are future taxes discounted in this paper i examine empirically the question of whether or not the public recognizes the future taxes implied by current deficitfinanced expenditures as discussed by barro 1 it seems that such recognition does not occur but that by a new hypothesis presented here the aggregate economy behaves much as if it did this alternative hypothesis relies on the widely accepted efficient markets and permanent income hypotheses and it requires considerably less sophistication and information on the part of the average economic agent than does barro s hypothesis

the market value of outstanding government debt 1919 1975 abstract several new series on the market value of outstanding government debt are reported and their methods of construction described the new series on federal debt are compared with other existing estimates and are shown to be markedly superior to them

strategic behavior of federal open market committee board members evidence from members forecasts abstract in this paper we use panel data to test whether federal open market committee fomc board members forecasts are rational rationality is rejected in the sense that forecasts by members are heavily dependent on previous own forecasts and last consensus made in fomc furthermore we reveal the strategic behavior of fomc board members forecasts by governors who always have voting rights agree much with the previous consensus of fomc members forecasts in contrast non governors who rotate voting rights exaggerate their forecasts they aggressively deviate their forecasts from previous consensus the former is herding behavior and the latter is anti herding behavior our results imply that individual members behave strategically governors want to present policy consistent forecasts to the congress and non governors utilize their forecasts to influence decision making in fomc

fomc forecasts and monetary policy deliberations this paper investigates the influence of the economic forecasts of federal open market committee fomc members on the committee s policy deliberations and finds evidence that the policy preferences of only the voting federal reserve bank presidents are influenced by other members forecasts

the market value of u s government debt monthly 1942 1980 abstract the market value of outstanding united states treasury debt is calculated on a monthly basis using price and par value data from the treasury bulletin separate series for treasury bills bonds certificates of indebtedness notes and total treasury debt are presented along with estimates of privately held treasury debt and gross federal debt the calculated market value series is compared to par value and an existing annual market value series

forecast dispersion dissenting votes and monetary policy preferences of fomc members the role of individual career characteristics and political aspects using data from 1992 to 2001 we study the impact of members economic forecasts on the probability of casting dissenting votes in the federal open market committee fomc employing standard ordered probit techniques we find that higher individual inflation and real gdp growth forecasts relative to the committee s median significantly increase the probability of dissenting in favor of tighter monetary policy whereas higher individual unemployment rate forecasts significantly decrease it using interaction models we find that fomc members with longer careers in government industry academia non governmental organizations ngos or on the staff of the board of governors are more focused on output stabilization while fomc members with longer careers in the financial sector or on the staffs of regional federal reserve banks are more focused on inflation stabilization we also find evidence that politics matters with republican appointees being much more focused on inflation stabilization than democratic appointees moreover during the entire clinton administration natural monetary policy preferences of bank presidents and board members for inflation and output stabilization were more pronounced than under periods covering the administrations of both george h w bush and george w bush respectively

are estimates of calorie income fxelasticities too high a recalibration of the plausible range abstract the wide range of calorie income elasticities in the literature results in large part from the particular calorie and income variables used for estimation elasticities across four estimation techniques and four calorie income variable pairs for a sample of philippine farm households ranged from 0 03 to 0 59 estimates associated with calorie availability are biased upwards first because random errors in measuring food purchases are transmitted by construction both to calorie availability and total expenditures and second because the residual difference between family calorie intake and household calorie availability will often increase with income the calorie intake total expenditure variable pair gives the preferred elasticity estimate in the 0 08 0 14 range

productivity health and inequality in the intrahousehold distribution of food in low income countries a model is formulated incorporating linkages among nutrition labor market productivity health heterogeneity and the intrahousehold distribution of food and work activities in a subsistence economy empirical results based on a sample of households from bangladesh indicate that despite considerable intrahousehold disparities in calorie consumption households are averse to inequality furthermore consistent with the model the results also indicate that both the higher level and greater variance in the calories consumed by men relative to women reflect in part the greater participation by men in activities in which productivity is sensitive to health status copyright 1990 by american economic association

the influence of fomc member characteristics on the monetary policy decision making process abstract this paper provides new empirical evidence on a monetary policy committee with heterogeneous members whose decisions affect the efficacy of monetary policy it thereby provides a link between the literature on monetary policy committees and central bank monetary policy implementation through monetary rules using a novel dataset of the idiosyncratic characteristics of fomc members over the period from august 1979 to february 2014 the empirical findings show that characteristics such as education age and to a lesser extent work experience are not important in understanding the fomc decision making process instead the results point to the importance of time spent within the federal reserve system tenure on the fomc itself and the influence of the chair in shaping the decision making process the results are expected to have implications for the capacity of economic agents as well as various markets in the economy to more readily interpret public monetary policy information that reaches them this makes the monetary policy decision process less noisy and thus enhances the capability of agents and markets to attach the correct weight to this information

