time consistent public policy in this paper we study how a benevolent government that cannot commit to future policy should trade off the costs and benefits of public expenditure we characterize and solve for markov perfect equilibria of the dynamic game between successive governments the characterization consists of an inter temporal first order condition a generalized euler equation for the government and we use it both to gain insight into the nature of the equilibrium and as a basis for computations for a calibrated economy we find that when the only tax base available to the government is capital income an inelastic source of funds at any point in time the government still refrains from taxing at confiscatory rates we also find that when the only tax base is labour income the markov equilibrium features less public expenditure and lower tax rates than the ramsey equilibrium

a model for supply planning under lead time uncertainty the paper is focused on the search of the optimal values of the planned lead times for the mrp method under lead time uncertainty the problem is to find the planned lead times which minimize the expected backlogging and holding costs the aim of the paper is to give a mathematical formulation of this single level multi item dynamic multi period planning problem for the case where lead time does not depend on the lot size and demand level is constant an auxiliary markov model is proposed some new formulations of optimal control policies are obtained using this markov model

instability of the u s money demand function this paper surveys the two major episodes of instability of the u s money demand function known respectively as the mystery of missing money and the great velocity decline it also assesses the recent literature on open economy money demand models and their usefulness in explaining the puzzling behavior of money demand manifested shortly after the transition to floating exchange rates copyright 1991 by blackwell publishers ltd

public versus private investment in human capital endogenous growth and income inequality in this paper we present an overlapping generations model with heterogeneous agents in which human capital investment through formal schooling is the engine of growth we use simple functional forms for preferences technologies and income distribution to highlight the distinction between economies with public education and those with private education we find that income inequality declines more quickly under public education on the other hand private education yields greater per capita incomes unless the initial income inequality is sufficiently high we also find that societies will choose public education if a majority of agents have incomes below average

us business credit sources demand deposits and the missing money abstract this study accounts for much of the missing money in the us through compensating balances business lending by banks affects demand deposit growth standard money demand models include variables that likely pick up income and interest rate effects on the transactions demand for demand deposits and on compensating balance requirements provided that bank lending to firms is stable however during the missing money period business shifted toward nonbank sources of short term credit causing a decline in compensating balances empirical finding support this hypothesis as a partial explanation for the missing money using the federal reserve board s demand deposit model

on the impossibility of a stable and low gdp elasticity of money demand the arithmetic of aggregation replication and income growth this paper shows the aggregate income gdp elasticity of money demand depends on the elasticity at the individual level and on population growth as money regressions are usually formulated using us post ww ii data a low and stable aggregate income elasticity implies a negative and unstable elasticity at the individual level likewise positing a stable and non unitary individual income elasticity implies wide variation in the conventional gdp elasticity over time it has been possible to ignore these issues in empirical work due to collinearity between regressors and population even for differenced data measuring money and income on a per household basis is a simple way to avoid these problems and to distinguish income from mere replication effects

how to use aggregation and combined forecasting to improve seasonal demand forecasts standard forecasting methods that are designed to cope with seasonal demand often are no longer applicable in practice due to growing assortments and shorter product life cycles demand data may show too high variation or may be insufficient to construct reliable forecast models at the individual item level in this article we present alternative forecasting methods that are based on using demand information from a higher aggregation level and on combining forecasts sales data from two prominent dutch wholesalers are used to illustrate the drawbacks of the standard seasonal forecasting methods and to demonstrate the potential of the new methods the average reduction in forecast error in terms of mse turns out to be three times as large as reported in earlier studies on common seasonal patterns

on the stock control performance of intermittent demand estimators the purpose of this paper is to assess the empirical stock control performance of intermittent demand estimation procedures the forecasting methods considered are the simple moving average single exponential smoothing croston s method and a new method recently developed by the authors of this paper we first discuss the nature of the empirical demand data set 3000 stock keeping units and we specify the stock control model to be used for experimentation purposes performance measures are then selected to report customer service level and stock volume differences the out of sample empirical comparison results demonstrate the superior stock control performance of the new intermittent demand forecasting method and enable insights to be gained into the empirical utility of the other estimators

external debt capital flight and political risk abstract this paper explains the simultaneous occurence of large external debts private capital outflows and low domestic capital formation we consider a general equilibrium model in which two government types with conflicting distributional goals randomly alternate in office uncertainty over the fiscal policies of future governments generates capital flight and small domestic investment and induces the government to overaccumulate external debt the model also predicts that left wing governments are more inclined to restrict capital outflows than right wing governments finally we examine how political uncertainty affects the risk premium and how debt repudiation may occur after a regime change

modeling monetary trends in italy using historical data the demand for broad money 1861 1990 in this paper we estimate a stable demand for money relationship for italy using a long series of historical data we extend previously available data sets to obtain a sample for the years 1861 to 1990 and use cointegration analysis and two stage estimation procedures to obtain a dynamic model for m2 demand by employing a small number of explanatory variables and a nonlinear error correction model we find a stable demand for money relationship our model incorporates significant inflation and interest rate effects in contrast to previous studies of this type

