indirect currency substitution a structural approach abstract previous empirical tests of mckinnon s indirect currency substitution ics hypothesis based on macro reduced form models yield ambiguous results because evidence cannot discriminate ics from competing non monetary models this note suggests a structural model based on the money demand function preliminary evidence supports mckinnon s hypothesis for the federal republic of germany switzerland canada and the netherlands but not for the u s

some empirical evidence on the effects of shocks to monetary policy on exchange rates this paper investigates the effects of shocks to u s monetary policy on exchange rates we consider three measures of these shocks orthogonalized shocks to the federal funds rate orthogonalized shocks to the ratio of nonborrowed to total reserves and changes in the romer and romer index of monetary policy in sharp contrast to the literature we find substantial evidence of a link between monetary policy and exchange rates specifically according to our results a contractionary shock to u s monetary policy leads to i persistent significant appreciations in u s nominal and real exchange rates and ii significant persistent deviations from uncovered interest rate parity in favor of u s interest rates

a general equilibrium model with external scale economies in production abstract a general equilibrium model of an urban economy is described the standard residential land use model is extended to include a well defined production employment sector external scale economies occur in the production of the city s export good the model is designed for the numerical computation of equilibria and optima

unraveling the complex interrelationships between exchange rates and fundamentals abstract this research investigates the intrinsic characteristics of currency values by fundamentally decomposing investor expectations on 16 currencies the results on 195 exchange rates over several decades indicate investors perceive countries to be more likely to choose devaluation solutions to bop problems when inflation is lower and when an alternative drop in real income growth is more painful in addition empirical support is provided for the hypothesis that forward rates often appear biased because the distributional expectations incorporated into them include for a country with a current account deficit a small probability of a large spot decline that does not actually occur in most finite samples

currency preferences and the australian dollar abstract we investigate currency substitution and currency complementarity in the case of the australian dollar data spanning 1984 2003 contain evidence of the australian dollar s substitution for the deutschmark and complementarity with the yen and the us dollar consistent with the theory that international variables will in general affect the demand for domestic money atemporally nonseparable preferences also give rise to the possibility of third currency effects our regressions find some evidence of these for example a rise in the us federal funds rate has been associated with rises in the value of the australian dollar against the mark and yen controlling for changes in other interest rates and in money supplies and real outputs

liquidity effects and the monetary transmission mechanism several recent papers provide strong empirical support for the view that an expansionary monetary policy disturbance generates a persistent decrease in interest rates and a persistent increase in output and employment existing quantitative general equilibrium models which allow for capital accumulation are inconsistent with this view there does exist a recently developed class of general equilibrium models which can rationalize the contemporaneous response of interest rates output and employment to a money supply shock however a key shortcoming of these models is that they cannot rationalize persistent liquidity effects this paper discusses the basic frictions and mechanisms underlying this new class of models and investigates one avenue for generating persistence we argue that once a simplified version of the model in christiano and eichenbaum 1991 is modified to allow for extremely small costs of adjusting sectoral flow of funds positive money shocks generate long lasting quantitatively significant liquidity effects as well as persistent increases in aggregate economic activity

inflation and welfare in a monetary economy it is in everyone s private interest to try to get someone else to hold non interest bearing cash and reserves but someone has to hold it all so these efforts must simply cancel out all of us spend several hours per year in this effort and employ thousands of talented and highly trained people to help us these person hours are simply thrown away wasted on a task that should not have to be performed at all

liquidity and exchange rates abstract we present a two country extension of lucas s 1988a work on cash in advance constraints in asset markets in the model there is temporary separation between the goods and asset markets and money is used for transactions in both we first find that the exchange rate level depends on the share of money used for asset transactions a greater share appreciates the currency second stochastic open market operations increasing the domestic bonds supply appreciate the domestic currency third the liquidity effects of bond supply shocks cause an excess volatility of nominal exchange rates even when their fundamental value is constant

