the out of sample success of term structure models as exchange rate predictors a step beyond abstract a large literature suggests that standard exchange rate models cannot outperform a random walk forecast and that the forward rate is not an optimal predictor of the spot rate however there is evidence that the term structure of forward premia contains valuable information for forecasting future spot exchange rates and that exchange rate dynamics display nonlinearities this paper proposes a term structure forecasting model of exchange rates based on a regime switching vector equilibrium correction model which is novel in this context our model significantly outperforms both a random walk and to a lesser extent a linear term structure vector equilibrium correction model for four major dollar rates across a range of horizons

integrated regressors and tests of the permanent income hypothesis abstract we use recent research on estimation and testing in the presence of unit roots to argue that hall s 1978 t and f tests of whether consumption is predicted by lagged income or by lags of consumption beyond the first are asymptotically valid a monte carlo experiment suggests that the asymptotic t and f distributions provide a good approximation to the actual finite sample distribution

forward exchange rates and expectations during the 1920s a re examination of the evidence abstract the philips hansen fully modified wald test is used to analyze whether or not the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate for the 1920s daily data for five exchange rates german mark belgium franc french franc italian lira and us dollar versus the british pound are examined the results suggest that the forward unbiasedness hypothesis can be rejected in three belgium franc french franc and german mark out of the five currencies this result may be due to the presence of a risk premium for the belgian and french francs and to market failure in the case of the german mark the forward and future spot exchange rates are cointegrated jel f31

wealth wages and wedlock explaining the college gender gap reversal we study the role of changes in the wage structure and expectations about marriage in explaining the college gender gap reversal with strongly diminishing marginal utility of wealth and in the presence of a gender wage gap single women have a greater incentive than single men to invest in education marriage market distortions tend to depress the overall benefit of education for women relative to men we parameterize the model using us census data for the cohort born in 1950 and show that it can generate a reversal the most important driving force is the decline in marriage rates this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

adaptive estimation of cointegrated models simulation evidence and an application to the forward exchange market the paper reports simulation and empirical evidence on the finite sample performance of adaptive estimators in cointegrated systems adaptive estimators are asymptotically efficient even when the shape of the likelihood function is unknown we consider two representations of cointegrated systems triangular cointegrating regressions and error correction models the motivation for and advantages of adaptive estimators in such systems are discussed and their construction is described we report results from the estimation of a forward exchange market unbiasedness regression using the adaptive and competing estimators and provide related monte carlo simulation evidence on the performance of the estimators copyright 1999 john wiley sons ltd

on the job specific training and efficient screening employment relationships are governed by short term incomplete contracts and typically involve on the job screening and firm specific training this article studies a dynamic employment relationship with these features and identifies a potential conflict between the employer s twin objectives to screen and train the worker when the training technology is quite productive the employer may have to sacrifice from worker performance during the screening process the article thus offers an explanation for why firms may invest suboptimally on training which complements the standard inappropriable rents explanation based on ex post mobility of young employees

a signalling theory of nominal wage inflexibility a model of learning in local labor markets is constructed in which the emphasis placed by employers on job applicants employment histories induces workers to reject low nominal wages to avoid subsequently signalling a low ability this wage censoring behavior leads to inefficiently high levels of unemployment and generates an apparent downwardly inflexible nominal wage monetary policy may be of use if it affects the quality of the nominal wage signal copyright 1993 by royal economic society

the speculative efficiency hypothesis the hypothesis that forward prices are the best unbiased forecast of future spot prices is often presented in the economic and financial analysis of futures markets this paper considers the hypothesis independently of its implications for rational expectations or market efficiency and in order to stress this fact the term speculative efficiency is used to characterize the state envisaged under the hypothesis if a market is subject to efficient speculation the supply of speculative funds is infinitely elastic at the forward price that is equal to the expected future spot price the expected future spot price is a market price determined as the solution to the underlying rational expectations macroeconomic model although the paper is primarily concerned with testing this hypothesis in the foreign exchange market the methodology introduced in the paper is of general application to all futures markets this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

foreign exchange market efficiency and common stochastic trends abstract in a recent paper baillie and bollerslev 1989 using daily data from 1980 to 1985 identified six common stochastic trends in a vector of seven nominal exchange rates implying the existence of one cointegrating vector cointegration implies that granger causality must run in at least one direction that is at least one of the exchange rates is predictable using current available information this result has been interpreted as foreign exchange market inefficiency by many another interpretation is suggested if the stationary linear combination of spot rates proxies for a time varying risk premium in some way then these results could be explained in a rational and risk averse market this possibility is eliminated if the time series properties of the risk premium are incompatible with those of the error correction term specifically it is demonstrated that the forward risk premium is non stationary for the exchange rates that comprise the exchange rate cointegration relationship in this paper the existence of common stochastic trends in a vector of nominal exchange rates is tested over the period 1974 to 1991 the efficiency of foreign exchange markets is then tested by examining the implications of stochastic trends in the forward premium and what this means for the time series properties of a time varying forward risk premium jel f31 g14

