testing for asymmetric information in insurance markets the first goal of this paper is to provide a simple and general test of the presence of asymmetric information in contractual relationships within a competitive context we also argue that insurance data are particularly well suited to such empirical investigations to illustrate this claim we use data on contracts and accidents to investigate the extent of asymmetric information in the french market for automobile insurance using various parametric and nonparametric methods we find no evidence for the presence of asymmetric information in this market

north american money surprises and financial market reactions an empirical note abstract in the late 1970s u s and canadian weekly money supply announcements occurred almost simultaneously the unanticipated components of these announcements are shown to be correlated and the importance of this factor for findings in the money surprise market response literature is explored

money supply announcements and foreign exchange futures prices for five countries since the federal reserve began targeting money supply growth in october 1979 the effects of fed money supply announcements on financial markets have been intensively examined studies have considered the impacts on financial assets including yields on short term and long term treasury securities forward interest rates exchange rates stock prices and commodity prices these studies suggest that money supply announcements have had significant effects on all these financial assets the effects however have not been consistent across time assets or countries this study adds to the money supply announcement literature focusing on foreign exchange spot and currency future prices mussa 23 provides a justification for this approach he demonstrates that exchange rates move in accord with the efficient markets theory of asset price determination in addition he finds most exchange rate changes are unexpected thus exchange rate changes generally should be related to news since unexpected changes must be due to new information how exchange rates respond to news depends on how that information alters expectations those expectations however depend on economic agents historical experience and on policymakers anticipated reactions thus the effects may vary across countries and across policymaking regimes we believe this study makes four contributions to the money announcement literature first we develop a model of money announcements where expected announcements may be important even when markets are efficient while we consider money announcements in particular the model suggests a general result even expected announcements may affect financial market variables simply by confirming prior expectations second we extend and update the prior literature by examining whether recent money supply announcements have an impact on exchange rates and whether recent impacts differ from those found through 1985 the results suggest the impact of money announcements may have diminished marginally third we extend the analysis to exchange rate currency futures comparing the reactions of spot and futures rates yields further evidence on the policy anticipation versus the expected inflation effects and fourth most prior studies of unanticipated money growth do not distinguish between positive and negative surprises if positive and negative surprises influence market prices asymmetrically however

predictable and profitable price patterns evidence from us interest rates abstract this paper detects a predictable response of short term eurodollar interest rate futures to us employment data during 1988 1993 a simulation with a trading rule derived from this predictable response generates systematic profits thus violating the efficient markets hypothesis

monetary policy actions intervention and exchange rates a reexamination of the empirical relationships using federal funds rate target data the authors reexamine the relationships among federal reserve monetary policy actions u s interventions in currency markets and exchange rates using an alternative measure of monetary policy actions the federal reserve s federal funds rate target they find that exchange rates generally respond immediately to u s monetary policy actions and that these responses are usually consistent with the overshooting hypothesis the authors also find evidence of signaling and leaning against the wind u s intervention policies over the sample however controlling for such interventions do not alter their estimates of exchange rate responses to federal funds rate target changes copyright 1998 by university of chicago press

breaking up a research consortium inter firm r d collaborations through contractual arrangements have become increasingly popular but in many cases they are broken up without any joint discovery we provide a rationale for the breakup date in r d collaboration agreements more specifically we consider a research consortium initiated by a firm a with a firm b b has private information about whether it is committed to the project or a free rider we show that under fairly general conditions a breakup date in the contract is a second best optimal screening device for firm a to screen out free riders with the additional constraint of renegotiation proofness a can only partially screen out free riders entry by some free riders makes sure that a does not have an incentive to renegotiate the contract ex post we also propose empirical strategies for identifying the three likely causes of a breakup date adverse selection moral hazard and project non viability

estimating demand for local telephone service with asymmetric information and optional calling plans in this paper i study the theoretical and econometric implications of agents uncertainty concerning their future consumption when a monopolist offers them either a unique mandatory nonlinear tariff or a choice in advance from a menu of optional two part tariffs agents uncertainty is resolved through individual and privately known shocks to their types in such a situation the principal may screen agents according to their ex ante or ex post type by offering either a menu of optional tariffs or a standard nonlinear schedule the theoretical implications of the model are used to evaluate a tariff experiment run by south central bell in two cities in kentucky in 1986 the empirical approach explicitly accounts for the existence of informational asymmetries between local telephone users and the monopolist leading to different nested econometric specifications under symmetric and asymmetric information the empirical evidence suggests that there exists a significant asymmetry of information between consumers and the monopolist under both tariff regimes all expected welfare components failed to increase with the introduction of optional tariffs for the estimated value of the parameters copyright 2002 wiley blackwell

why interest rates react to money announcements an explanation from the foreign exchange market abstract when the fed announces a money supply greater than had been expected interest rates rise why one explanation is that the market raises its estimate of the future rates of money growth and inflation and bids up nominal interest rates we offer contrary evidence on such days the dollar appreciates not depreciates an alternative explanation is that the market perceives the change in the money stock as a transitory fluctuation that the fed will reverse in the future the anticipated future tightening raises today s real interest rate causes a capital inflow and appreciates the dollar the result in fact observed

optimal contracts under adverse selection and moral hazard a continuous time approach this article presents a continuous time agency model in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard with a risk averse agent and a risk neutral principal under the model setup we show that the optimal controls are constant over time and thus the optimal menu consists of contracts that are linear in the final outcome we also show that when a moral hazard problem adds to an adverse selection problem the monotonicity condition well known in the pure adverse selection literature needs to be modified to ensure the incentive compatibility for information revelation the model is applied to a few managerial compensation problems involving managerial project selection and capital budgeting decisions we argue that in the third best world the relationship between the volatility of the outcome and the sensitivity of the contract depends on interactions between the managerial cost and the firm s production functions contrary to conventional wisdom sometimes the higher the volatility the higher the sensitivity of the contract the firm receiving good news sometimes chooses safer projects or invests less than it does with bad news we also examine the effects of the observability of the volatility on corporate investment decisions copyright 2005 oxford university press