inventories stock outs and production smoothing if stock outs are ignored and if demand shocks are additive then optimal behaviour requires that the marginal cost of production mc be equated with the expected marginal revenue of increasing expected sales by one unit emr however with more general demand shocks and still ignoring stock outs the excess of mc over emr has the same sign as the covariance of the slope of the demand curve and the marginal valuation of inventory the equality of emr and mc is also broken by taking account of stock outs even if demand shocks are additive if there is a production lag then taking account of stock outs implies that optimal behaviour will be characterized by production smoothing even if the cost of production is linear two alternative definitions of production smoothing are presented and optimal behaviour in the presence of stock outs displays each type of smoothing it is a well known proposition that a firm producing a storable good under conditions of increasing marginal cost will tend to smooth the time profile of its production relative to the time profile of its sales the incentive to smooth production arises from the fact that the cost function is a convex function of the level of production for a given average level of production average costs can be reduced by reducing the variation in production of course if the cost function is linear in the level of production then this incentive to smooth production disappears however we will demonstrate in this paper that if the possibility of stock outs is explicitly incorporated into the firm s dynamic optimization problem i e if we impose a non negativity constraint on inventories and if there is a lag in production then optimal behaviour can be characterized by production smoothing even if the cost function is linear

the identification of monetary policy disturbances explaining the liquidity puzzle abstract this paper examines recent work on the identification of monetary policy disturbances its main finding is that the empirical anomalies found in the literature reflect a failure to properly address the federal reserve s policy of accommodating reserve demand shocks a new method of identifying monetary policy using nonborrowed reserves is proposed using this specification policy has a strong persistent liquidity effect regardless of subsample policy granger causes output even in the presence of interest rates explaining approximately 49 of the variance in output at a two year horizon and the residual explanatory power of interest rates for output is negligible

the handbook of international macroeconomics preface 1 introduction rick van der ploeg amsterdam 2 quantity constrained models of open economies neil rankin warwick 3 imperfect competition and open economy macroeconomics huw d dixon york 4 relative price movements in dynamic general equilibrium models of international trade david backus nyu patrick kehoe pennsylvania and finn kydland carnegie mellon 5 international fiscal policy coordination and competition assaf razin and efraim sadka tel aviv 6 capital taxation in the world economy a lans bovenberg tilburg 7 history of the international monetary system implications for research in international macroeconomics and finance barry eichengreen berkeley 8 on inflation unemployment and the optimal exchange rate regime george alogoskoufis athens 9 macroeconomic policy speculative attacks and balance of payments crisis pierre richard agenor and robert p flood imf 10 continuous time models of exchange rates and intervention giuseppe bertola princeton 11 stylized facts of nominal exchange rate returns casper g de vries leuven 12 partial versus general equilibrium models of international capital market equilibrium 13 sovereign debt kenneth kletzer santa cruz 14 growth and external debt daniel cohen cepremap 15 growth and deficits in an interdependent world index

taking stock a critical assessment of recent research on inventories empirical and theoretical aspects of inventory behavior became hot topics in the 1950s and early 1960s no one seemed to notice the tension that was developing between the emerging macroeconomic and microeconomic views of inventories macroeconomists routinely thought of inventories as a destabilizing factor yet the prevailing micro theory viewed inventories as a stabilizing factor it was a fascinating question that was barely explored instead somewhat inexplicably interest in inventories dried up as if inventories were of minor economic significance and little intrinsic interest by the early 1980s then economists once again knew something they had known in the 1950s that inventory investment is of first order importance in business cycles but they were also beginning to realize that the standard production smoothing buffer stock model of inventories was in deep trouble this paper focuses on developments since that realization

covered interest arbitrage and market turbulence the covered interest parity theorem states that the covered interest differential between two similar assets denominated in different currencies should be zero this paper utilizes high quality data recorded by the dealers at the bank of england to test covered interest parity during certain historical periods in which there is known to have been turbulence as well as during a relatively calm control period the data is high frequency and allowance is made for the bid offer spread brokerage costs and other considerations the results have three main implications firstly profitable arbitrage opportunities do occasionally occur and sometimes persist during turbulent periods secondly the degree of efficiency of the relevant markets appears to have increased over time thirdly there appears to be a maturity effect whereby the existence and size of profitable arbitrage opportunities appear to be positive functions of the length of maturity a rationalization of this phenomenon is offered in terms of the existence of credit limits copyright 1989 by royal economic society