market efficiency in agricultural futures markets market efficiency and unbiasedness are tested in four agricultural commodity futures markets live cattle hogs corn and soybean meal using cointegration and error correction models with gqarch in mean processes results indicate each market is unbiased in the long run although cattle hogs and corn futures markets exhibit short run inefficiencies and pricing biases models for cattle and corn outperform futures prices in out of sample forecasting results also suggest short run time varying risk premiums in cattle and hog futures markets

wage posting in two sided search and the minimum wage this article focuses on wage formation in an equilibrium two sided model of search with match specific heterogeneity despite a large number a continuum of employers search provides sufficient isolation to generate market power by posting wages employers without collusion capture most of the surplus that accrues to any match the equilibrium wage is below that which maximizes employment an example using calibrated parameter values is used to reconcile some recent otherwise contradictory empirical results on the employment effects of minimum wage adjustments

a note on exchange rate expectations and nominal interest differentials a test of the fisher hypothesis this note tests the hypothesis that nominal interest differentials between similar assets denominated in different currencies can be explained entirely by the expected change in the exchange rate over the holding period this proposition often called the fisher open hypothesis or the hypothesis of perfect asset substitutability has been a major component of recent theories of exchange rate determination and has important implications for monetary policy 1 the fisher hypothesis differs from the covered interest parity theorem enunciated by keynes 11 while covered interest parity equates the nominal interest differential between financial centers to a known premium or discount on forward foreign exchange and is thus in principle riskless fisher parity involves risk in an essential way the two conditions are equivalent only when forward exchange rates equal expected future spot rates recent theoretical work for example that of grauer litzenberger and stehle 8 kouri 12 and frankel 6 shows that this need not be the case when market participants are risk averse thus while covered interest parity must always hold exactly in an informationally efficient asset market with no transactions costs fisher parity need not nominal interest differentials may reflect risk premia in addition to expected exchange rate movements 2 it should be emphasized at the outset that the tests conducted in this paper are really joint tests of the fisher hypothesis and a weak form of foreign exchange market informational efficiency levich 14 has argued that tests of market efficiency are always joint tests involving some hypothesized structure of normal equilibrium returns below we assume informational efficiency and instead test fisher s hypothesized arbitrage condition that nominal interest differentials equal expected percentage changes in exchange rates

mean reversion in g 10 nominal exchange rates according to conventional wisdom industrial country floating exchange rates contain unit roots sur tests on panels of monthly group of ten g 10 log nominal rates reject the null of unit roots for various samples over the current float with significance levels from 0 5 to 15 on average in out of sample forecasts mean reversion models beat random walks significantly in some forecast periods for monthly data the range of expected usd dem appreciation rates exceeds 15 per year in the mean reversion model mean reversion places strong restrictions on international models over the sample period the g 10 had to run monetary policies consistent with stable long run nominal rates

error correction mechanisms the interface between economic theory and applied econometrics is often one of uneasy compromise with the pragmatic justification for many accepted procedures resting on a theoretical base this paper examines the surprisingly strong arguments that exist in terms of economic theory for the use of error correction mechanisms in the specification of short run dynamic adjustment a common heresy exists that while economic theory provides a detailed analysis of comparative static equilibria it can offer no guidance as to the appropriate specification of dynamic adjustment towards an equilibrium perhaps in consequence it is not uncommon to find examples where the necessary dynamic specification is achieved by tacking onto an existing equilibrium specification some relatively ad hoc short run adjustment scheme the intercession of stochastic arguments in this process is confused and critical implications are frequently ignored in practice but perhaps more importantly there will typically be no guarantee that the dynamic specification is consistent with the prescribed equilibrium consistency in this sense requires that the short run dynamic adjustment be directed by the perceived disequilibrium and that eventual convergence to the equilibrium position be ensured that two separate theoretical arguments co exist within the final specification is the root cause of many difficulties both theoretical and empirical this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

cointegration and market efficiency abstract recently many economists have asserted that asset prices determined in efficient asset markets cannot be cointegrated we show that there is no general equivalence between the existence of arbitrage opportunities and cointegration or for that matter a lack of cointegration whether asset prices are cointegrated is a function of the relevant model we first show a convenient way to calculate the cointegrating vector based on necessary and sufficient conditions for cointegration we then examine particular cases including exchange rates interest rates and spot and forward exchange rates and asset prices with incoem flows reinvested and not reinvested jel f31

cointegration and market integration an application to the indonesian rice market this article suggests improvements in the use of regression analysis to measure spatial market integration the procedure pioneered by ravallion is still widespread but is valid only under certain conditions of exogeneity the alternative offered here is an error correction mechanism which makes it possible to test for exogeneity as well as indicating the direction and strength of causality in price formation between markets the method is illustrated with data on rice prices in different parts of the indonesian market the results confirm among other things that supply sources are more important than demand sources in driving prices