economic news exchange rates and interest rates the paper esamines the post october 1979 response of exchange rates and interest rates to the new information contained in the first announcement of fifteen us macroeconomic series illarkets respond primarily to monetary news but also to news about the trade deficit domestic inflation and variables that reflect the state of the business cycle for all fifteen macroeconomic variables an increase decrease in interest rates is accompanied by an appreciation depreciation of the dollar which is consistent with models that stress price rigidity and absence of purchasing power parity the effect of economic news on asset prices has received increasing attention in the economic literature because an outcome of the efficient markets rational expectations hypothesis is that flesible asset prices change the moment new information about future fundamentals arrives in the market in the exchange rate literature the role of news has gained importance because structural models have failed to predict most of the variation in exchange rates during the 1970s see imeese and rogoff 1983 researchers were naturally led to investigate the types of news that make exchange rates so volatile and to utilize news in order to test which model of exchange rate determination is consistent with the floating eschange rate experience notable studies are those of dornbusch 1980 frenkel 1981 edwards 1982a b 1983 copeland 1984 and rose 1984 in this paper i also examine the effects of macroeconomic news on eschange rates but i adopt a different more direct strategy one that complements previous work avoids some of its shortcomings and promises interesting conclusions i examine the instantaneous response of exchange rates the moment a piece of economic news hits the market if one can isolate the exact time during a business day when news arrives it is straightforward to examine the response of exchange rates because financial data are continuously available the advantages of the present methodology are many first it is possible to identify the exact types of economic news and how they affect exchange rates second the simultaneity bias which plagues the previous literature on exchange rates and news is not present here the independent variables that represent news can be interpreted as causal the paper was presented at the 1985 meeting ofthe american economic association the author wishes to thank sebastian edwards r w hafer nicholas karamouzis andrew rose and two anonymous referees for helpful comments kim rupert of the money market services for providing the survey data soo kounne for able research assistance and barnard college for research support

the influence of fundamentals on exchange rates findings from analyses of news effects as we survey the literature of macroeconomic news in the foreign exchange market we can by now look back on nearly 30 years of research the first studies which analysed news effects on exchange rates were established in the early 1990s see for example dornbusch almost at the same time meese and rogoff published their influential paper revealing the forecasting inferiority in exchange rates of structural models against the random walk this finding has shocked the pillars of exchange rate economics and thus cast general suspicion on research focusing on fundamentals in this field the eventual rising popularity of event studies can partly be attributed to the re establishment of the raison d etre of exchange rate economics this work focuses on systematically surveying this literature with particular respect to its primary goal i e shedding light on the analytical value of fundamental research thus its major findings are first fundamental news does matter whereas non fundamental news matters to a lesser degree second news influences exchange rates via two separated channels i e incorporating common information into prices directly or indirectly based upon order flow third with a few exceptions the impact of fundamental news on exchange rates is fairly stable over time

the effect of unanticipated money on the money and foreign exchange markets abstract a number of studies have attempted to determine why unanticipated increases in the money supply are positively correlated with money market interest rates by examining the response of the foreign exchange market to unanticipated changes in the money stock they have found a significant positive relationship between unanticipated increases in the money supply and the foreign exchange value of the dollar and have interpreted this as evidence for the anticipated liquidity effect hypothesis however these results support this hypothesis only if both markets respond simultaneously to unanticipated changes in money this paper examines the cross market consistency of the response using six bilateral exchange rates and the treasury bill rate all measured over a narrow time interval the results show that in general these markets do not respond simultaneously to money announcements

toward a theory of regulation for developing countries following jean jacques laffont s lead the efficient operation and expansion of infrastructures in developing countries is crucial for growth and poverty reduction however recent reforms aimed at improving the performance of these sectors have had limited success evidence suggests that in many instances this was because the traditional regulatory theory relied on by policymakers was not suitable for the institutional context in developing countries this article surveys more recent theoretical work focusing on problems with regulation in these countries at the heart of the survey is the work of jean jacques laffont who in the last decade of his life set about developing a theoretical framework for regulation in developing countries we consider the implications of his work which focused on the key institutional limitations faced in developing countries we then discuss where experience suggests that there are important omissions from this modeling bringing in extensions and alternative approaches pursued by other authors we conclude by summarizing the key ways in which regulatory policy will be different when institutions are weak overall we find that an understanding of the institutional context and its implications are crucial when designing a regulatory framework for developing countries

testing for news in foreign exchange markets abstract traditional tests of the role of interest rate news on foreign exchange rates are analysed and found to be of little empirical value

the effects of macroeconomic news on high frequency exchange rate behavior this paper studies the high frequency reaction of the dem usd exchange rate to publicly announced macroeconomic information emanating from germany and the u s by us ing data sampled at a five minute frequency we are able to identify significant impacts of most announcements on the exchange rate change in the 15 minutes post announcement although the significance of these effects decreases rapidly as the interval over which the post announcement change in exchange rates is increased the direction of the exchange rate response conforms in general with a reaction function interpretation whereby reac tions to macroeconomic news are driven by the likely operations of monetary authorities in domestic money markets further we detect influences of german monetary policy deci sions on the reaction of the exchange rate and also differences between u s and german announcements in the exchange rate reaction time pattern i introduction this paper studies the high frequency reaction of the dem usd exchange rate to macroeconomic information emanating from germany and the u s specif ically we utilize exchange rate data covering the period 1 1 92 to 31 12 94 sam pled at a five minute frequency to investigate how the major monthly macroe conomic releases from these two countries impact the dem usd the infor mation contained in announcements over this three year period is extracted via a set of market expectation series supplied by money market services interna tional mms 1 our analysis improves on previous work in this area in two main respects first our study is conducted using very high frequency data whereas most earlier work has used exchange rate data sampled at a frequency of a number of hours or more this allows us to construct a very precise characterization of

us money announcements and covered interest parity the case of japan abstract this paper examines the effects of us money announcements on dollar and yen denominated securities in their respective onshore markets the effects are consdered over several periods corresponding to possible us and japanese policy regimes the consistency of the responses is further examined by testing whether the responses of dollar denominated securities yen denominated securities the spot yen dollar exchange rate and the forward yen dollar exchange rate violate covered interest parity given the results of previous studies the evidence suggests that restrictions on capital mobility in japan have not allowed complete international integration of japanese financial markets