are heterogeneous fomc forecasts consistent with the fed s monetary policy abstract yes they are we find that although there is a surprisingly high dispersion of individual forecasts and some dissent on the federal funds target the fomc s individual behavior is well described by a taylor type rule

inflation and government deficits there is a pronounced positive correlation of inflation andgovernment deficits in the united states since world war ii the purpose of this paper is to test the three leading explanationsof this correlation these three explanations are a a deficitincreases prices through a wealth effect b a deficit results inthe federal reserve purchasing debt thus increasing the moneysupply and prices and c expected inflation increases the deficit which is the change in the nominal value of bonds no supportis found for either of the first two hypotheses the results indi cate that expected government deficits have no significance forfuture inflation since world war ii the united states has experienced large federal government deficits and a sustained peacetime inflation three differentconnections between the deficits and inflation are prominent in theliterature the most direct connection between government deficits and inflationis that by increasing the real value of outstanding bonds and perceived netwealth a deficit can raise total spending and the price level this connec tion is also the most long standing and is suggested by metzler 1951 andpatinkin 1965 for example monetarists generally and buchanan and wagner 1977 in particularhave emphasized a different link between deficits and inflation they sug gest that the federal reserve purchases government bonds when the trea sury sells bonds thus increasing high powered money the money supply and the price level the federal reserve might behave this way for exam ple because it is attempting to hold down interest rates on governmentsecurities when deficits occur recently barro 1978 1979 has put forward a hypothesis that deficitsare a result of inflation rather than inflation being a result of deficits thegovernment deficit is the change in the nominal value of outstanding gov ernment bonds if the anticipated inflation rate increases then the nomi nal value of bonds must increase i e the government will run a deficit tokeep the same anticipated real amount of bonds all three of these possible connections between government deficitsand inflation are consistent with the observed positive correlation of defi cits and inflation the implications however are strikingly different con

autoregressive modelling and money income causality detection abstract a step wise procedure based on granger s concept of causality and abaike s final prediction error criterion is suggested as a practical means to identify the order of lags of each variable in a multivariate autoregressive process the model seems useful because it can serve as a reduced form formulation to avoid imposing often spurious or false restrictions of the model it also provides a reasonably powerful test of causality the idea is applied to u s postwar money and income data it is found that between m1 and gnp a bivariate feedback model fits the data best between m2 and gnp a one way causal model from money to income performs better diagnostic checks applied to our model seem to indicate the adequacy of our approach

joint determination of food consumption and production in rural sierra leone estimates of a household firm model abstract this paper investigates the determination of food consumption for rural households in sierra leone that produce the foods which they consume a household firm model is estimated with seven commodities including five foods non foods and labor as compared to three commodities in past studies such food disaggregation permits tracing of the effects of socioeconomic variables on household nutrient availability household specialization in production is such that censored data is a problem a tobit approach is used to correct for this for most crops the own price effects on consumption remain negative when a price change is allowed to shift the budget constraint by effecting the profits from home production elasticities of calorie availability with respect to toal expenditure are found to be sizeable varying little by expenditure group the price elasticities of calorie availability are generally positive however an important exception occurs for price of the staple food rice this exception has several important policy implications which are explored

government deficits and aggregate demand abstract the evidence presented in this paper indicates that changes in government spending transfers and taxes can have substantial effects on aggregate demand the estimates also indicate that the promise of future social security benefits significantly reduces private saving each the basic implications of the so called ricardian equivalence theorem is contradicted by the data the results are consistent with the more general view of the effects of fiscal actions and fiscal expectations that is described in the paper

government debt national income and causality the concept of granger causality is applied to assess the validity of the ricardian equivalence hypothesis the analysis is conducted using a multivariate approach with a us data set consisting of annual observations for the 1919 1981 period the empirical evidence generated by this investigation does not support the strict debt neutrality position

el nino or el peso crisis poverty and income distribution in the philippines using household survey data for 1998 the authors assess the distributional impact of the recent economic crisis in the philippines the results suggest that the impact of the crisis was modest leading to a five percent reduction in average living standards and a nine percent increase in the incidence of poverty with larger increases indicated for the depth and severity of poverty the greater shock came from el nino rather than through the labor market the labor market shock was progressive reducing inequality while el nino shock was regressive increasing inequality not all households were equally vulnerable to the crisis induced shocks household and community characteristics affected the impact of the shocks ownership of land made households more susceptible to the el nino shocks higher levels of education made households more vulnerable to wage and employment shocks the impact of the crisis was greater in more commercially developed communities occupational diversity within a household helped mitigate the adverse impact there is some evidence of consumption smoothing by the households affected by the crisis but the poor were less able to protect their consumption which is a matter of policy concern

