferences of the incumbent first we show that the incumbent follows a policy which is intermediate between the other party s ideal policy and his own ideal policy second we show that often the incumbent has an incentive to choose procedures which make it difficult for voters to pinpoint his preferences with absolute precision thus politicians may prefer to be ambiguous

input price shocks and the slowdown in economic growth the case of u k manufacturing this paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of input price shocks on economic growth with a focus on united kingdom manufacturing in the 1970s the theoretical model predicts a discrete decline in output and productivity after an input price rise and a longer run slowdown in productivity growth real wage growth and capital accumulation these features characterize the united kingdom and most other oecd economies after 1973 the empirical results confirm the important role of input prices in recent u k adjustment but also point to an important role for other supply and demand factors two types of explanations have been offered for the sharp deterioration in u k economic performance in the past decade focusing respectively on demand and supply factors a standard keynesian view holds that macroeconomic demand management has been either too expansionary or too contractionary and that rising unemployment and falling output reflect the burden of anti inflationary policies an alternative view holds that various supply shocks are the main source of the poor output performance in this interpretation higher raw material prices particularly oil competition from the newly industrializing countries nics and perhaps an independent decline in productivity growth all have lowered output growth and raised unemployment

oil price shocks and stock markets in the u s and 13 european countries abstract oil price shocks have a statistically significant impact on real stock returns contemporaneously and or within the following month in the u s and 13 european countries over 1986 1 2005 12 norway as an oil exporter shows a statistically significantly positive response of real stock returns to an oil price increase the median result from variance decomposition analysis is that oil price shocks account for a statistically significant 6 of the volatility in real stock returns for many european countries but not for the u s increased volatility of oil prices significantly depresses real stock returns the contribution of oil price shocks to variability in real stock returns in the u s and most other countries is greater than that of interest rate an increase in real oil price is associated with a significant increase in the short term interest rate in the u s and eight out of 13 european countries within one or two months counter to findings for the u s and for norway there is little evidence of asymmetric effects on real stock returns of positive and negative oil price shocks for oil importing european countries

a neoclassical model of unemployment and the business cycle this paper investigates a general equilibrium model of unemployment and the business cycle in which specialization of labor plays a key role a rational expectations equilibrium with fully flexible wages and prices can exhibit unemployment in which the marginal product of employed workers exceeds the reservation wage of those who are without jobs workers are unemployed either because they are in the process of relocating for a better job or because they are waiting for conditions in the depressed sector to improve moreover seemingly small disruptions in the supplies of primary commodities such as energy could be the source of fluctuations in aggregate employment and can exert surprisingly large effects on real output

what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract strong evidence is found that oil prices no longer granger cause many u s macroeconomic indicator variables in data after 1973 a number of potential explanations are explored that sample stability issues are responsible that oil prices are now endogenous and that linear and symmetric specifications misrepresent the form of the oil price interaction none of these hypotheses are supported by the data the opec price increases do appear to have had significant impacts while the effects of the price declines of the 1980s are smaller and harder to characterize these results have potentially important implications for the large body of research which utilizes oil prices as an instrumental or explanatory variable

this is what happened to the oil price macroeconomy relationship abstract many of the quarterly oil price increases observed since 1985 are corrections to even bigger oil price decreases the previous quarter when one looks at the net increase in oil prices over the year recent data are consistent with the historical correlation between oil shocks and recessions

dynamic games with hidden actions and hidden states abstract we consider a class of dynamic games in which each player s actions are unobservable to the other players and each player s actions can influence a state variable that is unobservable to the other players we develop an algorithm that solves for the subset of sequential equilibria in which equilibrium strategies depend on private information only through the privately observed state journal of economic literature classification numbers c63 c73

optimal cartel equilibria with imperfect monitoring abstract there exist optimal symmetric equilibria in the green porter model 4 8 having an elementary intertemporal structure such an equilibrium is described entirely by two subsets of price space and two quantities the only production levels used by firms in any contingency the central technique employed in the analysis is the reduction of the repeated game to a family of static games