an empirical analysis of competitive nonlinear pricing abstract we estimate a model of competitive nonlinear pricing with multidimensional preference heterogeneity using individual level data on advertisements bought by local businesses e g doctors electricians from two yellow page directories in one u s city market variation in individual choices and payments allows us to identify the joint density of preferences marginal costs of publishing and common utility parameters our estimates suggest substantial welfare loss due to asymmetric information comparing duopoly outcomes with counterfactual monopoly outcomes we find that with less competition i producer surplus increases substantially ii more low type consumers are excluded iii product variety increases but benefits accrue only to the high type consumers iv total consumer surplus decreases v but its distribution across consumers does not change

what defines news in foreign exchange markets abstract this paper examines whether the traditional sets of macro surprises that most of the literature considers are the only sorts of news that can explain exchange rate movements we examine the intra daily influence of a broad set of news reports including variables which are not typically considered fundamentals in the context of standard models of exchange rate determination and ask whether they too help predict exchange rate behavior we also examine whether news not only impacts exchange rates directly but also influences exchange rates via order flow signed trade volume our results indicate that along with the standard fundamentals both non fundamental news and order flow matter suggesting that future models of exchange rate determination ought to include all three types of explanatory variables

on the identification of the procurement model abstract under multiplicative separability of the cost function this paper investigates the identification of the procurement model moreover we characterize the model restrictions on observables and show its observational equivalence to one where the function of private information is the identity

stock prices and economic news this paper examines the daily response of stock prices to announcements about the money supply inflation real economic activity and the discountrate except for the discount rate survey data on market participants expectations of these announcements are used to identify the unexpected component of the announcements in order to test the efficient markets hypothesis that only the unexpected part of any announcement the surprise moves stock prices the empirical results support this hypothesis and indicate further that surprises related to monetary policy significantly affect stock prices there is only limited evidence of an impact from inflation surprises and no evidence of an impact from real activity surprises on the announcement days there is also only weak evidence of stock price responses to surprises beyond the announcement day this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

balance of trade announcements and movements in exchange rates there is a growing literature on the effect of economic news on foreign exchange rates the effects of weekly money supply announcements on exchange rates have been empirically investigated by a number of researchers over a variety of periods 1 2 3 4 7 11 12 13 the response of foreign exchange rates to other types of economic information has also been studied for example dornbusch 5 uses innovations in the current account cyclical factors and interest rates frenkel 10 uses innovations in interest rate differentials edwards 6 uses innovations in money real output and real interest rates most recently hardouvelis 14 studies the market response of three interest rates and seven exchange rates to economic news on fifteen economic aggregates including monetary announcements inflation rate announcements and announcements reflecting the stage of the business cycle this paper studies short run movements in foreign exchange rates to the commerce department s monthly announcements of the u s balance of merchandise trade it extends previous studies of foreign exchange response to economic news in three ways first by studying the response to the trade announcement which occurs two months after the month to which the announcement refers the paper provides a more precise measure of the response to the news content of trade related announcements than earlier studies this for instance is an improvement over dornbusch s 5 definition of current account news as the innovation in the actual oecd organization for economic co operation and development biannual current account estimates second the paper studies not only movements in spot rates to the announcement but calculates the movements in forward premiums to this information by studying the response in forward premiums to the merchandise trade announcements the paper examines whether the information in the announcements implies effects that operate through capital flows and interest rates in addition to responses that operate through the flow of merchandise trade

news from the u s and japan which moves the yen dollar exchange rate abstract intra daily movements in the yen dollar exchange rate are examined in four non overlapping segments within each business day from january 1980 to september 1985 the results indicate that the dollar tended to appreciate in the new york segment and depreciate in the european segment in three of the four subsamples considered the tokyo segment made virtually no contribution to annual yen dollar rate movements the volatility of the exchange rate also differed across markets finally in examining the relative effects of news from the u s and japan explicitly u s money announcement surprises had the most consistent effects

deutsche mark dollar volatility intraday activity patterns macroeconomic announcements and longer run dependencies this paper provides a detailed characterization of the volatility in the deutsche mark dollar foreign exchange market using an annual sample of five minute returns the approach captures the intraday activity patterns the macroeconomic announcements and the volatility persistence arch known from daily returns the different features are separately quantified and shown to account for a substantial fraction of return variability both at the intraday and daily level the implications of the results for the interpretation of the fundamental driving forces behind the volatility process is also discussed the efficient market hypothesis contends that financial asset prices provide rational assessments of fundamental values and future payoffs by implication price changes should reflect the arrival and processing of all relevant new information however the proportion of return variability that can be ascribed to public news announcements is low for example cutler poterba and summers 1989 find that even the largest daily price changes in the stock market generally cannot be associated with any significant economic news 1 moreover proxies for the flow of public information e g the number of news items released by reuter s news service berry and hiowe 1994 or dow jones company mitchell and mulherin 1994 explain little of the overall variation thus if private information is ruled out proponents of rational price formation have to assert the existence of important news items

the effects of inflation and money supply announcements on interest rates this paper examines the impact of the money supply and inflation rate announcements on interest rates survey data on expectations of the money supply and consumer and producer price indexes are used to distinguish anticipated and unanticipated components of the announcements this distinction is used to test for the efficiency of the financial market response to the announcements of new information the results indicate that the unanticipated components of the announced changes in the producers price index and in the money supply have an immediate positive effect on short term interest rates the consumer price index announcement has no apparent effect there is no evidence of a delayed announcement effect however there is some indication of a liquidity effect of the money supply change on interest rates this takes place when reserves are changing and several weeks prior to the information announcement the effect of money supply announcements on interest rates has attracted considerable attention in both the academic literature and the financial press in the last few years it has been firmly established that unanticipated increases in the money supply lead to immediate increases in interest rates however there are several competing explanations for this phenomenon in the literature in this paper we present some additional empirical evidence which helps to distinguish between two of these hypotheses the policy anticipations and inflationary expectations hypotheses by examining the effect of money supply and inflation announcements on interest rates the positive effect on interest rates of announcements of unanticipated increases in the money supply was demonstrated by urich and wachtel 9 grossman 3 and roley 5 the announcement effect was interpreted in our earlier paper as a policy anticipations effect and has been interpreted by others e g cornell 1 as an inflationary expectations effect since both effects are in the same direction it is difficult to distinguish between them without additional evidence the policy anticipations effect is simply that an unanticipated increase in the money supply causes financial market participants to expect that the federal reserve will tighten the monetary reins in order to offset the increase in anticipation of future tightening there is a tendency for interest rates to increase the inflationary expectations effect is that an unanticipated increase

