fixing exchange rates a virtual quest for fundamentals abstract fixed exchange rates are less volatile than floating rates but the volatility of macroeconomic variables such as money and output does not change very much across exchange rate regimes this suggests that exchange rate models based only on macroeconomic fundamentals are unlikely to be very successful it also suggests that there is no clear tradeoff between reduced exchange rate volatility and macroeconomic stability

incentives productivity and labor contracts the relationship between age earnings profiles and worker incentives is examined by contrasting wage and salary workers with the self employed it is argued that the steepness of wage and salary workers age earnings profiles reflects the desire to provide work incentives to those workers since self employed workers do not face this agency problem they are used as a benchmark to gauge productivity empirical support of the proposition is provided and the effects of human capital accumulation are separated empirically from incentive effects the most important conclusion is that under some strong assumptions most of the slope in age earnings profiles is accounted for by the desire to provide incentives rather than by on the job training

the ir relevance of real wage rigidity in the new keynesian model with search frictions we explore the role of real wage dynamics in a new keynesian business cycle model with search and matching frictions in the labor market both job creation and destruction are endogenous we show that the model generates counterfactual inflation and labor market dynamics in particular it fails to generate a beveridge curve vacancies and unemployment are positively correlated introducing real wage rigidity leads to a negative correlation and increases the magnitude of labor market flows to more realistic values however inflation dynamics are only weakly affected by real wage rigidity this is because of the presence of labor market frictions which generate long run employment relationships the measure of real marginal cost that is relevant for inflation dynamics via the phillips curve contains a dynamic component that does not necessarily move with real wages

the return of the wage phillips curve the standard new keynesian model with staggered wage setting is shown to imply a simple dynamic relation between wage inflation and unemployment under some assumptions that relation takes a form similar to that found in empirical applications starting with the original phillips 1958 curve and may thus be viewed as providing some theoretical foundations to the latter the structural wage equation derived here is shown to account reasonably well for the comovement of wage inflation and the unemployment rate in the u s economy even under the strong assumption of a constant natural rate of unemployment

vacancies unemployment and the phillips curve abstract the canonical new keynesian phillips curve has become a standard component of models designed for monetary policy analysis however in the basic new keynesian model there is no unemployment all variation in labor input occurs along the intensive hours margin and the driving variable for inflation depends on workers marginal rates of substitution between leisure and consumption in this paper we incorporate a theory of unemployment into the new keynesian theory of inflation and empirically test its implications for inflation dynamics we show how a traditional phillips curve linking inflation and unemployment can be derived and how the elasticity of inflation with respect to unemployment depends on structural characteristics of the labor market such as the matching technology that pairs vacancies with unemployed workers we estimate on us data the phillips curve generated by the model while we can reject the baseline new keynesian phillips curve in favor of the search frictions specification we show it is still too stylized to fully describe the dynamics of firms marginal costs

dynamic forecasts of qualitative variables a qual var model of u s recessions this article presents a new qual var model for incorporating information from qualitative and or discrete variables in vector autoregressions with a qual var it is possible to create dynamic forecasts of the qualitative variable using standard var projections previous forecasting methods for qualitative variables in contrast produce only static forecasts i apply the qual var to forecasting the 2001 business recession out of sample and to analyzing the romer and romer narrative measure of monetary policy contractions as an endogenous variable in a var out of sample the model predicts the timing of the 2001 recession quite well relative to the recession probabilities put forth at the time by professional forecasters qual vars which include information about the qualitative variable can also enhance the quality of density forecasts of the other variables in the system

modeling the impact of technological change on nutrition and marketed surplus abstract this study develops and demonstrates procedures for modeling the impact of agricultural technology adoption decisions on consumption and nutrition in a subsistence farming context the method is based on expected direct utility maximization edum formulation and incorporates subsistence quantities for broad aggregates of protein calories and other consumption goods the method is applied to a hillside farming system of southern honduras where new sorghum cultivars and erosion control techniques are being introduced the expected direct utility maximization model allows the estimation of the effects of new technology on consumption and marketed surplus in situations where marginal values of products vary by state of nature and are affected by consumption and production choices the introduction of the new technologies in southern honduras results in improved nutrition and substantial increases in marketed surplus these effects are due to simultaneous changes in output and consumption patterns this work extends the subject of household modeling to problems with risk and thus complements prior work in both the integrated analysis of production consumption decisions and stochastic decision analysis