why is production more volatile than sales theory and evidence on the stockout avoidance motive for inventory holding this paper argues that the macroeconomically interesting features of inventory behavior are well captured by a model in which firms face only demand uncertainty with a nonnegativity constraint on inventories empirical implications of the stockout avoidance model of inventory behavior are derived and then tested on disaggregated automobile industry data the results largely support the model though they suggest a small role for production smoothing as well subsidiary evidence on the relative variance of demand and cost shocks suggests that demand shocks are indeed more important

the interrelationship between price and output decisions and investment decisions microfoundations and aggregate implications abstract this paper develops a model of firm behavior in which both price and output decisions and investment decisions are made the model permits an analysis of the dynamics of inventory and capital accumulation on price and output behavior there are two main results 1 short run price and output levels will differ from long run levels as desired stocks of inventory and capital diverge from actual levels 2 the size of the elasticities of price and output to changes in demand and cost variables depends on the speed with which gaps between desired and actual stocks are closed through investment

are real exchange rates nonstationary evidence from a panel data test it is well documented that real exchange rates between the united states and many industrialized countries in the post bretton woods period are integrated this result implies that purchasing power parity ppp does not hold even as a long run relationship this paper demonstrates that the failure to reject the unit root hypothesis may result from the low power of existing univariate test procedures i test for unit roots in real exchange rates by employing a more powerful panel based procedure using both cpi and wpi real dollar exchange rate data i strongly reject the null hypothesis of a unit root my results provide overwhelming support for the long run ppp under the current float copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

fx trading and exchange rate dynamics i examine the sources of exchange rate dynamics by focusing on the information structure of fx trading this structure permits the existence of an equilibrium distribution of transaction prices at a point in time i develop and estimate a model of the price distribution using data from the deutsche mark dollar market that prroduces two striking results 1 much of the short term volatility in exchange rates comes from sampling the heterogeneous trading decisions of dealers in a distribution that under normal market conditions changes comparatively slowly 2 public news is rarely the predominant source of exchange rate movements over any horizon copyright the american finance association 2002

some empirical evidence on the production level and production cost smoothing models of inventory investment the production smoothing model of inventories has long been the basic paradigm within which empirical research on inventories has been conducted the basic hypothesis embedded in this model is that inventories of finished goods serve primarily to smooth production levels in the face of fluctuating demand and convex cost functions however once we allow for shocks to technology and the costs of producing output firms will also use inventories to shift production from periods in which production costs are relatively high to periods in which production costs are relatively low in this sense inventories can serve to smooth production costs rather production levels in this paper we examine the empirical plausibility of the production level and production cost smoothing models of inventories our basic strategy is to derive and contrast a set of unconditional moment restrictions implied by these models in a way that minimizes the role of auxiliary assumptions regarding market structure and industry demand we find overwhelming evidence against the production level smoothing model and very little evidence against the production cost smoothing mode1 we conclude that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales in most manufacturing industries because the production cost smoothing role of inventories is quantitatively more important than the production level smoothing role of inventories this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the production and inventory behavior of the american automobile industry understanding inventory movements is central to an understanding of business cycles this paper presents an empirical study of the behavior of inventories in the automobile industry it finds that inventory behavior is well explained by the assumption of intertemporal optimization with rational expectations the underlying cost structure appears to have substantial costs of changing production as well as substantial costs of being away from target inventory thelatter being a function of current sales given this cost structure whether inventory behavior is stabilizing or destabilizing depends on the characteristics of the demand process in the automobile industry inventory behavior is destabilizing the variance of production is larger than the variance of sales

telework urban form energy consumption and greenhouse gas implications a primary motivation of telework policy is to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions using a numerical simulation of the standard urban model we show telework causes sprawl calling into question the idea that telework decreases energy consumption overall effects depend on wage changes due to telework land use regulation such as height limits or greenbelts and the telework participation rate while energy consumption increases in some scenarios emissions may fall due to changes in the energy mix between gasoline and other sources jel r11 r28 c60