robustness of simple menus of contracts in cost based procurement abstract we consider a model of cost based procurement in which the principal faces knightian uncertainty about the agent s preferences for cost reduction we show that a particularly simple incentive scheme a menu comprising a fixed price contract and a cost reimbursement contract minimizes the maximum expected payment where this maximum is taken over the set of possible agent preferences for some parameters of the problem a range of alternative incentive schemes also satisfy this criterion we show that the simple incentive scheme is not weakly dominated by any of the alternatives there does not exist an alternative mechanism for which the expected payment is no higher for all realizations of the agent s preferences and strictly lower for some realization

a model of speculative efficiency with news error components this paper proposes a theoritical model to assess of news on the spot forward exchange rate relationship and thereby predicts of the impact of news on the exchange rate two types of news are analysed rational expectations type innovations and announcement effects form newspapers by using historical data form a time period which includes the german hyperinflation of the early 1920s an estimate from of the model is derived which is substantially simpler than the version requried using contemporary data preliminary results support the main theoretical predictions but also cast some doubt on a literal interpretation of the exchange rate model plus rational expectations

how markets process information news releases and volatility we examine the impact of scheduled macroeconomic news announcements on interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets we find these announcements are responsible for most of the observed time of day and day of the week volatility patterns in these markets while the bulk of the price adjustment to a major announcement occurs within the first minute volatility remains substantially higher than normal for roughly fifteen minutes and slightly elevated for several hours nonetheless these subsequent price adjustments are basically independent of the first minute s return we identify those announcements with the greatest impact on these markets we examine the impact on interest rate and foreign exchange markets of scheduled macroeconomic news releases such as the employment report the consumer price index cpi and the producer price index ppi many market participants believe that such announcements have a major impact on financial markets indeed a small industry devoted to predicting the figures to be released in upcoming releases has evolved in recent years with the exception of the weekly money supply figures however the impact of such announcements on financial markets has received scant attention 1 this is doubly surprising given the considerable research interest in market volatility since these news releases are a potential source of much of this volatility consider for instance figure 1 as shown there prices in interest rate and foreign exchange futures markets are much more volatile between 8 30 and 8 35 a m eastern time et than during any other five minute trading period including

talking heads the effects of ecb statements on the euro dollar exchange rate abstract this paper studies the reaction of the conditional mean and volatility of the euro dollar exchange rate to statements by european central bank and national central bank officials we focus on comments on monetary policy and the external value of the euro we find that the bundesbank has dominated the news coverage we conclude that ecb statements have mainly influenced conditional volatility in some cases there are effects of statements on the conditional mean of the euro dollar exchange rate efforts to talk up the euro have generally not been successful there is also evidence of asymmetric reactions to news

money supply announcements interest rates and foreign exchange abstract this paper presents a test of the joint hypothesis that money supply announcements affect the real interest rate and that changes in the real interest rate affect the exchange rate in the short run the test results are consistent with the joint hypothesis for example it is found that announcement of an unexpected jump in the money supply is accompanied by an increase in interest rates and an appreciation of the dollar if the rise in interest rates was entirely due to higher inflationary expectations the dollar should not appreciate

market structure and inefficiency in the foreign exchange market abstract this paper investigates the intradaily operational efficiency of the us foreign exchange market by conducting computer simulation experiments with market structure the numbers of market makers brokers and customers the results indicate significant operational inefficiencies which can be explained by temporary inventory imbalances inherent in a decentralized market the results also suggest that much of this inefficiency could be alleviated through a centralization of price information jel f31 g15

a market interpretation of the proportional extended core abstract any tu game can be generated from a production economy with indivisible labor inputs an equilibrium of that economy always exists after a central intervention that taxes income and subsidizes production the set of equilibrium allocations corresponding to the smallest income tax coincides with the proportional extended core of the game

procurement and renegotiation parties bound by an incomplete contract have an incentive to renegotiate after acquiring new information the issue of the parties investment in the relationship before renegotiation is analyzed in a simple two period procurement model the firm invests in the first period it then learns its production cost and the sponsor learns its value for the project williamson s underinvestment presumption is shown to hold under very general assumptions about bargaining and about the ex post asymmetry of information as long as the firm s investment is not observable by the sponsor the introduction of a cancellation fee may well lead to even less investment contrary to what is sometimes argued the role of ex ante price fixing as an alternative way to reintroduce some form of commitment and the problem of cost overruns are discussed last it is shown that if investment is observable by the sponsor andthus may become a joint decision variable the two parties may choose to under or overinvest

exchange rate market efficiency and new information abstract this paper uses a multi currency approach to analyze the relationship between forward exchange rates future spot rates and new information the empirical results tend to support the hypothesis that the exchange rate can be expressed as a function of factors known in advance and news

once in a generation yen volatility in 1998 fundamentals intervention and order flow abstract the dramatic yen dollar volatility of 1998 has been popularly ascribed to order flow driven by changing tastes for risk and hedge fund herding on unwinding yen carry trade positions rather than fundamentals high frequency evidence of shifting fundamentals is provided by a comprehensive list of macroeconomic announcements news is found to have significant effects on volatility but order flow may play a more important role since portfolio shifts are revealed to the market through trading the results are consistent with order flow playing a significant role in the revelation of private information and associated exchange rate shifts