another look at long run money demand abstract this paper investigates the long run demand for m1 in the postwar united states previous studies based on data ending in the late 1980s are inconclusive about the parameters of postwar money demand this paper obtains precise estimates of these parameters by extending the data through 1996 the income elasticity of money demand is approximately 0 5 and the interest semi elasticity is approximately 0 05 these parameters are significantly smaller in absolute value than the corresponding parameters for the prewar period a caveat is that the analysis assumes there is no trend in money demand resulting from technological change

time consistent optimal fiscal policy this article studies the properties of optimal fiscal policy in a stochastic growth model when the government cannot commit itself beyond the next period s capital income tax rate we find that the results contrast markedly with those under full commitment first capital income tax rates are very high 65 on average versus close to zero on average under full commitment second labor income taxes are rather low on average about 12 versus a value of around 31 under full commitment finally labor income taxes are quite volatile whereas under full commitment their standard deviation is essentially zero

future rent seeking and current public savings abstract the conventional wisdom is that politicians rent seeking motives increase public debt and deficits this is because myopic politicians face political risk and prefer to extract political rents as early as possible in this paper we study the determination of government debt and deficits in a dynamic political economy model we show that this conventional wisdom relies on economic volatility being low relative to political uncertainty if economic volatility is high relative to political uncertainty then a rent seeking government actually over saves and over taxes along the equilibrium path relative to a benevolent government this result emerges because of the option value of rent seeking a rent seeking government over values future funds because of the possibility of using them for future rents instead of cutting taxes in the event of a future boom when marginal utility of private consumption is low this over saving bias is temporary since in the long run the rent seeking government over borrows relative to the benevolent government as it eventually squanders the funds it has accumulated we find that both the under saving and over saving bias of the government can be solved by a rule of capping deficits

the stability of the m2 demand function evidence from an error correction model this note presents an error correction model of m2 demand the chow test indicates that the m2 demand function is stable over the sample period 1953q1 to 1991q2 copyright 1993 by ohio state university press

domestic politics and the international coordination of fiscal policies abstract this paper investigates the desirability of international fiscal policy coordination in the presence of a domestic political distortion the domestic distortion results from the inability of the current policymaker to enter into a binding agreement with future policymakers about the composition of public spending this distortion generates a bias towards budget deficits international coordination can exacerbate the deficit bias and thus reduce social welfare at home and abroad the reason is that international coordination reduces the cost of running budget deficits and thus enhances the adverse effects of the domestic political distortion

portfolio redistribution impacts within the narrow monetary aggregate a number of important monetary and financial changes occurred in the 1980s a rising question among monetary economists is whether the character of m1 has changed substantially as a result in particular a frequent contention is that interest bearing checkable deposits behave as a savings type asset thus subjecting m1 to portfolio redistribution effects in the modern era this research examines the elasticities of substitution for a variety of financial assets pre and post 1980 results indicate that m1 subcomponents do show significant substitution with savings type assets however the portfolio redistribution impacts are not confined to the interest bearing checkable deposits further results indicate that this behavior is not unique to the 1980s copyright 1992 by ohio state university press

the demand for m1 in the u s a 1960 1988 estimated u s m1 demand functions appear unstable regularly breaking down over 1960 1988 e g missing money great velocity decline m1 explosion we propose a money demand function whose arguments include inflation real income long term bond yield and risk t bill interest rates and learning curve weighted yields on newly introduced instruments in m1 and non transactions m2 the model is estimated in dynamic error correction form it is constant and with an equation standard error of 0 4 variance dominates most previous models estimating alternative specifications explains earlier breakdowns showing the model s distinctive features to be important in accounting for the data

balanced budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition this paper models balanced budget redistribution between socio economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties equilibrium is unique in the present model and a sufficient condition for existence is given requiring that there be enough stochastic heterogeneity with respect to party preferences in the electorate the validity of hotelling s principle of minimum differentiation and of director s law are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions and voter s possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties the policy strategy of expected plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality incomes are fixed and known so lump sum taxation is feasible however constraints on tax transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis

ageing government budgets retirement and growth we analyze the short and long run effects of demographic ageing increased longevity and reduced fertility on per capita growth the olg model captures direct effects working through adjustments in the savings rate labor supply and capital deepening and indirect effects working through changes of taxes government spending components and the retirement age in politico economic equilibrium growth is driven by capital accumulation and productivity increases fueled by public investment the closed form solutions of the model predict taxation and the retirement age in oecd economies to increase in response to demographic ageing and per capita growth to accelerate if the retirement age were held constant the growth rate in politico economic equilibrium would essentially remain unchanged due to a surge of social security transfers and crowding out of public investment

political economy of debt and growth abstract a theory of endogenous fiscal policy and growth is developed fiscal policy debt income tax spending on local public goods and public investment is determined through legislative bargaining economic growth depends directly on public investment private investment in human capital and via learning by doing labor supply the model economy converges to a balanced growth path during the transition to the balanced growth path public debt grows faster than gdp provisions of public goods and infrastructure grow slower than gdp and the tax rate declines the model is used to assess welfare implications of austerity programs

should bond funds be added to m2 abstract in the early 1990s m2 growth has been weaker than estimated while bond mutual funds have grown rapidly this study assesses whether adding bond funds to m2 would yield a monetary aggregate that is more explainable using a standard error correction model of money with and without modifications for bond interest rate and thrift resolution effects results indicate that it is important to net out institutional and ira keogh assets from bond funds as is done for m2 and that adding such a bond fund series to m2 results in an aggregate that is somewhat more explainable than m2