job destruction and propagation of shocks this paper considers propagation of aggregate shocks in a dynamic general equilibrium model with labor market matching and endogenous job destruction cyclical fluctuations in the job destruction rate magnify the output effects of shocks as well as making them much more persistent interactions between capital adjustment and the job destruction rate play an important role in generating persistence propagation effects are shown to be quantitatively substantial when the model is calibrated using job flow data incorporating costly capital adjustment leads to significantly greater propagation

job matching and on the job training conventional analysis predicts that workers pay part of their on the job training costs by accepting a lower starting wage and subsequently realize a return to this investment in the form of greater wage growth missing from the conventional treatment of on the job training is a discussion of the process by which heterogeneous workers are matched to jobs requiring varying amounts of training this matching process constitutes a key feature of the on the job training model presented in this article and tested with a unique data set containing extensive information concerning on the job training employer search wages and wage and productivity growth

an examination of firms employment costs the existence of quasi fixed costs of work may affect firms desired employee hours and number of workers which has important implications for the estimation of labour supply parameters firm level data from the 1982 employment opportunity pilot project is used to estimate the importance to firms of employee quasi fixed costs related to searching hiring training and firing specifically this paper examines how these costs affect number of workers and hours per worker turnover and vacancies to the extent that the costs are determined by the firm s presumably exogenous industrial classification an attempt is made to control for biases due to employee heterogeneity as well results show that higher costs are associated with lower turnover fewer vacancies and longer hours as predicted by a model of labour demand

high frequency analysis of foreign exchange interventions what do we learn abstract the high frequency analysis of foreign exchange dynamics is helpful in order to better identify the impact of central bank interventions evidence robustly shows that interventions do indeed move the exchange rate level in the desired direction interventions increase volatility in the short run as they are regarded as information but they can reduce volatility overall ways of transmission may reach beyond the signalling channel and also include the portfolio balance and a damping channel finally interventions are more successful if they obey certain conditions such as being coordinated among central banks and going with the market and fundamentals

wage rigidity and job creation recent research in macroeconomics emphasizes the role of wage rigidity in accounting for the volatility of unemployment fluctuations we use worker level data from the cps to measure the sensitivity of wages of newly hired workers to changes in aggregate labor market conditions the wage of new hires unlike the aggregate wage is volatile and responds almost one to one to changes in labor productivity we conclude that there is little evidence for wage rigidity in the data

central bank interventions and exchange rate band regimes abstract this paper presents an endogenous switching regression model for the exchange rate process where the switch is defined by the central bank criteria functions for intervening we study the signal effect of interventions on the exchange rate using norwegian daily data on official interventions we first find that interventions seemed to have been more effective in moving the exchange rate in the expected desired direction in the regime when the exchange rate was kept away from the edges of the band this type of intervention regime also reduces significantly the conditional volatility of the exchange rate thus when the exchange rate was near the weakest edge of the currency band its conditional variance was significantly larger than when it was moving around its central parity finally we show that in order to obtain consistent estimates intervention variables cannot enter as exogenous variables in the conditional mean or conditional variance of the exchange rate

identifying the efficacy of central bank interventions evidence from australia and japan abstract using a model incorporating the endogenous relationship between exchange rates and intervention we show how a change in central bank policy can be used as an identification assumption estimating this model with simulated gmm for daily data from australia and japan we find that a us 100 million purchase appreciates the australian dollar by 1 3 1 8 but the yen by just 0 2 almost all of the impact of an intervention occurs during the day it is conducted and we confirm that central banks typically lean against the wind

frictional wage dispersion in search models a quantitative assessment we propose a new measure of frictional wage dispersion the mean min wage ratio for a large class of search models we show that this measure is independent of the wage offer distribution but depends on statistics of labor market turnover and on preferences under plausible preference parameterizations observed magnitudes for worker flows imply that in the basic search model and in most of its extensions frictional wage dispersion is very small notable exceptions are some of the most recent models of on the job search our new measure allows us to rationalize the diverse empirical findings in the large literature estimating structural search models

do matching frictions explain unemployment not in bad times this paper models unemployment as the result of matching frictions and job rationing job rationing is a shortage of jobs arising naturally in an economic equilibrium from the combination of some wage rigidity and diminishing marginal returns to labor during recessions job rationing is acute driving the rise in unemployment whereas matching frictions contribute little to unemployment intuitively in recessions jobs are lacking the labor market is slack recruiting is easy and inexpensive so matching frictions do not matter much in a calibrated model cyclical fluctuations in the composition of unemployment are quantitatively large