regulation asymmetric information and auditing this article analyzes a model of a regulated firm that is better informed about its cost function than is the regulator by auditing at a cost however the regulator is assumed to be able to observe the realized cost of the firm if the regulator finds that the firm had misrepresented its costs at the time at which prices were set he can order a refund to consumers in the optimal policy the regulator audits when the firm reports for pricing purposes that its costs will be high and orders a refund when the auditfinds that realized costs are lower than anticipated given the original report a separation result that obtains for an important case indicates that the initial pricing decision is independent of the auditing decision the auditing decision however depends on the price that was initially set the optimal auditing strategy is characterized and the nature of the welfare gains are identified the methodology used in the analysis involves the characterization of an equilibrium of a revelation game with an ex post observable

incentive regulatory policies the case of public transit systems in france we assess the empirical relevance of the new theory of regulation using a principal agent framework to study the regulatory schemes used in the french urban transport industry taking the current regulatory schemes as given the model of supply and demand provides estimates for the firms inefficiency the effort of managers and the cost of public funds it allows us to derive the first best and second best regulatory policies for each network and compare them with the actual situation in terms of welfare loss or gain fixed price policies lie between fully informed and uninformed second best schemes cost plus contracts are dominated by any type of second best contract from these results we may conjecture that fixed price contracts call for better informed regulators

announcement effects and the theory of storage an empirical study of lumber futures we investigate how lumber futures returns are affected by monthly housing starts announcements and analyze the dependence of the response on lumber inventories and time to delivery to do so we develop a generalized least squares gls method to jointly analyze simultaneously traded contracts we find that increases in the unanticipated component of housing starts announcements increase returns on lumber futures contracts further and as predicted by the theory of storage but previously unrecorded the effects of housing starts shocks decline with lumber inventories there is also a time to delivery effect near delivery contracts respond more sharply to housing starts news than do farther out contracts

identifying and testing models of managerial compensation this article analyses the identification and empirical content of the pure moral hazard pmh and the hybrid moral hazard hmh principal agent models the pmh model has hidden actions while the hmh model has hidden information in addition to hidden actions in both models agents are risk averse and principals are risk neutral the article derives the equilibrium restrictions from the optimal contract and uses the restrictions to show that the models have empirical content for any given risk aversion parameter the models other parameters are non parametrically point identified the risk aversion parameter and hence the model are however only partially identified management s ability to manipulate accounting reports arises endogenously within hmh models but not in all versions of pmh models we use our framework to investigate whether shareholders contract with management recognizing that accounting reports are susceptible to manipulation and therefore endogenous to the incentives offered to management the data reject all models in which accounting reports are verifiable furthermore the version of the pmh in which accounting reports can be manipulated is rejected if expected compensation is restricted to be positive

nonparametric identification of a contract model with adverse selection and moral hazard this paper studies the nonparametric identification of a contract model with adverse selection and moral hazard specifically we consider the false moral hazard model developed by laffont and tirole 1986 we first extend this model to allow for general random demand and cost functions we establish the nonparametric identification of the demand cost deterministic transfer and effort disutility functions as well as the joint distribution of the random elements of the model which are the firm s type and the demand cost and transfer shocks the cost of public funds is identified with the help of an instrument testable restrictions of the model are characterized

interest rates the forward premium and unanticipated money reply the relationship between the weekly money supply announcement and interest rates has attracted the attention of a large number of economists recent research by cornell 2 3 engel and frankel 5 gavin and karamouzis 6 grossman 7 hardouvelis 9 naylor 10 nichols small and webster 11 roley 12 roley and walsh 13 urich 14 and urich and wachtel 15 indicates a positive correlation between unanticipated changes in the announced money supply and interest rates the consensus on the relationship between unanticipated changes in money supply announcements and interest rates however disappears in the explanation of the phenomenon two competing explanations and thus two hypotheses are offered the main difference between the two hypotheses lies in the interpretation of future money growth conditioned on the information provided by the money supply announcement according to the first hypothesis also known as the expected liquidity hypothesis market participants believe that the federal reserve will promptly offset any deviations in the money supply from its target level this implies that an unanticipated increase in the money supply revealed by the announcement will be followed by a monetary tightening and hence an increase in real short term interest rates according to the second hypothesis also known as the inflation premium hypothesis market participants interpret the change in the money supply revealed by the announcement as a permanent deviation from the money supply target this implies that an unanticipated increase in the money supply will not be offset and hence will raise the inflation premium therefore according to the first hypothesis an increase in nominal interest rates caused by an unanticipated increase in the announced money supply is due to a rise in real interest rates according to the second hypothesis it is due to an increase in the inflationary premium in order to distinguish between the two hypotheses evidence has been presented from the foreign exchange and long term bond markets after analyzing the correlation between unanticipated money growth and the change in the level of spot exchange rates before and after the announcements cornell 2 3 engel and frankel 4 hakkio and pearce 8 and hardouvelis 9 find support for the expected liquidity hypothesis based on the correla

time varying liquidity in foreign exchange abstract this paper addresses whether currency trades have greater price impact when public information is flowing rapidly we develop an optimizing model to account for why public news should increase the price impact of trades using transaction data made available by electronic trading we test whether trades following macroeconomic news have higher price impact they do price impact per dollar traded is about 10 percent higher per news announcement in the previous hour after controlling for public information flow we do not find evidence that liquidity depends on trading volume and return volatility the findings provide policy makers with guidance for the timing and magnitude intervention

noncooperative foundations of the nucleolus in majority games abstract this paper studies coalition formation payoff division and expected payoffs in a divide the dollar by majority rule game with random proposers a power index is called self confirming if it can be obtained as an equilibrium of the game using the index itself as probability vector unlike the shapley value and other commonly used power indices the nucleolus has this property the proof uses a weak version of kohlberg s siam j appl math 20 1971 62 balancedness result reinterpreting the balancing weights as probabilities in a mixed strategy equilibrium

using cost observation to regulate firms the paper emphasizes the use of accounting data in regulatory or procurement contracts when the supplier 1 has superior information about the cost of the project and 2 invests in cost reduction the main result states that under risk neutrality the supplier announces an expected cost and is given an incentive contract linear in cost overruns this optimal contract moves toward a fixed price contract as the announced cost decreases an investment choice is then introduced and the use of a rate of return regulation is studied