cointegration and structural change an application to the u s demand for money wankeun oh i perform the cointegration tests for the trivariate model of real monetary aggregates real personal income and short term interest rate i find the existence of a long run relationship among these three variables to check the stability of a long run money demand relationship i implement a rank constancy test and cusum test the test results show that real mi is relatively more stable than other aggregates but structural change occurred during the 1970s and early 1980s this is consistent with prior research on money demand jel e41 i introduction incorporating structural change when performing tests on the properties of stochastic processes is important because structural breaks may cause misspecification problems most tests of structural change consider the stability of the parameters over time tests for structural breaks and parameter stability have been studied extensively a partial list includes chow 1966 brown et al 1975 harvey and collier 1977 king 1987 ploberger et al 1989 in the context of unit root processes perron 1989 showed that the presence of a one time change in the level or slope of the trend function can severely distort the results of unit root tests and it is natural to ask how structural change can distort the results of cointegration tests 1 traditional tests of parameter stability ask if the parameters of the model are constant in contrast quintos 1993 proposed a test for stability of the long run relationship s in a cointegrating regression the test is based on johansen s 1988 framework and the test statistic is simply the weighted sum of the likelihood ratio test as given in johansen 1988 quintos s rank test is very different from the traditional cusum and chow tests for parameter stability because her rank test checks for stability of the cointegrating relationship between variables in other words the rank test checks whether cointegration holds for the full period the traditional cusum and chow tests assume that cointegration holds for the full period or does not hold for the full period and tests simply whether the cointegration vector changes for example if there is cointegration from 1960 1990 between revenues and expenditures with cointegrating vector 1 1 then the cusum and chow tests check whether the cointegra ting vector 1 1 is stable throughout the period the rank constancy test checks whether the cointegration rank is stable throughout the period not whether the cointegrating vector is stable at 1 1 in other words the rank test will check whether for example there is cointegration from 1960 1980 and no cointegration from 1980 onward the chow and cusum tests are not designed to check for this the structural stability of money demand relationships has been the issue of a substantial number of empirical studies 2 in general structural stability means stability of the underlying behavioral equations 3 this term includes parameter stability and stability of functional form friedman s 1990 research on the money demand function assumes that a long run equilibrium relationship exists between real money balances real income or real wealth and the opportunity cost of holding real money balances recently there has been strong evidence of cointegration between real income real money balances and a nominal interest rate for instance engle and granger 1987 dickey et al 1991 hafer and jansen 1991 hoffman and rasche 1991 mehra 1993 miller 1991 fischer and nicoletti 1993 and baba et al 1992 report on cointegration among variables in u s aggregate money demand jain and moon 1994 report on cointegration in u s sectoral money demand yashiv 1994 and engsted 1993 on money demand in a high inflation country and hoffman et al 1995 report on international money demand comparison this article asks if long run money demand relationship is stable and if so for which measure of money is it stable over time

a political theory of government debt and deficits in a neo ricardian framework in the presence of different abilities and therefore different bequests some individuals are bequest constrained even in a neo ricardian world such individuals vote for taxes on future generations through the issuance of bonds thereby increasing their current consumption this produces some crowding out of capital reduces wage rates and increases the interest rate as a consequence even unconstrained individuals are no longer indifferent to the size of government debt the paper derives conditions that are conducive to larger debt and deficits when each of the living generations determines current taxes social security benefits and the national debt by majority rule copyright 1989 by american economic association

a positive theory of fiscal deficits and government debt this paper considers an economy in which policymakers with different preferences alternate in office as a result of elections government debt is used strategically by each policymaker to influence the choices of his successors if different policymakers disagree about the desired composition of government spending between two public goods the economy exhibits a deficits bias that is debt accumulation is higher than it would be with a social planner the equilibrium level of debt is larger the larger is the degree of polarization between alternating governments and the less likely it is that the current government will be re elected

politicians taxes and debt the standard analysis of the efficient management of income taxes and debt assumes a benevolent government and ignores potential distortions arising from rent seeking politicians this paper departs from this framework by assuming that a rent seeking politician chooses policies if the politician chooses extractive policies citizens throw him out of power we analyse the efficient sustainable equilibrium unlike in the standard economy temporary economic shocks generate volatile and persistent changes in taxes along the equilibrium path this serves to optimally limit rent seeking by the politician and to optimally generate support for the politician from the citizens taxes resembling those of the benevolent government are very costly since the government over saves and resources are wasted on rents political distortions thus cause the complete debt market to behave as if it were incomplete however in contrast to an incomplete market economy in the long run taxes do not converge to zero and under some conditions they resemble taxes under a benevolent government