optimal fiscal policy with labor selection this paper characterizes long run and short run optimal scal policy in the labor selection framework quantitatively the time series volatility of the labor income tax rate is orders of magnitude larger than the tax smoothing results based on walrasian labor markets but is a few times smaller than the results based on search and matching labor markets to understand these results in terms of model primitives we develop a welfare relevant analytic concept of externalities for the selection model which we label tightness this concept of tightness is the source of the decentralized economy s inecient cross sectional wage premia between the average newly hired worker and the marginal newly hired worker compared to the traditional concept of labor market tightness in the search and matching literature this new concept of tightness plays a highly similar role and like in the matching model is crucial for understanding eciency and optimal policy

constant increasing and decreasing risk aversion with many commodities the arrow 1971 pratt 1964 theory of risk aversion has achieved important successes in the study of economic responses to risk this theory applies to a special class of cases in which the von neumann morgenstern expected utility hypothesis is used to explain these responses under this hypothesis individuals who maximize the expected utility of different utility functions will in general make different choices in the face of uncertainty for the purpose of predicting which of two different utility functions will lead to locally more risk averse economic behaviour the essential feature of these functions is their associated arrow pratt absolute risk aversion measures in fact the local comparisons can be extended to global comparisons if the arrow pratt absolute measures are uniformly comparable the arrow pratt measure of absolute risk aversion and a closely related measure of relative risk aversion also play crucial roles in the investigation of changes induced by wealth increases in the risk taking behaviour of a single expected utility maximizing individual this study has resulted in a satisfactory theory of increasing decreasing and constant absolute and relative risk aversion the special cases to which the arrow pratt theory is directly applicable are those in which the utility functions in question are functions of a single variable e g wealth unfortunately the models required to explain many economic decisions employ a version of the expected utility hypothesis in which the argument of the utility function is a multidimensional vector one example arises in the study of the consumption savings decision another occurs in the analysis of the combined consumption savings portfolio decision a final example is obtained in the investigation of demand for goods of uncertain quality the papers of kihlstrom mirman 1974 and diamond stiglitz 1974 have suggested a partial generalization of the arrow pratt theory of absolute risk aversion this

testing the portfolio balance model a multi lateral approach abstract this paper estimates outside bond demand equations from the portfolio balance model of exchange rate determination for five currencies the approach used in this paper differs from other structural studies of the portfolio balance model in two fundamental ways first while previous studies limit the portfolio choice to domestic assets relative to a composite foreign asset the model analyzed in this paper decomposes the foreign asset by currency second exploiting the cross equation correlation that arises from this decomposition provides more efficient estimates of the asset market parameters

economics of erosion control and seed fertilizer technologies for hillside farming in honduras abstract with population growth still at very high rates and large scale commercial farmers and cattle ranchers owning much of the more fertile valley land small scale farmers are concentrated on increasingly marginal steeply sloping hillsides in central america the continuing soil erosion and land degradation in these low input staple crop production hillside farming systems lead many to be pessimistic about increasing the agricultural incomes of these farmers however this study shows that the appropriate combination of improved technologies and agricultural policy or alternative production diversification strategies can improve the incomes of small scale hillside farmers in southern honduras by over 50 the technology components considered are stone walls and ditches combined with living tree barriers to prevent erosion of the hillsides and a package of improved sorghum seed seed treatment and modest doses of nitrogenous fertilizer a whole farm mathematical programming framework is used to determine the potential farm level income effects of the soil conservation and seed fertilizer technologies the main conclusion is that erosion control devices and yield increasing crop varieties and fertilizer are an effective technology introduction strategy for the erosion prone hillside landholdings found in many areas of central america if policy actions or diversification strategies for disposal of surplus grain are found which are effective in reducing the risk of low income from cereal price reductions in high production years adoption of the improved technologies is shown to be profitable for small scale farmers another benefit not explicitly considered would be to slow the very rapid growth of urban poverty in these countries sensitivity analysis results indicated that neither risk aversion nor the increased availability of crop land or initial cash have any substantial effects on the predicted adoption level of the improved technologies or on their income impacts for these farmers

stock flow matching this paper develops and quantifies the implications of the stock flow matching model for unemployment job vacancies and worker flows workers and jobs are heterogeneous so most worker job pairs cannot profitably match leading to the coexistence of unemployed workers and job vacancies productivity shocks cause fluctuations in the number of active jobs which in turn cause fluctuations in labor market outcomes we derive exact expressions for employment and worker transition rates in a finite economy and analyze their limiting behavior in a large economy a calibrated version of the model is consistent with the co movement of labor market variables observed in u s data and can explain about one third of their volatility