why doesn t society minimize central bank secrecy i introduction central banks have repeatedly revealed a preference for secrecy in conducting monetary policy in the united states for example the federal reserve has expressed its bias towards policy secrecy in a number of ways ranging from delays in releasing the minutes of federal open market committee fomc meetings to ambiguous policy statements at congressional hearings 1 nevertheless the degree of disclosure required by congress and the court system does not appear to minimize central bank secrecy indeed the fed s right to limit disclosure of policy intentions was upheld in a recent supreme court case 2 furthermore similar social tolerance of central bank secrecy appears in the banking institutions of other countries since legal and social institutions allow for central bank secrecy its presence may be attributed to the preferences of the social planners who designed these institutions in the first place forward looking planners know that monetary policy in future periods will be the outcome of a symbiotic relationship between monetary authorities politicians and private interest groups 3 as the relative importance of these different groups and their preferences change over time so will the policy objectives of the monetary authorities if secrecy is allowed monetary authorities could effect policy changes in response to relationship changes without immediate detection by private markets recognizing this policy effect of secrecy a social planner would design institutions to affect the environment so that desirable future policy formation takes place 4 this paper offers two explanations for why social institutions do not legally minimize central bank secrecy 5 first when establishing institutional disclosure requirements for central banks social planners recognize the tendency for central bankers to be secretive this secrecy imposes costs upon members of society by making shifts in policy objectives more difficult to detect faced with this tendency members of society set legal institutions that appear to require less disclosure because more restrictive laws would induce central bankers to become more secretive in other less informative ways 6 second if the policy objectives that society finds desirable change over time then members of society may directly prefer some degree of central bank secrecy economic theory holds that unanticipated changes in monetary policy can have an economic effect intuitively secrecy allows central banks to conduct unanticipated policy actions in periods when on average society most prefers them for example in periods when public opinion favors pushing down unemployment central banks may conduct a surprise monetary expansion 7 the paper develops examples of each of these two effects using a discretionary equilibrium similar to that in cukierman and meltzer 1986a the desired trade off between two policy objectives changes over time in response to changing political pressures although i use the trade off between output and inflation as an example the basic results hold with any policy trade off that varies over time the policy objectives could include targets for real exchange rates or interest rates for instance the plan of the paper is as follows section ii describes the discretionary equilibrium given institutional settings for the conduct of monetary policy sections iii and iv describe examples of each of the two explanations for secrecy described above concluding remarks follow ii the degree of policy disclosure in a discretionary equilibrium when the policy objectives of the monetary authorities shift over time due to changing economic or political circumstances their choice of discretionary policy also shifts 8 in the absence of a mechanism to pre commit to a particular policy rule the authorities will implement policy changes

monetary policy signaling from the administration to the federal reserve this chapter employs the index of monetary policy signaling from the administration to the federal reserve safer that was developed in chapter two the safer index is a simple weekly sum of articles that appeared in the wall street journal in which administration officials expressed a desire for easier 1 or tighter 1 monetary policy a key assumption is that systematically over time the financial media capture the essence of communication that is going on between the executive branch and federal reserve officials 1 the signaling index is employed in ordinary least squares regressions for the period from january 1964 to november 1991 cumulative values of the safer index over a three week period as an explanatory variable are found to have a statistically significant effect on the average federal funds rate during the third week as the dependent variable further evidence suggests that the safer index is granger causal with respect to the federal funds rate after classifying the signals by sources within the administration oval office council of economic advisers treasury and other and unidentified sources it is shown that for the overall 1964 1991 period signals from the treasury department and from other and unidentified sources have a statistically significant effect on the federal funds rate while signals from the oval office and the council do not when the data are segmented according to who was the chairman of the federal reserve board at the time ordinary least squares results indicate that the federal reserve did not systematically respond to executive branch signaling in a statistically significant way when william mcchesney martin g william miller and alan greenspan were chairmen but did respond statistically significantly to administration signaling during portions of the periods during which arthur burns and paul volcker were chairmen

central bank secrecy interest rates and monetary control we construct a dynamic rational expectations model of the federal funds and deposit market that provides a rationale for central bank secrecy about current monetary aggregate objectives in this analysis the trading desk values secrecy because it reduces the influence of monetary control policy on interest rates we then examine actual u s experience with monetary control and determine that the reserve bias predicted by the model is present in the data from 1978 to 1985 finally we demonstrate that central bank secrecy may not lower the value of commercial banks

impact of oil price shocks on output inflation and the real exchange rate evidence from selected asean countries this article analyses the impact of oil price shocks on real output inflation and the real exchange rate in thailand malaysia singapore the philippines and indonesia asean 5 using a structural var model the cointegration tests indicate that the macroeconomic variables of these countries are cointegrated and share common trends in the long run the impulse response functions reveal that oil price fluctuations do not impact the asean 5 economies in the long run and much of its effect is absorbed within five to six quarters the variance decomposition results further assert that with a few exceptions oil price shocks do not explain a significant variation in any of the variables under consideration we also identify a very unique pattern of response to oil price fluctuations between malaysia and singapore and between the philippines and thailand the pairs exhibit a high degree of similarity in their responses they do not share any commonalities across the group