testing the unbiased forward exchange rate hypothesis using a markov switching model and instrumental variables this paper develops a model for the forward and spot exchange rate which allows for the presence of a markov switching risk premium in the forward market and considers the issue of testing the unbiased forward exchange rate ufer hypothesis using us uk data it is shown that the ufer hypothesis cannot be rejected provided that instrumental variables are used to account for within regime correlation between explanatory variables and disturbances in the markov switching model on which the test is based copyright 2005 john wiley sons ltd

turnover externalities with marketplace trading this article considers equilibrium decentralized trade when there is a marketplace where buyers and sellers meet costlessly since buyers have idiosyncratic match payoffs for each seller s good some buyers rather than trade with the current stock of sellers wait for new sellers to enter the marketplace to obtain a good they like a turnover externality exists where all traders are better off with higher entry rates of new traders furthermore this turnover externality supports multiple pareto rankable equilibria this provides new insights into similar results obtained in the random matching literature

job queues and wages this paper uses job applications data to investigate the relationship between job queues and wage differentials the main finding is that openings for jobs that pay the minimum wage attract more job applicants than jobs that pay either slightly more or slightly less than the minimum wage this spike in the job application rate distribution suggests that ex ante rents generated for employees by an above market level minimum wage are not completely dissipated by reductions in nonwage benefits in addition we find that highly unionized firms large firms and firms in high wage industries tend to receive relatively many job applicants for openings

does the exchange rate follow a random walk a monte carlo study of four tests for a random walk abstract several authors have urged that real and nominal exchange rates follow a random walk conditions under which the exchange rate follows a random walk are reviewed in this paper many of these do not appear to hold therefore the empirical evidence presents a puzzle some evidence suggets the exchange rate follows a random walk while other evidence suggests the opposite should be true this paper attempts to reconcile the evidence it is argued that the tests for a random walk have low power monte carlo evidence on four tests for a random walk is presented that suppors this claim

optimal incentive contracts in the presence of career concerns theory and evidence this paper studies optimal incentive contracts when workers have career concerns concerns about the effects of current performance on future compensation we show that the optimal compensation contract optimizes total incentives the combination of the implicit incentives from career concerns and the explicit incentives from the compensation contract thus the explicit incentives from the optimal compensation contract should be strongest for workers close to retirement because career concerns are weakest for these workers we find empirical support for this prediction in the relation between chief executive compensation and stock market performance

a note on cointegration and international capital market efficiency abstract in a recent paper in the jimf crowder 1994 claims that evidence that spot exchange rates are cointegrated and forward premiums are non stationary implies international capital markets are not efficient this note argues that the cointegration properties of spot exchange rates are independent of the efficiency or inefficiency of financial markets

nonrevelation in employment contracts the author considers an employment contracting model in which firms have private information that is directly payoff relevant to workers and workers are always free to quit in contrast to existing models firms will sometimes fail to reveal adverse information to workers in equilibrium because of the effect this will have on quits risk averse workers can prefer such pooling contracts to separating ones because inducing truth telling requires firms to cut wages in states that are already bad for the worker applications to firms incentives to reveal unsafe working conditions and impending layoffs or plant closures are discussed copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

foreign exchange market efficiency revisited abstract the cointegration of spot rates is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to account for the lack of foreign exchange market efficiency instead crowder crowder w 1994 1996 j int money finance 13 551 564 15 661 664 and engel engel c 1996 j int money finance 15 557 560 claimed that the stationarity of the forward premium is crucial to the hypothesis of market efficiency in this paper we employ the panel unit root test of im et al to examine the stationarity of forward premia and interest differentials among nine oecd countries we reject the unit root null for both the time series of the forward premium and interest differential which in turn supports the hypothesis of foreign exchange market efficiency

arbitrage cointegration and testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in financial markets we use a no arbitrage cost of carry asset pricing model to show that the existence of coin tegration between spot and forward futures prices depends on the time series properties of the cost of carry we argue that the conditions for cointegration are more likely to hold in currency markets than in commodity markets explaining many of the empirical results in the literature we also use this model to demonstrate why the forward rate forecast error the basis and the forward premium are serially correlated and to develop econometric tests ofthe unbiasedness hypothesis sometimes called the simple efficiency hypothesis in various financial markets the unbiasedness hypothesis is so prevalent in the finance liter ature that many tests for it have been developed we examine four of the common tests and and use our cointegration results to demonstrate why each of these tests should reject the null hypothesis of unbiasedness we find strong support for our hypothesis in the existing empirical literature

market efficiency and cointegration an application to the sterling and deutschemark exchange markets abstract the assumption that the foreign exchange market is efficient that is that agents are risk neutral and use all available information rationally so that the forward exchange rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate is a property often imposed in theoretical international macroeconomic models although a vast empirical literature has evolved to test market efficiency we use recent developments in the theory of cointegration to provide new methods of testing several aspects of foreign exchange market efficiency we ffind evidence inconsistent with market efficiency for both germany and the united kingdom