currency substitution and the demand for money some evidence for canada recently the possibility that foreign and domestic currencies are substitutes has received considerable attention see 1 2 3 10 19 21 currency substitution has important implications for the working of flexible exchange rates if the degree of currency substitution is high small changes in the money supply would induce large changes in the exchange rate furthermore currency substitution would transmit the effect of monetary disturbances from one country to another indeed significant currency substitution would seriously undermine the ability of flexible exchange rates to provide monetary independence this paper examines the empirical importance of currency substitution in the framework of the demand function for money if currency substitution is important the expected change in the exchange rate should be a significant determinant of the demand for home currency in section 2 we undertake such a test for the canadian demand for money during the recent flexible exchange rate period there is considerable evidence that the forward exchange rate is a good measure of the expected exchange rate our own tests confirm these results for canadian data since 1970

saving and liquidity constraints this paper is concerned with the theory of saving when consumers are not permitted to borrow and with the ability of such a theory to account for some of the stylized facts of saving behavior the models presented in the paper seem to account for important aspects of reality that are not explained by traditional life cycle models copyright 1991 by the econometric society

cross currency cross maturity forward exchange premiums as predictors of spot rate changes theory and evidence abstract this paper shows that in predicting the spot rate of a currency the term structures of forward premiums of other currencies have incremental information content in addition to the term structure of the currency s own forward premiums the theoretical model motivating the analysis hinges on the abundant evidence on the co movements of excess returns from investing in different currencies the empirical results are obtained through fiml estimation of a vector error correction model for weekly data on three bilateral us dollar exchange rates

liquidity models in open economies theory and empirical evidence abstract this paper presents an overview of recent theoretical and empirical research on liquidity models in open economies this is a class of optimizing models where money has effects on real asset prices and economic activity without relying on the ad hoc assumption of price wage stickiness the non neutrality of money derives from a temporary segmentation between goods and asset markets after surveying the theoretical literature on liquidity models we present empirical evidence based on var econometric techniques for the seven major industrial countries such evidence is shown to be consistent with the main implications of the liquidity models

forward discount puzzle and liquidity effects some evidence from exchange rates among the united states canada and japan this paper empirically examines whether the interaction between foreign exchange markets and monetary markets can help to resolve the forward discount puzzle following the monetary models of lucas 1990 and fuerst 1992 we define as liquidity effects the negative impact of monetary injection on nominal interest rates temporary deviations from the standard euler equation the liquidity effect identified by these models weakens the linkage between current forward rates and expected future spot rates and improves on the standard rational expectations model that predicts a one to one correspondence between the two using time series of exchange rates among the united states canada and japan this paper shows that the liquidity measure identified above has an impact on forward premiums and that once the liquidity effect is taken into consideration the unbiased prediction of the forward discount rate is recovered to some extent in a theoretically consistent manner

estimating the effects of monetary shocks an evaluation of different approaches abstract this paper compares several methods for estimating the effects of monetary innovations on key macroeconomic variables and subsequently clarifies issues related to the use of instrumental variables in the identification of structural impulse responses in particular we make explicit the property that a measure of monetary policy must satisfy in order to identify the effects of monetary shocks within our framework we find that none of the currently popular methods of identifying the effects of monetary shocks are supported by the data we also indicate how current approaches can be combined to provide unbiased estimates of the effects of monetary disturbances

productivity and city size a critique of the evidence a critique of two leading articles in the productivity and city size literature results in revised estimates of the productivity advantages of large cities in particular extant estimates of the elasticity of productivity with city size are revised downward by over 100 percent for the manufacturing sector and about 25 percent for the entire urban economy after revision productivity advantages of larger cities are found to be much larger for the nonmanufacturing sector than for the manufacturing sector hence revitalization policies for large cities should be focused on nonmanufacturing sectors