optimal degrees of transparency in monetary policymaking den meisten akademikern und politischen entscheidungstragern zufolge ist transparenz in der geldpolitik wunschenswert ich untersuche diese behauptung anhand eines kleinen theoretischen models das das vorausschauende verhalten des privaten sektors hervorhebt transparenz erleichtert es denjenigen die preise festsetzen auf die kunftigen geldpolitischen absichten der zentralbank zu schliesen wodurch die laufende inflation starker auf stabilitatspolitische masnahmen reagiert dies fuhrt dazu dass die zentralbank sich eher auf die inflation als auf die stabilisierung der produktionslucke konzentriert in diesem fall kann transparenz negative folgen haben sie kann sich sogar als eine die geldpolitik verzerrende zwangsjacke herausstellen wenn die zentralbank sich stabilitatspolitischer glaubwurdigkeit erfreut und eine aktive monetare stabilisierungspolitik benotigt wird

inflation unemployment and public opinion polls it is well known that public opinion polls report that the public regards inflation as a more serious problem than unemployment in this paper we examine public opinion surveys with the aim of discovering what if anything the poll results mean we describe in some detail the questions about inflation and unemployment asked in the surveys and analyze the determinants in both cross section and time series of answers to those questions the typical opinion poll question about inflation and unemployment is which of the two problems inflation or unemployment do you think will cause the more serious economic hardship for people during the next year or so 1 section 1 discusses the possible issues to which opinion poll questions about inflation and unemployment might be relevant section 2 tabulates a variety of questions that have been asked along with the responses and examines the views expressed and their consistency both internal and across different polls section 3 presents a regression analysis of the cross sectional determinants of responses to the michigan poll question cited above while section 4 studies determinants of changes over time

dynamic structure of the spot price of crude oil does time aggregation matter abstract this paper assesses nonlinear structures in the time series data generating mechanism of crude oil prices we apply well known univariate tests for nonlinearity with distinct power functions over alternatives but with different null hypotheses reflecting the existence of different concepts of linearity and nonlinearity in the time series literature we utilize daily data on crude oil spot price for over 26 years as well as monthly data on crude oil spot price for 41 years investigating the monthly price of crude oil along with the daily price distinguishes the approach of this paper from existing studies focusing on the time series structure of crude oil price all the tests detect strong evidence of general nonlinear serial dependence as well as nonlinearity in the mean variance and skewness functions in the daily spot price of crude oil since evidence of nonlinear dependence is less dramatic in monthly observations nonlinear serial dependence is moderated by time aggregation in crude oil prices but not significantly

collusion with persistent cost shocks we consider a dynamic bertrand game in which prices are publicly observed and each firm receives a privately observed cost shock in each period although cost shocks are independent across firms within a firm costs follow a first order markov process we analyze the set of collusive equilibria available to firms emphasizing the best collusive scheme for the firms at the start of the game in general there is a trade off between productive efficiency whereby the low cost firm serves the market in a given period and high prices we show that when costs are perfectly correlated over time within a firm if the distribution of costs is log concave and firms are sufficiently patient then the optimal collusive scheme entails price rigidity firms set the same price and share the market equally regardless of their respective costs when serial correlation of costs is imperfect partial productive efficiency is optimal for the case of two cost types first best collusion is possible if the firms are patient relative to the persistence of cost shocks but not otherwise we present numerical examples of first best collusive schemes

random fractal structures in north american energy markets this paper uses daily observations on west texas intermediate wti crude oil prices at chicago and henry hub natural gas prices at la over the deregulated period of the 1990s and various tests from statistics and dynamical systems theory to support a random fractal structure for north american energy markets in particular this evidence is supported by the vassilicos et al 1993 multifractal structure test and the ghashghaie et al nature 381 1996 767 turbulent behavior test