energy intake and productivity of guatemalan sugarcane cutters an empirical test of the efficiency wage hypothesis part ii abstract this paper examines additional evidence of an empirical test of the productivity consumption relation of the efficiency wage hypothesis a cross sectional analysis showed sharply diminishing productivity returns to higher levels of daily energy intake of guatemalan sugarcane cutters no positive and consistent energy supplementation effect on the daily supply of work units could be demonstrated in a time series analysis energy supplementation did not have a delayed impact on worker productivity it is concluded that increased energy availability may not necessarily result in increased productivity of rural workers who are moderately energy deficient

poverty and illness in low income rural areas one of the oldest and most studied questions in development is whether the resource and environmental conditions faced by households in low income rural areas significantly affect productivity the reason for this interest is clear if productivity is significantly constrained by these factors then the returns to investment in the form of human capital are likely to be high and under certain conditions there may be scope for efficiency improving policies and programs given this motivation it may at first seem surprising that most of the existing literature focusing on the health productivity relationship concentrates on the effects of nutrition while nutrition is an important contributor to good health other components of health especially illness may also influence worker productivity moreover in contrast to the case of nutrition over which households have direct control illness is affected by exposure to pathogens something over which individual households may have little control this public aspect of illness makes an examination of the effects of illness on productivity particularly important from a policy perspective this distinction between the private nature of nutrition and the public nature of illness may at least in part be evident in tables 1 and 2 these tables present the distribution of illness and calories respectively by wealth quartiles in three asian countries what is most striking about these tables is the fact that despite clear evidence that calories are importantly associated with wealth in at least two of the countries bangladesh and pakistan there is little systematic relationship between illness and wealth in any of the countries for example in bangladesh the top quartile in terms of wealth of the population of men and women consumes 6 percent and 8 percent more calories respectively than the lowest quartile by contrast bangladeshi males in the upper quartile experience 19 percent more days ill over the same period than do those in the lower quartile the figures for the women are identical there are several possible reasons for this pattern as suggested earlier one possibility is that households have little control over their exposure to illness if this is the case then one might well conclude that the distributional effects of illness are quite limited a second plausible explanation is that illness is measured or reported differently for better off households for example a better off individual who is generally healthy may be more readily able to identify when he or she is ill than a poor individual with low caloric intake moreover to the extent that illness is measured as an alternative to work as is the case for the pakistani data set a wealthier individual may be more willing to skip work on a day that he or she is ill if this latter point is true then the distributional consequences of illness could be quite important despite what is evident in table 1 2 in this paper i address these and other related issues using two of the longitudinal data sets from rural asia from which these tables were derived in the first section of

do fomc members herd abstract we show that growth and unemployment forecasts submitted by individual fomc members do not exhibit herding behavior while the inflation forecasts show strong evidence of anti herding interestingly anti herding is more important for non voting members than for voters

the economic rationale for investing in nutrition in developing countries abstract studies of experimental and socioeconomic survey data on the direct productivity effects of nutrition indicate growing though qualified evidence of positive direct effects of nutrition on labor productivity of poorer individuals in developing countries greater productivity effects for nutrition than for formal schooling studies on the indirect productivity effects of nutrition through cognitive achievement schooling and preschool ability also indicate positive productivity effects through these channels therefore for productivity reasons alone policies that favor better nutrition among the poorer members of society merit serious consideration that productivity and equity concerns are in harmony is an important plus

evaluating the efficiency of the fomc s new economic projections since 2007 fomc policymakers have been publishing detailed numerical projections of macroeconomic series over the next three years by testing whether the revisions to these projections are unpredictable i find that fomc s efficiency is generally accepted for inflation but often rejected for real economic variables notably for the unemployment rate the rejection is due to the strong autocorrelation of revisions which may reflect information rigidity of fomc s unemployment projections the joint efficiency of the entire projection is accepted in most cases

the fomc versus the staff where can monetary policymakers add value a key issue in monetary policymaking is the appropriate division of labor between the profes sional staff of the central bank and the appointed policymakers lars e o svensson 1999 argues that the appropriate role of a policymaking group such as the federal open market com mittee fomc in the united states is to make judgments about social welfare taking as given the likely outcomes of different policies as esti mated by the staff in this division the staff is relied upon to assess current and prospective economic conditions and to forecast the effects of different policies policymakers only role is to decide which of the various options should be chosen

a new data set on monetary policy the economic forecasts of individual members of the fomc this paper describes a new data set of the forecasts of output growth inflation and unemployment prepared by individual members of the federal open market committee the paper discusses the scope of the data set possibilities for extending it and some potential uses it offers a preliminary examination of some of the cross sectional features of the data