measuring global money market interrelationships an investigation of five major world currencies abstract this paper extends the study of global money market integration in two primary directions first a technique which combines stationarity and cointegration tests as a basis for constructing an error correction model is applied to assess the existence of long run equilibrium relationships between money market series second analysis for the increasingly significant asian offshore markets of singapore and hong kong is added to traditional european and national markets analysis major findings are 1 the error correction model is an appropriate technique for identifying causality relationships and 2 major domestic markets and included offshore markets are partially segmented

econometric modelling of non ferrous metal prices abstract this article evaluates the significance of the empirical models and the distributional properties of prices in non ferrous metal spots and futures markets published in leading refereed economics and finance journals between 1980 and 2002 the survey focuses on econometric analyses of pricing and return models applied to exchange based spot and futures markets for the main industrially used non ferrous metals namely aluminium copper lead nickel tin and zinc published empirical research is evaluated in the light of the type of contract examined frequency of data used choice of both dependent and explanatory variables use of proxy variables type of model chosen economic hypotheses tested methods of estimation and calculation of ses for inference reported descriptive statistics use of diagnostic tests of auxiliary assumptions use of nested and non nested tests use of information criteria and empirical implications for non ferrous metals

continuum economies with finite coalitions core equilibria and widespread externalities abstract we develop a new model of a continuum economy with coalitions consisting of only finite numbers of agents the core called the f core is the set of allocations that are stable against improvement by finite coalitions and feasible by trade within finite coalitions even with widespread externalities preferences depend on own consumptions and also on the entire allocation up to the null set we obtain the result that the f core coincides with the walrasian allocations without widespread externalities the f core the aumann core and the walrasian allocations all coincide however with widespread externalities there is no obvious natural definition of the aumann core

legal minimum wages and employment duration 1 introductionthe effect of a legal minimum wage on employee turnover is an important consideration when evaluating the effectiveness of a minimum wage policy if an increase in the minimum wage results in greater turnover then firms hiring costs are increased and the direct benefit to workers who are paid the minimum wage may be lessened a reduction in turnover on the other hand would mean more stability for employers and workers though access to minimum wage jobs may be reduced for job seekers despite the recent proliferation of studies on the effects of legal minimum wages their impact on turnover has received relatively little attention from economists this may be due to the fact that much of the literature focuses on the teen labor market where there is more churning than in the adult labor market gardecki and neumark 1998 the fact remains however that a significant proportion of workers hired at the minimum wage are adults and the effects of the minimum wage onthe turnover hazard are understudied 1standard economic theory suggests that a price floor such as a minimum wage results in fewer transactions and in rents for those suppliers who manage to sell in the context of the labor market this means workers in minimum wage jobs may be expected to receive rents and therefore may be less likely to quit another possible consequence of a minimum wage arises from imperfect information in the labor market combined with heterogeneity among workers and jobs prior to the start of an employment relationship the worker does not know all the relevant aspects of the job and the employer does not know all the important characteristics of the worker as a result in the absence of a mandated minimum wage job applicants may use wage offers to infer information about the nonpecuniary aspects of jobs thereby facilitating the matching process a binding minimum wage compresses the wage distribution so that a single wage is associated with a larger array of jobs this means that the wage offer becomes a poor indicator of a job s nonwage characteristics which leads to a higher proportion of poor matches and consequently more turnover this paper uses data on young men and women in the 1988 1994 rounds of the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy to estimate the relationship between the minimum wage and the turnover hazard the extent to which the minimum wage binds varies across states both because of differences in state laws and because of differences in wage levels across states we exploit this variation to estimate turnover hazards as a function of the ratio of the nominal minimum wage to the state median wage this variable measures the extent to which the minimum wage binds we find some evidence that in states where the minimum wage is low relative to the state s median wage men hired at the minimum wage have lower employee initiated separation hazards than other low wage workers as the minimum wage rises relative to the prevailing median wage that is as the minimum wage becomes more binding men hired at the minimum wage are increasingly likely to leave their jobs at any given duration when the minimum wage is high relative to the median wage we find that men hired at the minimum wage have significantly higher employee initiated separation hazards than other low wage workers we interpret these findings as evidence that while rents may accrue to minimum wage workers the job matching process is undermined when the minimum wage binds our results apply to the men in our sample but not to the women indeed for women we find no connection between employment duration and the starting wage rate though we do uncover some evidence that for women in low wage jobs employment duration is more elastic with respect to the presence of family friendly fringe benefits than it is for men the paper proceeds as follows the next section explores the possible reasons minimum wages would affect turnover and discusses the existing empirical and theoretical research on this topic