the behavior of money demand in the 1980s existing money demand functions did not predict the strength in m1 in the 1980s this strength derived from the combination of a change in the character of m 1 due to elnancial deregulation and the sharp fall in market rates that began in 1982 the public s m2 demand function however remains unaffected by the forces that altered the m1 demand function the character of the public s m 1 demand function changed with the legalization nationwide in january 1981 of the checkable deposits known as nows because nows pay explicit interest they are used by the public as an instrument for saving as well as for effecting transactions mehra 1986 the addition of nows to m1 therefore caused m1 to become more highly substitutible with the savings instruments included in the non ml component of m2 that is savings deposits small time deposits money market deposit accounts mmdas and money market mutual funds of noninstitutional investors mmmfs furthermore financial institutions move the rate paid on nows only sluggishly in response to changes in market rates in contrast the rates paid on small time deposits mmdas and mmmfs move promptly in response to changes in market rates consequently when market rates fell beginning in late summer 1982 the differential between the rates paid on the non ml components of m2 and on nows fell sharply the public then substituted out of the non ml components of m2 and into the nows in m1 these substitutions increased m1 de

money demand the effects of inflation and alternative adjustment mechanisms the paper first reconciles a variety of specification tests for partial adjustment money demand models and points out a fundamental identification problem which makes it impossible to distinguish between the real and nominal partial adjustment models if inflation has an independent effect on the long run demand for money the paper also finds that empirical estimates of simple partial adjustment models have some undesirable properties and then considers the shortand long run effects of inflation in a more general distributed lag model

financial innovation new assets and the behavior of money demand abstract two fundamental changes in us banking regulations have affected the behavior of money demand m1 the first authorized checkable deposit accounts paying explicit interest rates the second allowed these rates to be market determined the theoretical literature does not directly address the impact of these events suggesting that they are primarily an empirical issue however the empirical literature has yet to agree on the impact of financial innovation on money demand for example several studies report an increase in the elasticity of money demand several others report a decline this paper uses a lancaster type choice model to analyze formally the expected impact of these two changes on the demand for money the model derives specific conditions under which i the demand for money increases as new assets are introduced and ii the impact of either the introduction of new assets or the elimination of interest rate restrictions on the elasticity of money demand

monetary dynamics a market approach the behaviour of the short run responses implied by the identification of a long run money demand relationship is examined these responses have recently been interpreted as representing the policy stance of the monetary authority however as movements in the monetary aggregate reflect both demand and supply adjustments estimating the short run dynamics solely within the money demand relationship may produce biased results in order to address this issue the paper explicitly acknowledges the importance of the supply of money function by including the function alongside the demand for money function while the interaction of the two equations continues to produce the long run quantity theory result the additional detail provides more accurate estimates of the individual short run adjustments within the two equations

the impact of high government debt on economic growth and its channels an empirical investigation for the euro area abstract this paper investigates the average impact of government debt on per capita gdp growth in twelve euro area countries over a period of about 40 years starting in 1970 it finds a non linear impact of debt on growth with a turning point beyond which the government debt to gdp ratio has a negative impact on long term growth at about 90 100 of gdp confidence intervals for the debt turning point suggest that the negative growth effect of high debt may start already from levels of around 70 to 80 of gdp the channels through which government debt is found to have a non linear impact on the economic growth rate are private saving public investment and total factor productivity

is there a debt threshold effect on output growth abstract this paper studies the relationship between public debt expansion and economic growth and investigates whether the debt growth relation varies with the level of indebtedness we contribute theoretically by developing tests for threshold effects in the context of dynamic heterogeneous panel data models with cross sectionally dependent errors in the empirical application using data on a sample of forty countries over the 1965 2010 period we find no evidence for a universally applicable threshold effect in the relationship between public debt and economic growth regardless of the threshold however we find significant negative effects of public debt buildup on output growth

short run money demand abstract the conventional wisdom holds that the short run demand for money is unstable this paper challenges the conventional view by finding a stable demand for m1 in u s data from 1959 through 1993 the approach follows previous work in interpreting long run money demand as a cointegrating relation and it uses goldfeld s partial adjustment model to interpret short run dynamics the key innovation is the choice of the interest rate in the money demand function most previous work uses a short term market rate but this paper uses the average return on near monies the savings accounts and money market mutual funds that are close substitutes for m1 this choice helps rationalize the behavior of money demand in particular the increase in the volatility of velocity after 1980 is explained by increased volatility in the returns on near monies

why a stubborn conservative would run a deficit policy with time inconsistent preferences a conservative government in favor of a low level of public consumption knows that it will be replaced by a government in favor of a larger level of public consumption we show that the resulting level of public consumption is in between the levels the two governments would choose if each were in power both in the present and in the future in particular we show that if the conservative government is more stubborn in a particular sense than the succeeding government the conservative government will borrow more than it would had it remained in power in the future

regression direction and weak exogeneity abstract the absence of testing for weak exogeneity in money demand has often led to stark conditioning claims regarding the validity of price equations this paper uses the johansen procedure to explore the conditioning properties of money demand systems for nonborrowed reserves m1 and m2 our results show that irrespective of the specification of the cointegrating relation a feedback mechanism enters the equation for money the opposite however is not true for the price equations the results also cast a warning for single equation models of money demand in that weak exogeneity is sensitive to how the system is defined