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

liquidity loanable funds and real activity abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model of two traditional explanations of the monetary black box linking money and real activity the liquidity effect and the loanable funds effect these effects are modeled with a monetary production economy in which central bank injections of cash are funnelled into the economy through the credit market since only borrowers have direct access to the newly injected cash monetary injections cause nominal interest rates to fall if firms are borrowers then monetary injections also increase current and future real activity

the global configuration of a speculative trading operation an empirical study of foreign exchange trading this paper proposes a theory of firm boundaries based on fore knowledge development and exploitation in speculative or informed trading foreign exchange trading provides this study s empirical context from research on information economics we suggest optimal speculative trading operations are multiunit and globally dispersed alternatively transaction cost economics suggests atomistic actors prevail in the market for fungible commodities like currencies we also develop competing hypotheses about information technology s effects on foreign exchange trading operations speculation arguments predict that the global scope of trading operations will expand after the introduction of generic information technologies transaction cost economics proposes that when atomistic actors do not prevail trading operations will contract after this introduction we test competing predictions with models of the expansion contraction and net change in a firm s global dispersion we estimate these models with data from the population of banks worldwide engaged in interbank foreign exchange currency fx trading from 1974 to 1993 our results uncover two types of firms those that approach the atomistic actor of transaction cost economics and those that resemble the globally dispersed multiunit configuration from our speculation discussion these results encourage reflection on how the theory of the firm differs when firms trade to produce versus speculate

accounting for forward rates in markets for foreign currency absteract forward and spot exchange rates between major currencies imply large standard deviations of both predictable returns from currency speculation and of the equilibrium price measure the intertemporal marginal rate of substitution representative agent theory with time additive preferences cannot account for either of these properties we show that the theory does considerably better along these dimensions when the representative agent s preferences exhibit habit persistence but that the theory fails to reproduce some of the other properties of the data in particular the strong autocorrelation of forward premiums since the advent of flexible exchange rates in the early 1970s a large body of statistical work has established that forward rates for major currencies are not optimal predictors of future spot rates relevant evidence is reported in studies by baillie lippens and mcmahon 1983 bekaert 1991 bilson 1981 boothe and longworth 1984 cumby 1988 cumby and obstfeld 1984 fama 1984 gregory and mccurdy 1984 hansen and hodrick 1983 hodrick and srivastava 1984 and korajczyk and viallet 1990 a more complete list of references is provided by hodrick 1987 these papers indicate that returns from speculation in forward and spot currency markets are predictable and that the predictable components vary considerably over time a number of alternative explanations have been offered for the predictable variation in foreign currency market excess returns kaminsky 1988 korajczyk 1985 and krasker 1980 suggest that infrequent extreme events may make returns appear predictable in small samples the so called peso problem lewis 1989 argues that rational learning following infrequent changes in the process governing equilibrium prices can explain part of the ex post predictability of currency returns froot and frankel 1989 and froot and thaler 1990 examine the hypothesis that market forecasts of future spot

inventories and sticky prices note in a recent contribution to this review alan blinder provides an interesting analysis of the relationship between optimal inventory decisions and the process of price adjustment arguing that inventory permits separation of production and sale decisions and allows the firm greater flexibility in responding to anticipated demand disturbances blinder shows that the responsiveness of relative prices depends critically upon the cost of storage and the temporal structure of the demand shocks few economists would fault the intuitive substance of blinder s basic proposition and the proposition is justified with characteristic precision the analysis however is considerably less general than blinder maintains the formal argument of his paper relies upon a simple model of a monopolist capable of backlogging orders and storing unsold goods as the model is constructed order backlogs assume a role of fundamental importance in any stationary equilibrium this feature of the model vitiates blinder s extension of his result to situations in which order backlogs are prohibited the basic monopoly model developed in sections i and ii of blinder s paper places no restriction upon the sign of inventory negative inventory is interpreted as net unfilled orders while no distinction is drawn between reductions in gross inventory and additions to the order backlog as a result the cost of holding inventory is symmetric around an arbitrary minimum point the only role of inventory is to permit the time paths of production and sales to differ gross inventory allows production to antedate sales while order backlogs generate revenue before production costs are borne under these circumstances if future costs and revenues are discounted it is natural to expect any stationary equilibrium level of net inventory to be negative this can be shown to be true of blinder s model it is useful to distinguish in general between the nonstochastic stationary level of inventory n and the stochastic stationary level n the former is realized when the current expected demand disturbance eo is zero and production equals sales the latter which differs from customary usage represents the level of inventory expected to prevail when adjustment to the current nonzero expected demand disturbance is complete if the demand disturbance is not a random walk so that p 1 in blinder s 5 the two equilibria coincide relatively little attention is devoted to either stationary solution because blinder s main interest is in the optimal current solution level n1 the stochastic stationary level is crucially important however since it represents the goal toward which the current choice must provide an optimal first step to verify that both nand n are negative whenever production is strictly positive note that blinder s necessary condition 7 with the coefficient cl set equal to zero together with the definition of xa as the deviation of the shadow value of inventory q from its nonstochastic stationary value q implies