search and the efficient assignment of workers to jobs in a model in which different types of workers form matches with different types of employers a method of calculating opportunity costs of workers and jobs is derived these are shown to differ systematically from the reservation wages and profits used by workers and employers to determine whether matches should be formed ex ante differences among workers and among jobs then generate externalities in the labor market resulting in inefficient assignments of workers to jobs and multiple equilibria intervention in the labor market by altering the assignment can increase aggregate output but may cause regressive redistribution copyright 1995 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

cointegration based tests of daily foreign exchange market efficiency abstract an immediate implication of cointegration is the existence of granger causal orderings among cointegrated series this implies that asset prices determined in a weakly efficient market cannot be cointegrated this proposition is tested using daily data for 18 foreign currencies tests are conducted for both pairwise combinations of currencies and higher order systems no significant evidence of cointegration among exchange rates is found

anomalies foreign exchange most all behavior can be explained by assuming that agents have stable well defined preferences and make rational choices consistent with those preferences in markets that eventually clear an empirical result qualifies as an anomaly if it is difficult to rationalize or if implausible assumptions are necessary to explain it within the paradigm this column will present a series of such anomalies readers are invited to suggest topics for future columns by sending a note with some reference to or better yet copies of the relevant research comments on anomalies printed here are also welcome the address

cointegration how short is the long run abstract when testing for cointegration and faced with short sample periods it is common for researchers to turn to more frequently sampled observations that is to move from annual to quarterly or monthly data in order to increase the number of observations we argue that such a gain in the degrees of freedom is more apparent than real essentially cointegration is a long run concept and hence requires long spans of data to give tests for cointegration much power rather than merely large numbers of observations using monte carlo simulations we demonstrate this for four popular tests for cointegration

why are the returns to schooling higher for women than for men many studies have found that the impact of schooling on earnings is greater for females than for males despite the fact that females tend to earn less both absolutely and controlling for personal characteristics this study investigates possible reasons for this effect using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 one explanation is that education appears to have a double effect on the earnings of women it increases their skills and productivity as it does with men and in addition it appears to reduce the gap in male and female earnings attributable to factors such as discrimination tastes and circumstances the latter appear to account for about half of the differential in the returns to schooling

the relative adjustment of wages and prices direct tests within a multiple equation system in order to assess the relative rigidity of the aggregate price level and the nominal wage rate most researchers have focused on the implied behaviour of the real wage rate in response to a purely demand disturbance the present work examines the explicit behaviour of the two variables and is therefore able to analyse the variables short run responses within the context of their defined long run behaviour while the paper reports evidence of long run stability in the real wage rate additional evidence is presented which supports both sticky price and sticky wage models the determining factor is the choice of lag

investment in schooling and the marriage market we present a model in which investment in schooling generates two kinds of returns the labor market return resulting from higher wages and a marriagemarket return defined as the impact of schooling on the marital surplus share one can extract men and women may have different incentives to invest in schooling because of different market wages or household roles this asymmetry can yield a mixed equilibrium with some educated individuals marrying uneducated spouses when the labor market returns to schooling rises home production demands less time and the traditional spousal labor division norms weaken more women may invest in schooling than men

a theory of dual labor markets with application to industrial policy discrimination and keynesian unemployment this paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers need to motivate workers in order to elicit effort from their workers employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage this changes fundamentally the character of labor markets the model is applied to a wide range of labor market phenomena it provides a coherent framework for understanding the claims of industrial policy advocates it also can provide the basis for a theory of occupational segregation and discrimination that will not be eroded by market forces finally the model provides the basis for a theory of involuntary unemployment

are foreign exchange forecasts rational new evidence from survey data abstract tests of rationality in foreign exchange markets have been inconclusive because of disagreement over the relevant asset pricing model this paper uses a newly available set of data on foreign exchange expectations to directly test the rationality of four foreign currency markets overall the results reject the rational expectations hypothesis

on biases in the measurement of foreign exchange risk premiums abstract the hypothesis that the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate has been consistently rejected in recent empirical studies this paper examines several sources of measurement error and misspecification that might induce biases in such studies although previous inferences are shown to be robust to a failure to construct true returns and to omitted variable bias arising from conditional heteroskedasticity in spot rates we show that the parameters were not stable over the 1975 89 sample period estimation that allows for endogenous regime shifts in the parameters demonstrates that deviations from unbiasedness were more severe in the 1980s jel f31

the phantom gender difference in the college wage premium abstract a growing literature seeks to explain why so many more women than men now attend college a commonly cited stylized fact is that the college wage premium is and has been higher for women than for men after identifying and correcting a bias in estimates of college wage premiums i find that there has been essentially no gender difference in the college wage premium for at least a decade a similar pattern appears in quantile wage regressions and for advanced degree wage premiums