a dynamic theory of public spending taxation and debt this paper presents a dynamic political economy theory of public spending taxation and debt policy choices are made by a legislature consisting of representatives elected by geographically defined districts the legislature can raise revenues via a distortionary income tax and by borrowing these revenues can be used tofinance a national public good and district specific transfers interpreted as pork barrel spending the value of the public good is stochastic reflecting shocks such as wars or natural disasters in equilibrium policy making cycles between two distinct regimes business as usual in which legislators bargain over the allocation of pork and responsible policy making in which policies maximize the collective good transitions between the two regimes are brought about by shocks in the value of the public good in the long run equilibrium tax rates are too high and too volatile public good provision is too low and debt levels are too high in some environments a balanced budget requirement can improve citizen welfare

the empirical reliability of monetary aggregates as indicators 1983 1987 the empirical reliability of monetary aggregates as indicators 1983 1987 i introduction it is widely believed that monetary aggregates have failed to predict real growth and inflation over 1983 87 this presumed breakdown of previously reliable linkages between money growth and future output and inflation has been variously attributed by the present authors among others to changes in money demand induced by regulatory change and to parameter instability due to structural change this paper observes that these disputations may be moot since the traditional definition of money currency plus demand deposits shows no evidence of structural change and yields nearly as low or lower prrediction root mean square errors for both real gnp growth and inflation over 1983 87q2 than the standard errors of estimate obtained for 1961 82 part of the so called breakdown in the monetary indicators especially in the case of m1 may be explained by the fact that current m1 or m1b is defined much like the old m2 and current m1a is defined much like old m1 thus it is probably not too surprising that use of m1 as a monetary indicator does not yield consistent predictive power over a period of time in which it experienced redefinition if there is a mystery in the 1980 it is not why m1a has done so well but why economists abandoned it for broader m1b currency demand deposits and other checkable deposits or ocds 1 with the nationwide introduction of negotiable order of withdrawal now accounts on january 1 1981 m1a fell by 5 5 percent a 22 1 percent per annum rate in the first quarter while m1b rose at a 3 1 percent per annum rate at the time the federal reserve system expected m1a demand to shift down as households chose to substitute from demand deposits to the newly available in most states ocds accordingly the sharp drop in m1a was expected to be reflected in a once for all upward shift in its velocity with no effect on nominal income or its components 2 however consistent with the shock absorber view of money demand even if the long run demand for m1a was unchanged a sharp decrease in its quantity would induce an equal contemporaneous increase in its velocity 3 contrary to the federal reserve s expectation the shock absorber view would thus predict that the actual value of velocity would temporarily exceed its long run equilibrium level so that nominal income would tend to fall or grow less rapidly as m1a velocity adjusted to the money shock figure 1 shows that compared to a relatively small drop in m1 velocity the contemporaneous velocity of m1a moved sharply in the first quarter of 1984 4 the shock absorber hypothesis suggests that contemporaneous velocity movements would be dominated by money supply shocks and thus attributes the different movements of m1a and m1 velocity to differences in magnitude and signs of the shocks in m1a and m1 what milton friedman 1983 calls leading velocity is a crude way of allowing nominal gnp to adjust to past money shocks panels a and b in figure 2 illustrate leading velocity for lags between money and gnp of one and four quarters respectively the longer the adjustment lag the more leading velocity becomes a smooth trend dominated series for m1a 5 however m1b continues to display a sizeable break from its historical pattern this observation suggests that the recent behavior of the economy may be consistent with that indicated by movements in m1a and that the choice to switch to m1b as the standard definition of the narrow money supply was unfortunate and a major source of recent forecasting failure 6 this paper runs a race among m1a m1 and m2 by comparing out of sample forecasting performance and tests of structural stability 7 an explanation is also offered for the observed departure of m1 velocity from its historical trend based on a large battery of conventional tests the results are remarkably favorable to the continued reliability of m1a as a useful indicator of future economic performance and for its relevance as a tool in monetary policy

intergenerational policies public debt and economic growth a politico economic analysis abstract this study presents a two period overlapping generations model with endogenous growth in each period the government representing young and old generations provides a public good financed by labor income taxation and public debt issuance and the government s policies are determined by probabilistic voting increased political power of the old lowers economic growth a debt ceiling rule is considered to resolve the negative growth effect but it creates a trade off between generations in terms of welfare

on the reinterpretation of money demand regressions a stylized fact concerning estimated money demand relationships is that lagged dependent variables have high explanatory power and large estimated coefficients which is hard to explain at a theoretical level marvin s goodfriend 1985 suggests that this may be due to the presence of serially correlated measurement errors in the independent variables the author demonstrates how consistent estimates of the short run demand function can be obtained even if the goodfriend hypothesis is accepted and also how the hypothesis might be tested application of the suggested test using the goldfeld 1973 data set leads to decisive rejection of the hypothesis copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