telecommuting traffic congestion and agglomeration a general equilibrium model abstract we develop a fully closed general equilibrium model of a monocentric city in which land is allocated to production housing and roads cbd workers and telecommuters are imperfectly substitutable in production cbd workers contribute to the cbd s agglomeration economies but cause traffic congestion in commuting telecommuters do not cause congestion and do not contribute to agglomeration the effects of telecommuting on the urban economy and land use pattern are studied the first best optimal policy in the presence of agglomeration economies congestion and telecommuting is derived and its impacts are compared with the effects of different second best policies

currency substitution under finance constraints the perfect foresight continuous time couterpart of lucas and stokey s cash in advance model is generalized to the case of two currencies the money demand function for eac currency has as arguments the endowments of goods associated with each denomination various monetary shocks are investigated including permanent and temporary changes in levels and growth rates it is shown that substitution can be an important factor in explaining the possible negative transmission of inflation the amount of volatility of exchange rates and the degree tp which exchange rate movements approximate a random walk

how well can the new open economy macroeconomics explain the exchange rate and current account abstract this paper advances the new open economy macroeconomic literature in an empirical direction estimating and testing a two country model fit to u s and g7 data the model performs moderately well for the exchange rate and current account results offer guidance for future theoretical work parameter estimates lend support to the assumption of local currency pricing estimates are found for key parameters commonly calibrated in the theoretical literature such as the elasticity of substitution between home and foreign composite goods and the response of a country s risk premium to the net foreign asset position results also indicate that deviations from interest rate parity are not closely related to monetary policy shocks as recently hypothesized but that these deviations are strongly related to shifts in the current account

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

inventories and the volatility of production a stylized fact associated with inventory behavior is that the variance of production exceeds the variance of sales this paper presents a model of production decisions with demand uncertainty that incorporates no nnegativity constraints on inventories even with no productivity shocks optimal behavior by the firm is consistent with this stylized fact either if demand exhibits positive serial correlation or if the firm can backlog excess demand the reason is that a demand shock affects both the actual inventory level given unchanged production and the desired level production must replenish the stock and adjust to the new desired level copyright 1987 by american economic association

the econometric analysis of models with risk terms summary in this paper we have attempted to provide an integrated approach to the estimation of models with risk terms it was argued that there exist orthogonality conditions between variables in the information set and higher order moments of the unanticipated variable density these could be exploited to provide consistent estimators of the parameters associated with the risk term specifically it was recommended that an iv estimator should be applied with instruments constructed from the information set four existing methods commonly used to estimate models with risk terms are examined and applications of the techniques are made to the estimation of the risk term in the us c exchange market and the effects of price uncertainty upon production

production smoothing evidence from physical product data we reconsider the paradox that the variance of production often exceeds the variance of shipments a result that casts doubt on the production smoothing model of inventory behavior most studies of production smoothing have analyzed two digit sic dollar value data from commerce department surveys in contrast this paper examines disaggregated physical product data and finds that production is smoother than shipments in about two thirds of the 38 industry or product groupings considered however doubts about the model persist most notably euler equation estimates of the model s cost parameters are usually imprecise and often do not have the signs postulated by production smoothing models