household sharing and commitment evidence from panel data on individual expenditures and time use in this article we analyse the dynamics of intra household allocations using unique panel data on individual specific consumption expenditures and time used for leisure market production and home production cross sectional differences at the time of marriage in expected wage profiles between a husband and wife strongly affect the allocation of private consumption expenditures and time use by households in the cross section there are substantial gender asymmetries in these allocations even for households where the husband and wife have identical wages the private consumption expenditures for the wife are about half those for the husband within a given household over time shocks to wages lead households to shift the relative weights in favour of the spouse receiving the favourable shock additionally we find that households adjust the weights in response to large but not to small shocks the adjustment to the weights is twice as large in the year leading up to a divorce and adjustments are more frequent in dual than in single earner households we interpret the data using a dynamic collective model of the household with potentially limited commitment

a re examination of the unbiased forward rate hypothesis in the presence of multiple unknown structural breaks we test the unbiased forward rate ufr hypothesis using new tests for cointegration developed by hatemi j 2008a that allows for multiple unknown structural breaks we analyse the australian dollar aud euro eur british pound gbp and japanese yen jpy versus the us dollar usd spot rates and forward rates relationship during the period 5 january 1999 to 28 december 2006 we find that the ufr does hold when the effects of the unknown structural breaks are taken into account the parameters that we obtained were close to unity hence taking into account transaction cost and the existence of a risk premium earning arbitrage profits may still not be possible thus the markets for these currencies may still be considered as efficient

uncovered interest parity monetary policy and time varying risk premia abstract in a recent paper mccallum argued that monetary policy behavior can be responsible for the apparent empirical failure of uncovered interest parity uip the present paper investigates whether optimizing policy behavior can account for the observed regime dependence of uip evidence the main result is that the tradeoff between interest rate and exchange rate stability is a potential candidate for the explanation of the apparent failure of uip and that the consideration of policy reactions can explain why deviations from uip differ systematically by the exchange rate regime

are foreign exchange markets really efficient asset prices determined in a weakly efficient market cannot be cointegrated because cointegration implies a granger causal link however strong evidence of cointegration in currency markets is found using johansen s multivariate procedure on london daily closing rates for the six major currencies in dollar terms an error correction based trading model is implemented

forward exchange market unbiasedness the case of the australian dollar since 1984 abstract this paper implements a robust statistical approach to regression with non stationary time series the methods were recently developed in other work and are briefly exposited here they allow us to perform regressions in levels with non stationary time series data they accommodate data distributions with heavy tails and they permit serial dependence and temporal heterogeneity of unknown form in the equation errors with these features the methods are well suited to applications with frequently sampled exchange rate data which generally display all of these empirical characteristics our application here is to daily data on spot and forward exchange rates between the australian and us dollars over the period 1984 1991 following the deregulation of the australian foreign exchange market we find big differences between the robust and the non robust regression outcomes and in the associated statistical tests of the hypothesis that the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate the robust tests reject the unbiasedness hypothesis but still give the forward rate an important role as a predictor of the future spot rate

women s college decisions how much does marriage matter this article investigates the sequential college attendance decision of young women and quantifies the effect of marriage expectations on their decision to attend and graduate from college a dynamic choice model of college attendance labor supply and marriage is formulated and structurally estimated using panel data from the nlsy79 the model is used to simulate the effects of no marriage benefits and finds that the predicted college enrollment rate will drop from 58 0 to 50 5 using the estimated model the college attendance behavior for a younger cohort from the nlsy97 is predicted and used to validate the behavioral model

why are married men working so much an aggregate analysis of intra household bargaining and labour supply are macro economists mistaken in ignoring bargaining between spouses this paper argues that models of intra household allocation could be useful for understanding aggregate labor supply trends in the us since the 1970s a simple calculation suggests that the standard model without bargaining predicts a 19 decline in married male labor supply in response to the narrowing of the gender gap in wages since the 1970s however married men s paid labor remained stationary over the period from the mid 1970s to the recession of 2001 this paper develops and calibrates to us time use survey data a model of marital bargaining in which time allocations are determined jointly with equilibrium marriage and divorce rates the results suggest that bargaining effects raised married men s labor supply by about 2 1 weekly hours over the period and reduced that of married women by 2 7 hours bargaining therefore has a relatively small impact on aggregate labor supply but is critical for trends in female labor supply also the narrowing of the gender wage gap is found to account for a weekly 1 5 hour increase in aggregate labor supply

on the informational content of wage offers this article investigates signaling and screening roles of wage offers in a single play matching model with two sided unobservable characteristics it generates the following predictions as matching equilibrium outcomes i good jobs offer premia if high quality worker population is large ii bad jobs pay compensating differentials if the proportion of good jobs to low quality workers is large iii all firms may offer a pooling wage in markets dominated by high quality workers and firms or iv gresham s law prevails good types withdraw if bad types dominate the population the screening signaling motive thus has the potential of explaining a variety of wage patterns

tests of exchange market efficiency fragile evidence from cointegration tests abstract several recent papers have employed engle and granger 1987 cointegration tests to determine whether or not markets are efficient we use a new test for cointegration due to johansen 1988 to examine market efficiency with respect to the us dollar exchange rates for canadian japanese and west german currencies the fragile nature of the test indications suggests that cointegration methodologies cannot be relied upon to provide reliable evidence on market efficiency