job search by employed and unemployed youth analysis of data from the new youth cohort of the national longitudinal survey yields evidence that young unemployed job seekers chose higher levels of search effort as measured by number of methods used and time spent per method and lower reservation wages relative to offered wages than did comparable employed job seekers in 1981 these differences in search choices at least partly explain differences in search outcomes between the two groups unemployed searchers apparently were more likely than employed searchers to gain new employment and the wages they obtained were slightly lower the author argues that the greater search effort by unemployed job seekers is due to the higher costs of search they bear because of foregone earnings

tax smoothing in frictional labor markets we re examine the optimality of tax smoothing from the point of view of frictional labor markets our central result is that whether or not this cornerstone optimal scal policy pre

transport costs and smallholder cropping choices an application to siaya district kenya smallholders regularly devote shares of resources to low yielding food crops than they do to cash crops that have higher market returns in this paper costly exchange is incorporated into an agricultural household model and a numerical nonseparable version of the model is used to show that seemingly inefficient cropping choices of this type in siaya district kenya can be explained as rational food import substitution given high transport costs in product markets improved rural road networks that reduce these costs could abate motives to meet food needs through domestic production and promote specialization that raises farm incomes

occasional interventions to target rates this paper develops a model of central bank intervention based upon a policy characteristic of foreign exchange interventions by the united states germany and japan in the late 1980 s and evaluates it empirically central bankers intervene with greater intensity as rates deviate from target levels but they also try to stabilize rates around current levels the model is estimated using exchange rates and data based upon observed central bank interventions interestingly the estimates of the model are consistent with the predictions of the theoretical model for both the deutsche mark dollar rate and less strongly for the yen dollar rate jel f41 g15 f31

efficiency and labor market dynamics in a model of labor selection this article characterizes efficient labor market allocations in a labor selection model the model s crucial aspect is cross sectional heterogeneity for new job contacts which leads to an endogenous selection threshold for new hires with cross sectional dispersion calibrated to microeconomic data 40 of empirically relevant fluctuations in the job finding rate arise which contrasts with results in an efficient search and matching economy the efficient selection model s results hold in partial and general equilibrium as well as with sequential search abstract from author

heterogeneity job creation and unemployment volatility in this paper i explore the impact of match specific heterogeneity at the job creation margin on business cycle fluctuations i show that this form of heterogeneity alone does not help to amplify labor market volatility either under full or under asymmetric information first i show analytically that under full information heterogeneity has no first order effect on the response of unemployment and job creation to productivity and actually tends to dampen the response of market tightness then in a series of calibrations i show that with both full and asymmetric information the model delivers labor market volatilities close to the representative agent full information benchmark

do central banks lose on foreign exchange intervention a review article abstract estimates of central bank intervention losses or profits vary widely some estimates find substantial losses others profits in most cases estimated profits are not risk adjusted and risk adjustment can have large effects furthermore profit estimates involve variables integrated of order one and because of this test statistics may have nonstandard distributions few studies take this into account estimates of risk adjusted profits for the us fed and the swedish riksbank with allowances for possible nonstandard distributions suggest that neither made losses and might have made significant profits

on the effects of sterilized intervention an analysis of weekly data abstract as the recent empirical studies surveyed here illustrate it is very difficult to demonstrate that the exchange rate risk premium depends through a portfolio balance channel on the currency composition of outside assets the existence of a portfolio balance effect is a necessary condition for sterilized intervention to be a genuinely independent tool of monetary policy this paper studies u s canadian data and attempts to improve on earlier studies by using higher frequency weekly data and by implementing an appropriate instrumental variables technique 2s2sls however we still fail to detect evidence of a portfolio balance effect

business cycles and labor market search the quantitative implications of labor market search for economic fluctuations are evaluated in the context of a real business cycle model incorporating labor market search into the model is found to improve its empirical performance along several dimensions in particular hours now fluctuate substantially more than wages and the contemporaneous correlation between hours and productivity falls in addition the model replicates the observation that output growth displays positive autocorrelation at short horizons overall the empirical results suggest that the labor market search environment embodies a quantitatively important propagation mechanism copyright 1996 by american economic association