microfoundations and the demand for money the reader should note that i write this piece in a style that aims to be accessible to that much neglected representative agent the woman on the eurostar train hence unlike the man on the clapham omnibus i assume my intrepid traveller has reasonable knowledge of monetary economics and econometrics but not of the details of the demand for money space constraints force me to indulge in a certain amount of poetic licence but i hope this results in poetic justice there have been many wars fought on this particular battlefield some with almost religious zeal on the theoretical side of the debate we sometimes have the equivalent of religious fundamentalists be they muslims jews christians etc who would dismiss almost any evidence unless it were associated with a strong microtheoretic basis as laid down in the koran talmud or bible the empirical side encompasses agnostics atheists as well as born again econometricians pure theorists inhabit the sunlit uplands while applied economists and policymakers flounder in the muddy plain below occasionally gaining solace from their copy of zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance in general in economics we do not have the luxury of controlled experiments as is the case in the natural sciences what distinguishes good microfoundations from bad and how to weight priors and statistical evidence is subject to much dispute leamer i983 hendry et al i990 as in religion sometimes there is the occasional miracle proclaimed after a suitable interval a new saint may be declared and disciples flock to the new shrine later doubts may arise as to whether a miracle really did occur human behaviour is difficult to explain let alone predict so the search for the equivalent of the holy grail ark of the covenant etc is bound to be arduous in scholarly journals we generally read of the success of the demand for money like diplomats who are sent abroad to lie for the good of their country publication may require applied economists to be somewhat economical with the actualite lovell i983 leamer i983 in this article i want to be as honest as possible about our success and failures in this area the prior information an armchair economist would consider when thinking about the demand for money over the past 40 years in western industrialised countries which have experienced moderate inflation might

consumer credit in an era of financial liberalization an overreaction to repressed demand in this article we empirically analyse the factors which determined consumer credit in greece in the period before and after the financial liberalization while accounting for significant changes in structure due to the lifting of credit restrictions and the subsequent impressive boom of consumer loans we use multivariate cointegration techniques to estimate a vector error correction model vecm and identify separate demand and supply relationships for consumer loans we introduce demand and supply related shifts in parameters through the inclusion of appropriate dummy variables and trends in the long run relationships we partly deviate from the typical johansen procedure and estimate the model in two steps we find that the theoretical exclusion and coefficient size restrictions on the demand and supply cointegrating vectors are valid our results are consistent with the operation of a bank lending channel in greece we also find that the supply side was mostly responsible for the acceleration of con

the survival of the welfare state this paper provides an analytical characterization of markov perfect equilibria in a model with repeated voting where agents vote over distortionary income redistribution a key result is that the future constituency for redistributive policies depends positively on current redistribution since this affects both private investments and the future distribution of voters the model features multiple equilibria in some equilibria positive redistribution persists forever in other equilibria even a majority of beneficiaries of redistribution vote strategically so as to induce the end of the welfare state next period skill biased technical change makes the survival of the welfare state less likely

demand forecasting for multiple slow moving items with short requests history and unequal demand variance modeling the lead time demand for the multiple slow moving inventory items in the case when the available requests history is very short is a challenge for inventory management the classical forecasting technique which is based on the aggregation of the stock keeping units to overcome the mentioned historical data peculiarity is known to lead to very poor performance in many cases important for industrial applications an alternative approach to the demand forecasting for the considered problem is based on the bayesian paradigm when the initially developed population averaged demand probability distribution is modified for each item using its specific requests history this paper follows this approach and presents a new model which relies on the beta distribution as a prior for the request probability and allows to account for disparity in variance of demand between different stock keeping units to estimate the model parameters a special computationally effective technique based on the generalized method of moments is developed simulation results indicate the superiority of the proposed model over the known ones while the computational burden does not increase

the future of social security we analyze the effect of the projected demographic transition on the political support for social security and equilibrium outcomes embedding a probabilistic voting setup of electoral competition in the standard olg model with capital accumulation we find that intergenerational transfers arise in the absence of altruism commitment or trigger strategies closed form solutions predict population ageing to lead to higher social security tax rates a rising share of pensions in gdp but eventually lower social security benefits per retiree the response of equilibrium tax rates to demographic shocks reduces old age consumption risk calibrated to match features of the u s economy the model suggests that in response to the projected demographic transition social security tax rates will gradually increase to 16 other policies that distort labor supply will become less important labor supply therefore will rise in contrast with frequently voiced fears

the accuracy of a modified croston procedure a modified croston procedure to forecast intermittent demand is reviewed the modified procedure published in this journal in 2004 consists of a new method for estimating the mean demand and a smoothing method for estimating the variance of the forecasted demand rate it is found that the smoothed variance estimate is based on an invalid measure of forecast accuracy moreover it is shown that the method of forecasting mean demand produces biased forecasts the accuracy of this method is assessed using simulated data and the mean square error measure and compared with croston s method and single exponential smoothing it is found that croston s method is generally more accurate than its modification particularly for strongly intermittent series

democratic public good provision this paper analyzes an overlapping generation model of redistribution and public good provision under repeated voting expenditures are financed through age dependent taxation that distorts human capital investment taxes redistribute income both across skill groups and across generations we focus on politico economic markov equilibria and contrast these with the ramsey allocation under commitment the model features indeterminate equilibria with a key role of forward looking strategic voting due to the lack of commitment to future policies the tax burden may be on the wrong side of the dynamic laffer curve moreover restrictions on government policies can in some cases be welfare improving

eurosystem monetary targeting lessons from u s data abstract using a small empirical model of inflation output and money estimated on u s data we compare the relative performance of monetary targeting and inflation targeting the results show monetary targeting to be quite inefficient yielding both higher inflation and output variability this is true even with a nonstochastic money demand formulation our results are also robust to using a p model of inflation therefore in these popular frameworks there is no support for the prominent role given to money growth in the eurosystem s monetary policy strategy