the expectations hypothesis of the term structure tests on us german french and uk euro rates abstract this paper tests the expectations hypothesis of the term structure on us german french and uk euro rates three tests are examined the first is based on forward rates and the other two are based on the interest rates spread first we show that the sign puzzle highlighted by campbell and shiller campbell j y shiller r j 1991 yield spreads and interest rate movements a bird s eye view review of economic studies 58 495 514 for us data does not arise in the cases of french and uk short term rates second we propose tests for the expectations hypothesis based on error correction models with these tests the sign puzzle disappears but the country puzzle remains

testing the hypothesis of market efficiency in the taiwan us forward exchange market since 1990 this article examines the applicability of the hypothesis of market efficiency in taiwan s foreign exchange market using daily data instead of linear regression based models we consider the possibility that the true data generating process may come from two different distributions and we employ the markov switching approach to analyse this from the results of the two state markov switching model we define state 1 as the efficient state and state 2 as the inefficient one only the 30 day forward rate is able to differentiate between the two states based on the unconditional probabilities from the markov switching model we also find that the 30 day forward rate has a 70 probability in the efficient state which indicates that 70 of all speculators fully extract information when predicting future spot rates while 30 of all investors do not

persistence in foreign exchange rates abstract this study examines the long run behavior of seven daily nominal exchange rates using univariate and multivariate persistence measures our results indicate that for some currencies the long run behavior deviates from that of a pure random walk in certain periods the multivariate estimates reflect the effect of both the ems exchange rate mechanism and increased post louvre accord coordinated intervention a large portion of the effect of a shock in one currency on another currency s long run value can be attributed to contemporaneous effects on the other currencies

information revelation in a market with pairwise meetings the paper presents a simple pairwise meetings model of trade the new feature is that agents have asymmetric information about the true state of the world the focus is on the transmission of the information through the process of trade the qualitative question is to what extent is the information revealed to uninformed agents through the trading process when the market is in some sense frictionless in particular does the decentralized process give rise to full revelation results as derived by the literature on rational expectations for centralized and competitive environments in the context of the model of this paper it turns out that the information is not fully revealed to uninformed agents even when the market is in some sense approximately frictionless

a cointegration study of the efficiency of the us treasury strips market one theoretical implication of cointegration according to granger 1986 is that asset prices in an efficient market cannot be cointegrated using price data on us treasury strips with maturities from 2 15 1997 to 8 15 2015 it is found that a set of three strips series is often cointegrated in addition by setting up a costless hedge portfolio from three strips with three different maturities it is found that the hedge portfolio is often stationary and thus arbitrage opportunities are likely to occur that is because the hedge portfolio is costless and stationary cash in can be done when the value of the hedge portfolio is either positive or negative however when taking liquidity tax effects and transaction costs into consideration these arbitrage profits would be unlikely hence it is concluded that the us treasury strips market is efficient

common stochastic trends between forward and spot exchange rates abstract the common trend analyses between the forward rate f t and the corresponding future spot rate of the same currency s t 1 have raised several issues notably the sensitivity of the cointegrating relation to a constant term and lag lengths and the non stationarity of the risk premium this paper addresses these issues more rigorously using the daily exchange rate of the pound sterling vis a vis five major currencies viz the canadian dollar french franc german mark japanese yen and us dollar the appropriate deterministic term in the cointegrating space is identified through empirical tests a robust cointegrating relation is found between f t and s t 1 however the hypothesis of unbiasedness of forward rate could not be sustained an alternative measure of risk premium is suggested and its stationarity is confirmed

interdependence and dynamics in currency futures markets a multivariate analysis of intraday data abstract this paper investigates long term interdependencies and short term dynamics in currency futures utilizing intraday data for six major foreign currencies the british pound deutsche mark swiss franc australian dollar canadian dollar and japanese yen lack of cointegration ci among the foreign exchange futures is found to be the prevailing mode of behavior but some temporary deviations from the no ci condition are detected there is a notable overlap between detected ci relationships and the timing of policy changes world events and regime shifts indicating that the observed cis are event driven the robustness of the ci results is checked with respect to variations in the model lag structure data period sample horizon and currency basket grouping impulse response functions irfs reveal that currency markets are in general efficient and absorb new information within the day the interdependence among currencies is found to be asymmetric