market perceptions of federal reserve policy and the weekly monetary announcements abstract in october 1979 the federal reserve altered its operating procedures emphasizing control of the growth rate of the money stock was the fed able to gain credibility in the market the paper investigates this question by examining the reactions of spot and expected future exchange rates foreign interest rates and long run domestic forward interest rates to the weekly federal reserve announcements of m l both before and after october 1979 the empirical evidence points out that the fed did gain credibility but was unable to establish full credibility the market reactions are consistent with the hypothesis that market participants attached a positive probability to the event that the fed may at some point in the future abandon its money stock targets

semiparametric estimation of first price auctions with risk averse bidders in view of the non identification of the first price auction model with risk averse bidders this paper proposes some parametric identifying restrictions and a semiparametric estimator for the risk aversion parameter s and the latent distribution of private values specifically we exploit heterogeneity across auctioned objects to establish semiparametric identification under a conditional quantile restriction of the bidders private value distribution and a parameterization of the bidders utility function we develop a multistep semiparametric method and we show that our semiparametric estimator of the utility function parameter s converges at the optimal rate which is slower than the parametric one but independent of the dimension of the exogenous variables thereby avoiding the curse of dimensionality we then consider various extensions including a binding reserve price affiliation among private values and asymmetric bidders the method is illustrated on u s forest service timber sales and bidders risk neutrality is rejected

a complete solution to a class of principal agent problems with an application to the control of a self managed firm this paper considers a class of principal agent problems which have the following features 1 there is adverse selection because the principal ignores the value of one parameter of the agent s true characteristics 2 leaving aside the information parameter the principal s welfare as well as the agent s welfare depend on two types of variables observable to both of them the first ones possibly multidimensional are called action variable s and the second one which is one dimensional has in general the meaning of a money transfer 3 the principal is a stackelberg leader of the two person game he can commit himself to decision rules which are admissible on informational grounds he optimizes within the adequate class taking into account besides the agent s reaction one constraint which has generally the meaning of an individual rationality constraint and sometimes of a feasibility constraint the optimization is limited to the class of non stochastic mechanisms 4 the problem can also receive an alternative interpretation the principal faces a continuum of agents of unknown characteristics the distribution being known however stylized principal agent problems of this type have often been considered in the economic literature in particular the reader will later be able to recognize that the standard income tax model a la mirrlees 1971 the quality or quantity choice model of the monopolist a la mussa and rosen 1978 or maskin and riley 1982 and the model of government regulation of the private monopolist of baron and myerson 1982 all belong to

on market games when agents cannot be in two places at once abstract we consider markets in which agents supply their time or the services of a capital good and the duration of the market is limited we show that a coalitional game can be generated by such a market if and only if the characteristic function of the game is superadditive journal of economic literature classification numbers c71 d51

promotion turnover and compensation in the executive labor market this paper develops a generalized roy model with human capital accumulation moral hazard and career concerns we identify and estimate the model with a large panel that matches data on publicly listed firms to information on their executives the structural estimates obtained are used to decompose the firm size pay gap we find that although total compensation and incentive pay increase with firm size certainty equivalent pay decreases with firm size in larger firms and for more highly ranked executives weaker signal quality about effort results in higher risk premiums this risk premium accounts for roughly 80 percent of the firm size gap in total compensation larger firms are also willing to pay more than smaller ones to attract executives finally the estimated coefficients on human capital accumulation from formal education and experience gained from different firms are individually significant but their collective effect on firm size pay differentials nets out

balance of trade announcements and asset prices influence on equity prices exchange rates and interest rates abstract this paper examines the informational impact of traded balance announcements on asset prices including equities currrencies long and short term debt instruments and financial futures this study finds that in the 1980s prior to the 1985 plaza agreement for international economic cooperation information in trade balance announcements seem to have influenced only interest rates however in the 1985 1987 period such announcements also influenced stock prices and currency values these influences intensity further in the 1987 1988 period thus asset prices are sensitive to news in trade balance announcements and this sensitivity seems to have increased significantly in recent years with important implications for asset pricing models and economic policy formulation jel f30

the changing influence of money and monetary policy on exchange rates foreign exchange dealers said the american currency got an additional boost after the federal reserve reported that the nation s money supply rose 700 million in the latest week a development that is likely to put upward pressure on interest rates most economists had been expecting a decline in the money supply figures the wall street journal 25 january 1982 14 i introduction the importance of the linkage between money and asset prices such as interest rates and exchange rates is now well understood friedman 1990 12 writes given the familiar dependence of imports and exports on real exchange rates together with the dollar s evident relationship to interest rates the combination of a larger foreign sector in the u s economy and flexible exchange rates has clearly opened new avenues for monetary policy to affect economic activity however the precise nature of the relationship between money and exchange rates has long been a topic for research in international economics with the adoption of a system of floating exchange rates by most of the industrialized countries in march 1973 and the development of the rational expectations efficient markets hypotheses attempts to model observed fluctuations in exchange rates have focused on incorporating the important role of expectations of particular interest to the research in this paper is the dornbusch 1976 overshooting model which provided the structural foundation for the work of engel and frankel 1984 in the money announcements literature in the money announcements literature researchers employed unanticipated money announcements defined as the difference between announced and expected m1 to examine the linkage between money and asset prices as hakkio and pearce 1985 point out the research on foreign exchange rates in this laboratory was motivated by mussa s 1979 empirical findings in support of the efficient markets theory i e changes in exchange rates are unpredictable and are largely the result of the impact of new information on expectations in this literature researchers commonly regressed changes in the exchange rate on unanticipated money over sample periods which coincided with different policy regimes at the federal reserve to determine if the coefficient on unanticipated money say b sub 1 varied from one policy regime to another overall their findings uncover a significant link between unanticipated money and exchange rates and the size sign and significance of b sub 1 varies from one sample period to another 1 while suggestive the apparent link between changes in b sub 1 and changes in fed policy regimes is difficult to evaluate absent a model which formally incorporates such a link 2 thus my objective in this paper is to develop a basic theoretical empirical link between fluctuations in b sub 1 and changes in fed policy regimes i begin by extending the important work of engel and frankel 1984 in section ii to incorporate a policy feedback parameter g sub 1 in the money supply process which will represent the rational expectation of the type of monetary control regime in place at the federal reserve at the time of a money announcement it is shown that the magnitude of the response of exchange rates to an unanticipated announcement is mainly driven by agents expectations of the federal reserve s response to the deviation of the actual money supply from a pre specified target in section iii the time varying response of the dollar german mark exchange rate to weekly unanticipated money announcements b sub 1t and the time varying policy feedback parameter g sub 1t which reflects the adjustment of the federal funds rate to money away from target are estimated on a weekly basis using these estimates the variation of the coefficient b sub 1t vis a vis the changes in g sub 1t is examined over the january 1978 to december 1982 sample period the results provide considerable support for the hypothesized link between parameters b