the efficacy of the european union emissions trading scheme depicting the co movement of carbon assets and energy commodities through wavelet decomposition abstract environmental system thresholds have been crossed for a number of dimensions of global environmental pollution such as greenhouse gas emissions under this scenario institutions and corporations are required to implement sustainable policies as a condition for humanity staying within planetary boundaries accordingly the european union created the largest emissions trading scheme in the world with the aim of properly managing corporations carbon dioxide reductions this paper aims to contribute to the literature focused on testing the effectiveness of institutional environmental management policies specifically this research evaluates whether the objectives of the european union emissions trading scheme are partially achieved by analyzing the dynamics of carbon assets and the main energy commodities worldwide this paper provides relevant information both for policy makers and company managers so that contributions towards the common goal of developing a clean energy future and curbing climate change are ameliorated based on wavelet coherence analysis this paper proposes a model free way of estimating the time varying correlations between carbon assets and energy commodities at both high and low frequencies our central results reveal that carbon assets and energy commodities present a changing lead lag behavior at different frequencies the energy commodities lead the european union allowances returns at medium frequencies but the contrary was true for the highest investment horizons this finding should be in line with the goal of significantly reducing emissions because during long cycles if the majority of companies have not switched to cleaner industrial processes they must buy more carbon assets increasing their prices in that case energy commodities would be more expensive because of the energy commodities market behavior during long term horizons with european union allowances lead the certified emissions reductions lead in a negative way most of the energy commodities at medium frequencies thus indicating that investors handling energy commodities oriented portfolios could incorporate the mentioned carbon assets for diversification purposes these specific findings suggest that polluting activities would be more expensive which would provide an incentive to companies to implement environmentally friendly industrial processes the european union emissions trading scheme can result in significant emission reductions and compliance of the european union with the objectives of the kyoto protocol

a partisanship theory of fiscal and monetary regimes this paper indicates that income redistribution motivated by the distributive ideals of liberal political p arties create unanticipated disincentives for productive effort thi s suggests that newly elected liberal parties are likely to engage in monetary surprises in order to compensate for the adverse effects of these disincentives on real income estimated reaction from function s support these predictions a measure of income redistribution the change in the ratio of the social expenditures of government to gnp has a positive significant effect on money growth in addition when the presidency changes from conservative to liberal there is a posit ive and significant increase on money growth copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

on repeated moral hazard with discounting in this paper we analyze optimal contracts in an infinitely repeated agency model in which both the principal and agent discount the future we show that there is a stationary representation of the optimal contract when the agent s conditional discounted expected utility is used as a state variable this representation reduces the multi period problem to a static variational problem which can be analyzed using standard variational techniques this reduction is used to obtain several properties of the contract

international lending with moral hazard and risk of repudiation in this paper i examine the constrained optimal pattern of capital flows between a lender and a borrower in an environment in which there are two impediments to forming contracts the first impediment to contracting arises from the assumption that lenders cannot observe whether borrowers invest or consume borrowed funds this assumption leads to a moral hazard problem in investment the second impediment arises from the assumption that the borrower as a sovereign nation may choose to repudiate his debts the optimal contract is shown to specify that the borrowing country experience a capital outflow when the worst realizations of national output occur this seemingly perverse capital outflow forms a necessary part of the optimal solution to the moral hazard problem in investment

oil and the macroeconomy when prices go up and down an extension of hamilton s results in an important paper hamilton 1983 demonstrated a strong correlation between oil price changes and gross national product growth in u s data however his study pertained to a period in which all the large oil price movements were upward and thus it left unanswered the question whether the correlation persists in periods of price decline moreover the price variable he used was somewhat distorted by price controls in the 1970s this note investigates whether hamilton s results continue to hold when the sample is extended to include the recent oil market collapse and the oil price variable is corrected for the effects of price controls particular attention is given to the possibility of asymmetric responses to oil price increases and decreases as suggested in the structural employment literature loungani 1986 davis 1987 hamilton 1988 like hamilton i based my investigation on the gnp equation in sims s 1 980b six variable quarterly vector autoregressive model

expectations learning and the changing relationship between oil prices and the macroeconomy this paper estimates a structural general equilibrium model to investigate the changing relationship between the oil price and macroeconomic variables the oil price through the role of oil in production and consumption affects aggregate demand and supply in the model the assumption of rational expectations is relaxed in favor of learning oil prices therefore affect the economy through an additional channel i e through their effect on the formation of agents beliefs the estimated learning dynamics indicates that economic agents perceptions about the effects of oil prices on the economy have changed over time oil prices were perceived to have large effects on output and inflation in the 1970s but only milder effects after the mid 1980s since expectations play a large role in the determination of output and inflation the effects of oil price increases on expectations can magnify the response of macroeconomic variables to oil price shocks in the estimated model in fact the implied responses of output and inflation to oil price shocks were much more pronounced in the 1970s than in 2008 therefore through the time variation in the impact of oil prices on beliefs the paper can successfully explain the observed weakening of the effects of oil price shocks on real activity and inflation