a model of the natural rate of unemployment since the publication of edmund phelps volume the new macroeconomics has treated the labor market as a dynamic process of rational search by unemployed workers for available vacancies wages are viewed as at least potentially flexible though free contracting between workers and firms may lead to fixed wages in the short run imperfect information is a crucial element of the theory for it implies both a need for contracting and a need for rational search rather than simple market clearing in each period a positive rate of frictional unemployment may exist in equilibrium denoted as the natural rate this unemployment is due to the frictions in the search process and imperfections in information rather than to any deficiency in aggregate demand milton friedman defined the natural rate as the level that would be ground out by the walrasian system of general equilibrium equations provided there is embedded in them the actual structural characteristics of the labor and commodity markets including market imperfections stochastic variability in demands and supplies the cost of gathering information about job vacancies and labor availabilities the costs of mobility and so on p 8 this paper reexamines the micro foundations of the natural rate in a model of labor market equilibrium in which turnover flows and imperfect information are explicitly considered workers may quit their current jobs to enter the unemployment pool in order to search among available vacancies for a more preferred position firms economize on turnover by an appropriate wage policy

does comovement among exchange rates imply market inefficiency abstract this paper argues that contrary to what has been reported in the empirical literature previously cointegration between pairs of exchange rates does not necessarily rule out informational efficiency in currency markets the basic reason is that market efficiency does not rule out predictable exchange rate movements but only rules out arbitrage opportunities from predictable exchange rate movements as the usual parity conditions dictate

is the chinese construction industry moving towards a knowledge and technology intensive industry abstract total factor productivity tfp is a sustainable driver of economic growth and tfp driven growth is of great importance for a knowledge and technology intensive industry however there is a massive gap between theoretical research and practical observations on the role that tfp has played in driving construction growth since the global financial crisis the understanding of this tfp role may shake and even change the traditional notion that the chinese construction industry is a typical labor intensive industry to fulfill this gap this paper presents an analysis on the driving effects of growth drivers in the industry from the perspective of neoclassical growth theory the solow residual approach is applied to perform this analysis where the growth drivers are decomposed into tfp labor and capital the data are collected from the china statistical yearbook on construction and china statistical yearbook for the period of 2008 2016 interestingly the results indicate that during the surveyed period the average driving effects of tfp labor and capital were 45 08 39 95 and 14 97 respectively tfp was the first and foremost growth driver but its driving effect has been facing a rigorous challenge from labor driven effect from an evolutionary perspective the growth mostly driven by tfp occurred over 4 years 2008 09 2011 12 2012 13 and 2013 14 which accounted for 50 of the whole study period the growth mainly driven by labor occurred in only 3 years 2009 10 2014 15 and 2015 16 given this situation the chinese construction industry can no longer be considered a labor intensive industry instead it is believed to be moving from a labor intensive industry to a knowledge and technology intensive industry

sorting and long run inequality many social commentators have raised concerns over the possibility that increased sorting in society may lead to greater inequality to investigate this we construct a dynamic model of intergenerational education acquisition fertility and marital sorting and parameterize the steady state to match several basic empirical endings we end that increased sorting will signiecantly increase income inequality four factors are important to our endings a negative correlation between fertility and education a decreasing marginal effect of parental education on children s years of education wages that are sensitive to the relative supply of skilled workers and borrowing constraints that affect educational attainment for some low income households

some further evidence on the law of one price the law of one price still holds international trade models often postulate the existence of a representative price i e the price which prevails at all markets this is known as the law of one price in this paper the law of one price is tested for seven commodities among four countries by explicitly considering transaction costs the empirical evidence suggests that in most cases the law of one price cannot be rejected asa maintained hypothesis furthermore for the remaining cases transaction costs seem to cause the failure

common stochastic trends in a system of exchange rates univariate tests reveal strong evidence for the presence of a unit root in the univariate time series representation for seven daily spot and forward exchange rate series furthermore all seven spot and forward rates appear to be cointegrated that is the forward premiums are stationary and one common unit root or stochastic trend is detectable in the multivariate time series models for the seven spot and forward rates respectively this is consistent with the hypothesis that the seven exchange rates possess one longrun relationship and that the disequilibrium error around that relationship partly accounts for subsequent movements in the exchange rates a general consensus has emerged in recent years that many macroeconomic time series such as gnp consumption expenditures disposable income etc can be characterized by a stochastic trend model in particular nelson and plosser 22 described this property as one of being difference stationary so that the first difference of a time series is stationary an alternative trend stationary model where a stationary component is added to a deterministic trend term has generally been found to be less appropriate 1 similarly it has long been recognized that many financial time series such as foreign exchange rates are nonstationary e g in meese and singleton 21 the issue of nonstationary is not merely a statistical curiosity but has several important implications for the modeling of exchange rates for instance many models of exchange rate determination under rational expectations require stationarity assumptions when solving out the expected future values of the fundamentals further there has been some controversy over the appropriate transformations to use when conducting tests of whether the forward rate is an unbiased and efficient predictor of the future spot exchange rate 2 some authors e g frenkel 11 12 have conducted tests in levels while geweke and feige 14

the term structure of forward exchange premiums and the forecastability of spot exchange rates correcting the errors we develop a framework to extract information regarding subsequent spot rate movements from the term structure of forward exchange premiums while admitting possible deviations from rationality and