score driven models of stochastic seasonality in location and scale an application case study of the indian rupee to usd exchange rate abstractwe estimate the stochastic seasonality of the indian rupee inr to united states dollar usd exchange rate by using new dynamic conditional score dcs specifications we use the dcs skew gen t dcs skewed generalized t distribution and dcs nig dcs normal inverse gaussian distribution models which are alternatives to the dcs t dcs student s t distribution and dcs egb2 dcs exponential generalized beta distribution of the second kind models from the literature dcs models are robust to outliers and such models effectively disentangle the local level seasonality and irregular components for the latter we apply dcs egarch dcs exponential generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity scale dynamics and we use new dcs models with seasonal volatility we use inr usd data for the period of 1 january 1982 to 7 july 2017 we find that the dcs skew gen t and dcs nig models are superior to the dcs t and dcs egb2 models respectively the amplitude of the inr usd seasonality is rel

contract pricing in consumer credit markets we analyze subprime consumer lending and the role played by down payment requirements in screening high risk borrowers and limiting defaults to do this we develop an empirical model of the demand for financed purchases that incorporates both adverse selection and repayment incentives we estimate the model using detailed transaction level data on subprime auto loans we show how different elements of loan contracts affect the quality of the borrower pool and subsequent loan performance we also evaluate the returns to credit scoring that allows sellers to customize financing terms to individual applicants our approach shows how standard econometric tools for analyzing demand and supply under imperfect competition extend to settings in which firms care about the identity of their customers and their postpurchase behavior

a note on economic news and intraday exchange rates abstract measured with intraday data in a 1987 1991 sample period the mark dollar exchange rate was affected by unanticipated information about the trade deficit and the consumer price index the exchange rate showed no significant response to news about money supply industrial production the producer price index or unemployment trade deficit surprises were negatively correlated with the value of the dollar as expected cpi surprises showed a positive correlation as would be predicted by sticky price models of exchange rates the market s reaction to the 8 30am trade deficit announcement was complete by 9am but the market s response to the cpi announcement was not as immediate no significant reaction had occurred by 9am and the spot price did not fully digest the information until 1pm significant responses were present in the 9am 11am and noon hours alternate measures of currency returns failed to explain this delayed response

learning and the exchange rate exchange rate responses to money announcements in the early 1980s abstract the paper develops a monetary model of exchange rate determination with transitory monetary shocks and bayesian learning the model implies that exchange rate responses to monetary surprises are time varying and asymmetric furthermore the two variables become increasingly negatively correlated as beliefs converge an empirical section reexamines the evidence of dollar exchange rate responses to monetary announcements in the 1979 1984 period during which two monetary reforms took place in the usa there is strong support for the presence of learning behavior during the october 1979 to october 1982 period in the german mark and japanese yen equations

1979 1982 rules or discretion in monetary policy gregory hoelscher what determined m1 growth from november 1979 through october 1982 a reaction function is developed and tested which ascribes the level of ml to two fed motives one is the fed s desire to hit its money growth targets the other is to carry out a counter cyclical short run monetary policy both motives are found to be significant during the period this evidence is consistent with the contention of some economists that the period was not a valid test of monetarist policy rules i introduction in october of 1979 the federal reserve system announced that it would use a new operating procedure that would allow it to place strong emphasis on controlling ml this policy shift from an interest rate target regime to a non borrowed reserves target regime was widely considered as tacit acceptance of the monetarist doctrine monetarists had been calling for a policy of stable gradually declining and pre announced money growth paths the change in operating procedure was designed to give the fed greater control over ml and to dramatize the fed s commitment to slowing money growth and inflation at the time many expected the new operating policy to result in a more stable money growth path at the expense of some short term interest rate variability the rate of inflation fell from 13 3 percent in 1979 to 3 9 percent in 1982 but the variability of both short term interest rates and of money growth increased substantially ore importantly the economy slipped into a brief recession in early 1980 and a longer and much more severe one in late 1981 by october 1982 the fed announced that it would de emphasize ml as a target variable but would continue to monitor the broader monetary aggregates thus a three year monetarist inspired experiment came to an end benjamin friedman 1984 and bryant 1983 argue that the events of 1979 82 demonstrate that monetarism as a policy guide is inadequate other economists disagree with these criticisms milton friedman 1984 mccallum 1984 and poole 1982 blame the high variance of monthly or quarterly growth rates in m1 for the poor post 1979 performance of the economy this paper assesses formally the determinants of m1 growth during the 1979 82 period if the fed was attempting to use m1 to fine tune the real sector then the argument that the 1979 82 period was not a valid test of the monetarist approach to monetary policy is that much stronger on the other hand if changes in m1 cannot be explained by fine tuning motives then perhaps the period does represent a test of monetarist policies the next section discusses the reaction function used in the paper section iii describes the data and the test results the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the money growth targets and either of two measures of real economic performance the unemployment rate and industrial production were significant determinants of fed policy during the late 1979 to late 1982 period section iv contains conclusions ii methodology the empirical tests use a reaction function the use of a reaction function does not imply that the federal reserve board or the open market committee explicitly acts in accordance with the function the reaction function is instead an as if assumption the fed is assumed to act as if it minimizes a loss function reaction functions have been estimated by a large number of authors barth sickles and wiest 1982 summarize many of the papers published in 1978 and earlier they report that unemployment and to a lesser extent inflation were most commonly cited as significant determinants of federal reserve policy during various portions of the 1952 77 period more recent papers by abrams froyen and waud 1980 levy 1981 allen and smith 1983 bradley 1984 witte 1984a 1984b and bradley and potter 1986 have extended the literature by including additional variables and time periods in the analysis