intervention in the mark dollar market the authorities reaction function abstract this paper investigates the intervention behavior of the deutsche bundesbank in the dollar dm market over the period 1974 to 1981 an intervention reaction model is developed which stresses the conditioning role of perceived exchange rate uncertainty the most important findings from non linear estimates are i an increase in perceived exchange rate risk shifts the bundesbank s trade off between money and exchange rate control in favor of the former aim probably due to risk aversion of the managers of the foreign department ii the bank tries to counter exchange speculation by compressing the expected risk premium and iii the bank does not completely sterilize

multi country evidence on the behavior of purchasing power parity under the current float abstract using panel data for the united states and 22 other oecd countries for the current float this paper presents evidence that despite substantial short term perturbations purchasing power parity actually performed much better than commonly believed average rates of growth of real exchange rates over long horizons bear little relationship either to average rates of growth of nominal exchange rates or to average inflation differentials thus implying a close to one to one relation between average rates of growth of nominal exchange rates and average inflation differentials panel data variants of standard unit root tests suggest that the real exchange rates of these countries can be characterized as mean reverting

money and interest in a cash in advance economy the authors analyze an aggregative general equilibrium model in which the use of money is motivated by a cash in advance constraint applied to purchases of a subset of consumption goods the system is subject to both real and monetary shocks which are economy wide and observed by all they develop methods for verifying the existence of characterizing and explicitly calculating equilibria copyright 1987 by the econometric society

congestion land use and job dispersion a general equilibrium model abstract in dispersed cities congestion tolls would drive up central wages and rents and would induce centrally located producers to want to disperse closer to their workers and their customers paying lower rents and realizing productivity gains from land to labor substitution but the tolls would also induce residents to want to locate more centrally in order to economize on commuting and shopping travel in a computable general equilibrium model we find that the centralizing effect of tolls on residences dominates on the decentralizing effect of tolls on firms causing the dispersed city to have more centralized job and population densities under stylized parameters we find that efficiency gains from levying congestion tolls on work and shopping travel are 3 0 of average income about 80 of such gains come from road planning and 20 from tolls

momentary exchange rate locked in a triangular mechanism of international currency this study uses two way quoted data on major and nonmajor currencies to test the exchange rate dynamics particular attention is paid to the arbitrage and the spread in triangular foreign exchange trades there is only one possible triangle when a bilateral exchange rate equals its trilateral rate otherwise any third currency would potentially create arbitrage opportunities empirical testing evidence supports that small but possibly exploitable profitable arbitrage has significantly occurred over the very short haul of uncertainty and turbulence in other words we are convinced that the bilateral exchange rate could be diverged from one common currency side of the trilateral basket rates until markets function efficiently this helps in better explaining foreign exchange rate movements in addition we find that the currency correlating decreases slightly but the volatility increases over time as we expected

estimating the linear quadratic inventory model maximum likelihood versus generalized method of moments abstract we compare generalized method of moments gmm and maximum likelihood ml estimators of the parameters of a linear quadratic inventory model using nondurable manufacturing data and monte carlo simulations data based gmm estimates for five normalizations vary widely generally rejecting the model the ml estimate generally supports the model monte carlo experiments reveal that the gmm estimates are often biased apparently due to poor instruments statistically insignificant economically implausible and dynamically unstable the ml estimates are generally unbiased even in misspecified models statistically significant economically plausible and dynamically stable asymptotic standard errors for ml are 3 to 15 times smaller than for gmm

a panel project on purchasing power parity mean reversion within and between countries abstract previous time series studies have shown evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates deviations from purchasing power parity ppp appear to have half lives of approximately four years however the long samples required for statistical significance are unavailable for most currencies and are potentially inappropriate because of regime changes in this study we re examine deviations from ppp using a panel of 150 countries and 45 annual post wwii observations our panel shows strong evidence of mean reversion that is similar to that from long time series ppp deviations are eroded at a rate of approximately 15 annually i e their half life is around four years such findings can be masked in time series data but are relatively easy to find in cross sections