a money demand function with output uncertainty monetary uncertainty and financial innovations in a general equilibrium framework incorporating the money in the utility function approach we show that output uncertainty and monetary uncertainty as well as output interest rates and financial innovations affect money demand the estimated long run relationships are consistent with our postulated relation but not with the conventional one our model delivers a high income elasticity consistent with cross sectional evidence and helps resolve m1 demand puzzles the model estimated in dynamic error correction form exhibits a good level of stability and forecastability providing little support for the recent de emphasis of monetary aggregates due to the instability of money demand

the demand for m3 in the euro area in this paper an empirically stable money demand model for m3 in the euro area is constructed starting with a multivariate system three cointegrating relationships with economic content are found i the spread between the long term and the short term nominal interest rates ii the long term real interest rate and iii a long run demand for broad money m3 there is evidence that the determinants of m3 money demand are weakly exogenous with respect to the long run parameters hence following a general to specific modelling approach a parsimonious conditional error correction model for m3 money demand is derived which can be interpreted economically for the conditional model long run and short run parameter stability is extensively tested and not rejected copyright 2001 john wiley sons ltd

breaks in money demand during the last twenty years beginning with the provocative paper by goldfeld 5 that revealed the case of the missing money the question of whether money demand the relationship between money income and an interest rate is stable has been intensively investigated using a variety of econometric techniques currently the most popular framework for examining the behavior of money demand is the cointegration framework in this framework the stationarity of money demand instead of the stability of money demand is evaluated earlier tests of the stability of money demand typically centered on whether the coefficient estimates were stable i e not subject to a structural break these tests did not consider the underlying time series aspects of the variables in money demand or the time series properties of their joint relationship prior to estimation as is now common given the seminal work of engle and granger 1 since then newer tests have focussed on the time series properties of the money demand variables and whether the joint relationship between the variables is stationary i e whether the variables are cointegrated engle and granger 1 and johansen and juselius 10 offer cointegration estimation procedures that have been applied by numerous researchers to the money incomeinterest rate relationship the pervasive finding is that money demand is non stationary see section ii below structural stability has not typically been a facet of investigation however the issues of stationarity and stability should not necessarily be treated independently failure to take account of structural change may bias the results in favor of non stationarity as shown in perron 16 1 history suggests that the economic environment and monetary institutions regulations and operating procedures have changed over time in the early 1970s the fixed exchange rate system collapsed when the gold exchange standard was abandoned and the u s dollar became a fiat currency during that same time the u s suffered an oil price shock that produced accelerating inflation and stagnant gdp growth an outcome that had never before been experienced in

the dynamics of government abstract we model income redistribution with dynamic distortions as determined by rational voting without commitment among individuals of different types and income realizations we find that redistribution is too persistent relative to that chosen by a planner with commitment the difference is larger the lower is the political influence of young agents the lower is the altruistic concern for future generations and the lower is risk aversion furthermore there tends to be too much redistribution in the political equilibrium finally smooth preference aggregation as under probabilistic voting produces less persistence and does not admit multiple equilibria which occur under majority voting aggregation

a closer look at long run u s money demand linear or nonlinear error correction with m0 m1 or m2 i introduction the stability of money demand has been a long standing issue 1 lucas 1988 informally analyzes the stability of a log linear m1 money demand function and concludes that real money demand is a stable function and he supports earlier findings of meltzer 1963 with an income or wealth elasticity of around unity 2 with the development of cointegration methods engle and granger 1987 numerous empirical studies have applied these techniques to long run u s money demand examples are baba hendry and starr 1992 haferand jansen 1991 hoffman and rasche 1991 and miller 1991 who find support for a cointegrated money demand model with either m1 or m2 3 king et al 1991 also find support for cointegration with m2 and a short term interest rate in contrast to these studies others have argued against a stable u s money demand function in the postwar period for example friedman and kuttner 1992 do not find support for cointegration particularly when the period march 1970 to april 1990 is considered similarly miyao 1996 studies the behavior of the m2 money demand function over the period from 1959 to 1993 with quarterly data and various interest rates in levels and in logs miyao concludes that m2 is not a useful intermediate target for monetary policy in the 1990s 4 however carlson et al 2000 reach the conclusion that m2 does have predictive content for nominal economic activity and that the real m2 money demand function is stable but only after accounting for financial innovation in the first half of the 1990s two recent papers ball 2001 and stock and watson 1993 focus on especially long data sets for the united states and m1 stock and watson 1993 analyze various estimation methods for cointegrating relationships and illustrate their performance for money demand functions with annual data from 1900 to 1987 they pay particular attention to the postwar period and use monthly data in addition to annual data for this period they employ a semi log linear real m1 money demand model with real net national product and the level of the 6 mo commercial paper rate for the postwar period they also consider the 90 day treasury bill rate and the 10 yr treasury bond rate they compare and contrast their results to those of various others they also carry out recursive estimations to check their results for stability stock and watson 1993 conclude that a long span of data is needed to estimate long run money demand functions precisely their overall evidence is in favor of a stable long run money demand function with an income elasticity near one and an interest rate semielasticity near 0 10 however the postwar data are found to be not very informative a lack of low frequency variation in the postwar data as suggested by lucas 1988 does not allow a disentangling of the effects of output and interest rates on money demand for this time period estimates are imprecise and sensitive to subsample specifications due to substantial colinearity ball 2001 revisits the m1 money demand model of stock and watson 1993 using the same data set but extended through 1996 he applies the same array of estimation techniques as stock and watson did ball obtains precise estimates over the postwar period for his extended data set an income elasticity of approximately 0 5 and a semielasticity of 0 05 for the interest rate he does not find support for a velocity specification the m1 model is not stable over the period 1900 1996 lutkepohl terasvirta and wolters 1999 apply a nonlinear error correction model with smooth transition adjustment to capture instabilities in the linear cointegration model the long run equilibrium is described by a linear cointegrating relation and the adjustment to this long run equilibrium is nonlinear they analyze german m1 money demand granger and terisvirta 1993 terasvirta 1998 and van dijk terasvirta and franses 2002 provide details on the econometric theory for estimating and testing such nonlinear models