the impact of an unexpected political resignation on exchange rates based on the theory of economic regulation political shocks are examined as unexpected events in the light of the efficient markets hypothesis and a political resignation is taken as an example of such an event the hon j dawkins mp resigned as the federal treasurer of the australian government on friday 17 december 1993 there have been a number of studies on the effect of economic and political events on stock prices this study considers the impact of dawkin s resignation on the foreign exchange rates of the major traded currencies in australia the traditional event study methodology based on the market model and the lesser used multivariate methodology of seemingly unrelated regressions are used for the analysis the sample of currencies is considered both as a portfolio and on an individual basis with efficiency of the currency markets being tested for anticipatory event related and persistence effects the paper concludes by contrasting the findings of the two methodologies the study repo

aggregation and linearity in the provision of intertemporal incentives we consider the problem of providing incentives over time for an agent with constant absolute risk aversion the optimal compensation scheme is found to be a linear function of a vector of n accounts which count the number of times that each of the n kinds of observable events occurs the number n is independent of the number of time periods so the accounts may entail substantial aggregation in a continuous time version of the problem the agent controls the drift rate of a vector of accounts that is subject to frequent small random fluctuations the solution is as if the problem were the static one in which the agent controls only the mean of a multivariate normal distribution and the principal is constrained to use a linear compensation rule if the principal can observe only coarser linear aggregates such as revenues costs or profits the optimal compensation scheme is then a linear function of those aggregates the combination of exponential utility normal distributions and linear compensation schemes makes computations and comparative statics easy to do as we illustrate we interpret our linearity results as deriving in part from the richness of the agent s strategy space which makes it possible for the agent to undermine and exploit complicated nonlinear functions of the accounting aggregates

a model of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for new issues this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services for the case in which the investment banker is better informed about the capital market than is the issuer and the issuer cannot observe the distribution effort expended by the banker the optimal contract under which the offer price decision is delegated to the better informed banker in order to deal with the adverse selection and moral hazard problems resulting from the informational asymmetry and the observability problem is characterized the model demonstrates a positive demand for investment banking advising and distribution services and provides an explanation of the underpricing of new issues an investment banker performs three functions which may be of value to an issuer of new securities underwriting advising and distribution this paper presents a theory of the demand for investment banking advising and distribution services based on an informational asymmetry between an issuer of new securities and an investment banker ultimately a theory of the organization of the financial intermediary industry is required that would predict which firms would use which types of financial intermediaries for which purposes and which firms would raise capital without engaging the services of a financial intermediary only a limited set of such predictions are developed here in the context of a model of a fixedprice offering under a negotiated contract in which the investment banker is

the impact of money on short term interest rates this study reviews empirical evidence from four research methods related to the impact of money on short term nominal rates the studies consistently fail to find evidence supporting the much hypothesized short term negative relationship between money and nominal rates since at least april 1975 reasons for the absence of a negative relationship include the tendency of financial markets to anticipate corrective action by the fed whenever ml deviates from targeted growth ranges and a rapid adjustment of inflationary expectations to changes in money growth

regulating pollution under asymmetric information the case of industrial wastewater treatment abstract we present in this paper an empirical evaluation of a contract based environmental regulation under asymmetric information an imperfect pollution tax results in the necessity of regulating industrials by a contract based policy in order to promote a higher level of pollution removal the local regulatory agency has imperfect information on costs of abatement and must design a feasible mechanism providing incentives for industrials to extend their wastewater treatment plant capacity the optimal policy consists in regulating only the most efficient industrials in the abatement activity empirical evidence reveals that the pollution tax should be more than twice its present level to attain the fully internalizing pigouvian tax level

the empirical content of cournot competition we consider the testable implications of the cournot model of market competition our approach is nonparametric in the sense that we abstain from imposing any functional specification on market demand and firm cost functions we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for reduced form equilibrium market price and quantity functions to be consistent with the cournot model in addition we present identification results for the corresponding inverse market demand function and the firm cost functions finally we use our approach to derive testable restrictions for the models of perfect competition collusion and conjectural variations this identifies the conditions under which these different models are empirically distinguishable from the cournot model we also investigate empirical issues measurement error and omitted variables related to bringing our testable restrictions to data

an analysis of the principal agent problem most analyses of the principal agent problem assume that the principal chooses an incentive scheme to maximize expected utility subject to the agent s utility being at a stationary point an important paper of mirrlees has shown that this approach is generally invalid we present an alternative procedure if the agent s preferences over income lotteries are independent of action we show that the optimal way of implementing an action by the agent can be found by solving a convex programming problem we use this to characterize the optimal incentive scheme and to analyze the determinants of the seriousness of an incentive problem

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

the reaction of exchange rates to economic news this paper examines the short run responses of spot exchange rates to several types of economic news survey data are used to divide economic announcements into expected and unexpected components with the latter measuring news the results indicate that exchange rates are systematically related to unexpected money announcements after the october 1979 switch in federal reserve operating procedures but not before this response does not appear to have changed however after the october 1982 federal reserve regime change short run exchange rate movements are not systematically related to news on inflation or real activity

the impact of macroeconomic surprises on spot and forward foreign exchange markets abstract this paper evaluates the effects of surprises in 23 types of macroeconomic announcements on foreign exchange rates and on the forward premium several findings emerge first as in the balance of payment framework announcements that convey a decline in consumer demand increase foreign exchange rates second the ppp hypothesis is rejected in favor of portfolio balance effects in determining exchange rates third the behavior of forward premiums is consistent with covered interest rate parity fourth exchange rates respond to announcements related to consumer demand inflation and interest rates but not to the announcements directly related to the general strength of the economy finally among the news releases considered surprises in the treasury budget trade balance and capacity utilization have the strongest influence in the currency market

market reactions to u s weekly money supply announcements after the introduction of contemporaneous reserve requirements an empirical note abstract movements across the nominal term structure of u s interest rates have continued to be positively correlated with weekly money surprises post crr bond and foreign exchange market evidence suggests that these may no longer be movements in the real term structure