on the theory of the firm underlying empirical models of aggregate price behavior recent empirical work on aggregate and industrial price behavior has been conducted within the framework of a static neo classical theory of price formation 2 the purpose of this paper is to propose a more general theoretical framework for analyzing price behavior the proposed framework is neo classical in its basic characteristics but unlike the recent literature it is based on a dynamic theory of firm behavior in which decisions on price inventories and the capital stock are integrated to serve as a basis for comparison with the model developed here it is useful to state briefly the main propositions of the static neo classical model the model presumes that the typical firm behaves as if it were a simple monopolist that faces competitive factor input markets and sets its price so as to maximize current profits assuming a log linear demand function and production function the model yields the result that the firm s long run optimal price policy in general is

an analysis of the inventory behavior in a q theoretic framework this paper develops a generalized q model in which a monopolist with perfect foresight holds inventories this model permits an analysis of the dynamics of inventories in the presence of various types of deterministic demand and supply shocks the results suggest that if only positive inventories are allowed inventories are more successful in smoothing expected upward than downward variations in demand if unfilled orders are permitted then production smoothing accompanies any type of demand shock but inventories are generally negative the estimation of the linear quadratic model on data generated using the two versions of the generalized q model shows that incentives to smooth production appear only when the firm is allowed to have negative inventories

traffic congestion s economic impacts evidence from us metropolitan regions traffic congestion alleviation has long been a common core transport policy objective but it remains unclear under which conditions this universal byproduct of urban life also impedes the economy using panel data for 88 us metropolitan statistical areas this study estimates congestion s drag on employment growth 1993 to 2008 and productivity growth per worker 2001 to 2007 using instrumental variables results suggest that congestion slows job growth above thresholds of approximately 4 5 minutes of delay per one way auto commute and 11 000 average daily traffic adt per lane on average across the regional freeway network while higher adt per freeway lane appears to slow productivity growth there is no evidence of congestion induced travel delay impeding productivity growth results suggest that the strict policy focus on travel time savings may be misplaced and instead better outlooks for managing congestion s economic drag lie in prioritising the economically most important trips perhaps through road pricing or in providing alternative travel capacity to enable access despite congestion

inventories and sticky prices more on the microfoundations of macroeconomics the role of inventories in making prices sticky is studied by analyzing a dynamic linear quadratic model of a monopoly firm facing stochastic demand but able to store its finished goods in inventory it is shown that in contrast to the usual presumption firms that exhibit the smallest output responses to demand fluctuations may also exhibit the smallest price fluctuations specifically firms which have very flexible inventory storage facilities or are subjected to very transitory demand shocks will rely on inventories as buffers and will change neither production nor price very much on the other hand firms which have very inflexible storage facilities or whose demand shocks are quite permanent will display large swings in both price and output the standard assumption about inventory carrying costs that has been used in the literature that they are linear is shown to imply that production is impervious to fluctuations in demand it is also established that prices may respond more strongly to positive demand shocks than to negative ones if it is impossible to hold negative inventories i e to have unfilled orders the model offers an explanation for stickiness in relative prices however under certain circumstances it may help explain the persistence of inflation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

can the production smoothing model of inventory behavior be saved the production smoothing model of inventory behavior has a long and venerable history and theoretical foundations that seem very strong yet certain overwhelming facts seem not only to defy explanation within the production smoothing framework but actually to argue that the basic idea of production smoothing is all wrong most prominent among these is the fact that the variance of detrended production exceeds the variance of detrended sales this paper first documents the stylized facts then it derives the production smoothing model rigorously and explains how the model can be amended to make it consistent with the facts finally it reviews the theoretical and empirical evidence and tries to draw some tentative conclusions

covered interest parity a high frequency high quality data study profitable deviations from covered interest parity cip represent riskless arbitrage opportunities and so indicate market ineffic iency previous empirical work on cip uses noncontemporaneously sampl ed data and reports mixed results this paper uses high frequency te n minute high quality data gathered personally by the author in th e london foreign exchange market to test the cip condition the resu lts overwhelmingly support the market efficiency hypothesis copyright 1987 by the review of economic studies limited