fiscal policy in an endogenous growth model in a neoclassical growth model it is possible to make a case for public debt because a balanced growth path may be dynamically inefficient this paper shows that this possibility no longer holds in an endogenous growth model with constant external returns to capital it is shown that an increase in public debt reduces the growth rate so there always exists a future generation that will be harmed and that a reduction in public debt although it increases the growth rate cannot be pareto improving one current generation must be harmed

the costs and benefits of balanced budget rules lessons from a political economy model of fiscal policy this paper analyzes the impact of a balanced budget rule that requires that legislators do not run deficits in the political economy model of battaglini and coate 2008 the main finding is that the rule leads to a gradual reduction in the level of public debt legislators reduce debt in periods when the demand for public goods is relatively low they do so because the rule by restricting future fiscal policies raises the expected costs of carrying debt whether the rule increases citizen welfare depends on a comparison of the benefits of a lower debt burden with the costs of greater volatility in taxes and less responsive public good provision a quantitative version of the model is developed in which costs and benefits can be evaluated a welfare loss results if the debt level when the rule is imposed lies in the support of the long run distribution associated with the unconstrained equilibrium

modelling british interest rate adjustment an error correction approach an error correction model is used to capture the dynamics of british retail deposit and loan rate responses to changes in the central bank s base rate the test is conducted using a monthly series of interest rates for four generic retail banking products over the period 1986 93 the adjustment process is found to vary considerably between and within banks and products the results suggest that this market continues to exhibit many features of imperfect competition and that adjustment differences could affect the speed of the money transmission mechanism

exogeneity within the m2 demand function evidence from a large macroeconomic system a large body of literature investigates whether a stable and predictable long run association between money and its arguments exists one point of variation between models is whether to include an interest rate measure directly within the long run relationship several recent studies indicate that empirical findings are sensitive to the choice therefore the present article reexamines the empirical significance of the interest rate within a four equation macroeconomic system the results suggest that the interest rate 1 may be excluded from the m2 demand function 2 is strongly exogenous to most of the system s remaining variables and 3 may represent a common trend jel e41 e52 c32 i introduction much of recent macroeconomic literature has been dedicated to investigating whether long run relationships exist between macroeconomic variables 1 such preoccupation is understandable given the myriad models in which these relationships play a dominant role a significant portion of this literature has focused on whether a long run relationship exists between money demand and its arguments 2 of course the close association between the variables is an integral part of theories that suggest that the monetary authority may qualitatively influence the direction of the aggregate economy the estimation of long run money demand models have differed in their methodological approach and in countless other ways one specific way in which they may differ in whether the investigator s incorporates an interest rate measure directly within the long run relationship for example although fischer and nicholetti 1993 and baba et al 1992 incorporate various interest rate measures to identify the long run money demand function hendry and mizon 1998 and hendry and ericsson 1991 estimate the long run money demand function without an interest rate measure although the theoretical importance of the interest rate within the money demand function predates pigou s 1917 classic treatment and has been discussed at length elsewhere the importance empirically has recently been high lighted by sims 1980 in examining whether money granger causes output sims s results suggest that the tests are sensitive to whether a short term interest rate measure is included campbell and perron 1991 further argue that sims s findings are an outgrowth of whether the trivariate model of money prices and output are cointegrated that is i 0 or whether reduction to stationarity requires the introduction of a fourth variable the interest rate reduction to stationarity is important because estimating granger causality with nonstationary residuals may yield biased estimates due to nonstandard residual distributions the present article reexamines the significance of the interest rate within the long run money demand function specifically i examine two aspects of interest rate money behavior the initial examination is to test whether the interest rate measure three month treasury bill rate can be directly excluded from the long run m2 demand function following the methodology advanced by hendry and mizon 1993 johansen and juselius 1992 1994 and ericsson et al 1990 the test involves estimating the long run relationship with the interest rate measure and then impose the overidentifying zero restriction the associated log likelihood ratio statistics are distributed chi square n where n represents the number of overidentifying restrictions this approach however only examines whether the interest rate may be removed from the long run money demand vector a second area of interest is concerned with the short run responses of the interest rate more specifically the short run responses provide a test for granger causality within the cointegrated variables following ericsson et al 1998 granger causality is estimated where one or more cointegrated variables reject strong exogeneity