fed intervention dollar appreciation and systematic risk abstract in a four factor asset pricing model estimated on daily data fed intervention significantly affects betas of surprises in the market return expected inflation rate yield curve and corporate bond risk premium fed foreign currency sales cause economically and statistically significant increases in the systematic risk premium in appreciation and thus in the dollar s expected appreciation rate the direction the fed desires and consistent with the signaling but not the portfolio balance channel intervention s effects on actual appreciation are less reliable they depend on unpredictable risk factor realizations even successful intervention to strengthen the dollar may be costly by increasing the dollar s systematic risk intervention reduces the attractiveness of u s relative to foreign investments further uncertainty about future fed interventions may induce resource misallocation ceteris paribus investors find it harder to estimate risk adjusted discount rates and forecast the home currency value of cash flows

the establishment level behavior of vacancies and hiring this paper is the first to study vacancies hires and vacancy yields at the establishment level in the job openings and labor turnover survey a large sample of u s employers to interpret the data we develop a simple model that identifies the flow of new vacancies and the job filling rate for vacant positions the job filling rate moves counter to aggregate employment but rises steeply with employer growth rates in the cross section it falls with employer size rises with worker turnover rates and varies by a factor of four across major industry groups we also develop evidence that the employer level hiring technology exhibits constant returns and that at the employer level and that employers rely heavily on other instruments in addition to vacancies as they vary hires we also develop evidence that effective recruiting intensity per vacancy varies over time accounting for about 41 of movements in aggregate hires in the 2007 to 2009 period our evidence and analysis provide useful inputs for assessing developing and calibrating theoretical models of search matching and hiring in the labor market

on the cyclical behavior of employment unemployment and labor force participation abstract in this paper i evaluate to what extent a real business cycle rbc model that incorporates search and home production decisions can simultaneously account for the observed behavior of employment unemployment and out of the labor force this contrasts with the previous rbc literature which analyzed employment or hours fluctuations either by lumping together unemployment and out of the labor force into a single non employment state or by assuming a fixed labor force once the three employment states are explicitly introduced i find that the rbc model generates highly counterfactual labor market dynamics

are forign exchange intervention and monetary policy related and does it really matter the relationship between foreign exchange intervention and monetary policy underlies the question of whether sterilized interventions can affect the exchange rate in this article the author examines this relationship using data on u s foreign exchange interventions from 1985 to 1990 recently made publicly available she examines whether interventions could be viewed as signaling changes in future monetary policy variables the author also considers whether changes in monetary policy may induce interventions in an effort by central bankers to lean against the wind of exchange rate movements interestingly she finds evidence both that interventions help predict monetary policy variables and that monetary variables help predict interventions copyright 1995 by university of chicago press

a model of exchange rate dynamics this model treats the exchange rate as an asset price that depends on expectations concerning exogenous real and monetary factors that will affect relative prices and absolute price levels in future periods changes in exchange rates reflect both expected changes in these exogenous factors and changes in expectations occasioned by new information the model explains the random component in exchange rate behavior the source of divergences from purchasing power parity the anticipatory response of exchange rates to future expected disturbances and the causes of exchange rate overshooting

anticipated growth and business cycles in matching models in a business cycle model that incorporates a standard matching framework employment increases in response to news shocks even though the wealth effect associated with the increase in expected productivity reduces labor force participation the reason is that the matching friction induces entrepreneurs to increase investment in new projects and vacancies early if there is underinvestment in new projects in the competitive equilibrium then the efficiency gains associated with an increase in employment make it possible that consumption employment output as well as the investment in new and existing projects jointly increase long before the actual increase in productivity materializes if there is no underinvestment then investment in existing projects decreases but total investment consumption employment and output still jointly increase

a structural threshold model of the exchange rate under optimal intervention abstract by considering a social trade off between targeting the exchange rate and minimizing intervention costs nonlinear exchange rate dynamics can be captured by a structural threshold model this article provides a theory based empirical exchange rate model and shows how to put the model into an empirical investigation to estimate the structural threshold model we propose a two step procedure which separately estimates the permanent and temporary fundamentals of the foreign exchange market a demonstration of our approach is applied to 1981q3 2008q3 taiwan s foreign exchange market with a brief review of its monetary policies and central bank given prior estimation results are consistent with theoretical predictions and many intervention operations of taiwan s central bank are successfully identified

job matching and occupational choice this paper presents a model of job matching the generalizes the existing literature by allowing for different jobs types or occupations such differences affect the value of job specific experience inducing a career profile where certain types are sampled before others more specifically the analysis shows that it is optimal for the young and inexperienced to gravitate toward jobs exhibiting a certain kind of risk then after deriving the equilibrium job turnover rate for an economy in which people do not switch occupations panel data are used to estimate its underlying parameters the hypothesis that people do not switch occupations is rejected against the alternative that they do thus providing empirical support for the theoretical extension undertaken here