more on identification in detailed wage decompositions wage decompositions are often used to decompose wage differentials of two demographic groups into differences in characteristics and differences in returns to those characteristics the latter part is used as an estimate of the degree of discrimination a problem with this approach is that the contributions of individual dummy variables to the wage decomposition are not identified this note proposes a simple solution to the identification problem the solution is illustrated with an empirical application to spanish labor market data

regime changes in international real interest rates are they a monetary phenomenon in this paper we use the bai and perron 1998 2001 2003 methodology to test for multiple structural breaks in the mean real interest rate for 13 industrialized countries we find extensive evidence of structural breaks in the mean real interest rate for all 13 countries in an attempt to explain the breaks in international real interest rates we also test for multiple structural breaks in the mean inflation rate for the 13 countries once again we find extensive evidence of structural breaks in the mean inflation rate for all of the countries interestingly the breaks in inflation rates and real interest rates often coincide with increases decreases in the mean inflation rate as we move from one regime to the next typically associated with decreases increases in the mean real interest rate

on decomposing the wage gap a critical comment on blinder s method many studies have found that the impact of schooling on earnings is greater for females than for males despite the fact that females tend to earn less both absolutely and controlling for personal characteristics this study investigates possible

an examination of the fisher hypothesis the case of turkey this study examines the famous fisher hypothesis fh for turkey fh asserts that nominal interest rates adjust on a one to one basis to expected changes in inflation rates using the johansen cointegration method for the turkish monthly interest rate and inflation rate data we find that it is possible to determine the long run relationship but not the one to one basis between nominal interest rates and inflation our findings suggest that full fh does not hold but there is a very powerfull fisher effect in the case of turkey from 1990 to 2003

on the fisher effect abstract we use post war quarterly data for belgium canada denmark france germany greece ireland japan the netherlands the united kingdom and the united states to examine the fisherian link between inflation and short term nominal interest rates in doing so we apply the king and watson 1997 methodology paying particular attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables since meaningful fisher effect tests critically depend on such properties we conclude that the data are generally rejecting the fisher effect

international evidence on the neutrality of money the authors use the backus and kehoe 1992 long low frequency data on real gnp gdp and money for australia canada denmark germany italy japan norway sweden the united kingdom and the united states to examine the long run neutrality and superneutrality of money propositions in doing so they applied the king and watson 1992 methodology paying particular attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables since meaningful neutrality tests critically depend on such properties

evidence of nonlinear mean reversion in the real interest rate this article utilizes tests for a unit root that have power against nonlinear alternatives to provide empirical evidence on the time series properties of the ex post real interest rate in the g7 countries we find that the unit root hypothesis can be rejected in the presence of a nonlinear alternative motivated by theoretical literature on optimal monetary policy rules this represents a reversal of the results obtained using standard linear unit root and cointegration tests tests for linearity reject this hypothesis for canada france italy and japan for which we estimate nonlinear models capturing the dynamics of the interest rate for these countries ex post real interest rates follow a nonlinear model characterized by mean reversion and provide statistical evidence for the fisher effect

liquidity effects monetary policy and the business cycle this paper presents a flexible price quantitative general equilibrium model with the property that a positive money supply shock drives the nominal interest rate down and aggregate employment output and the real wage up these implications are broadly consistent with postwar u s data the two key features of the model that are responsible for its properties are 1 money shocks have a heterogeneous impact on agents and 2 ex post inflexibilities in production give rise to a very low short run interest elasticity of money demand in our model the extent of the drop in the interest rate after a positive money supply shock depends on the degree to which production is ex post inflexible given sufficient ex post inflexibility the model conforms well with the view widely held within the u s federal system that the short run interest rate elasticity for total reserves is very close to zero copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

monetary aggregation and the neutrality of money zisimos koustas this article tests the long run neutrality of money proposition using quarterly u s data over the period from 1960 1 to 1996 2 and the methodology suggested by king and watson 1997 paying particular attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables comparisons are made among simple sum divisia and currency equivalent ce monetary aggregates using the anderson et al 1997a 1997b series of divisia and ce monetary aggregates jel e40 e50 c32 i introduction the aim of this article is to investigate a long run question about the role of money in monetary policy whether changes in the conduct of monetary policy influence the growth rate of output as lucas 1996 p 661 puts it so much thought has been devoted to this question and so much evidence is available that one might reasonably assume that it had been solved long ago but this is not the case in fact recently fisher and seater 1993 and king and watson 1997 contribute to the literature on testing quantity theoretic propositions by developing tests using recent advances in the theory of nonstationary regressors and show that meaningful long run neutrality and superneutrality tests can only be constructed if both nominal and real variables satisfy certain nonstationarity conditions and that much of the older literature violates these requirements in this paper in the spirit of serletis and koustas 1998 and koustas and serletis 1999 we test the long run neutrality and superneutrality of money using the king and watson 1997 methodology paying particular attention to the gains that can be achieved by rigorous use of microeconomic and aggregation theoretic foundations in the construction of money measures this is accomplished by making comparisons among simple sum divisia and currency equivalent ce monetary aggregates using the anderson et al 1997a 1997b data see anderson et al 1997a 1997b for more details we also pay attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the variables because meaningful neutrality and superneutrality tests critically depend on such properties the organization of the article is as follows the next section briefly discusses the problem of the definition aggregation of money in section iii we investigate the univariate time series properties of the variables as these properties are relevant for some problems of potential importance in the practical conduct of monetary policy as well as for estimation and hypothesis testing in section iv we test the long run neutrality and superneutrality of money propositions using the king and watson 1997 structural bivariate autoregressive methodology paying particular attention to the integration and cointegration properties of the data the final section concludes ii the many kinds of money the monetary aggregates currently in use by the federal reserve are simple sum indices in which all monetary components are assigned a constant and equal unitary weight this index is m in 1 m sigma sup n sub i 1 x sub i where x sub i is one of the n monetary components of the monetary aggregate m this summation index implies that all monetary components contribute equally to the money total and it views all components as dollar for dollar perfect substitutes there is no question that such an index represents an index of the stock of nominal monetary wealth but cannot in general represent a valid structural economic variable for the services of the quantity of money over the years there has been a steady stream of attempts at properly weighting monetary components within a simple sum aggregate with no theory however any weighting scheme is questionable barnett 1980 derived the theoretical linkage between monetary theory and aggregation and index number theory he applied economic aggregation and index number theory and constructed monetary aggregates based on diewert s 1976 class of superlative quantity index numbers

macroeconomic fluctuations and the allocation of time what are the fundamental driving forces of macroeconomic fluctuations in particular why do people spend more time working in booms and less in recessions these are basic questions of macroeconomics recent thinking has emphasized technology shifts preference shifts and changes in government purchases as likely driving forces it is useful to distinguish atemporal and intertemporal effects of the driving forces under standard assumptions the technology shift has no effect through atemporal channels because income and substitution effects exactly offset a straightforward decomposition of movements of employment attributes most of them to the atemporal effects of preference shifts

on real interest rate dynamics and regime switching abstract we find evidence of regime switching dynamics in the usa and the uk real interest rates over the period 1881 2003 for the uk there is a regime in which the real interest rate displays a relatively stronger mean reversion and a regime in which it displays a relatively weaker mean reversion the former regime is characterized by a relatively larger error in the estimation of the reversion parameter and higher volatility for the usa the two regimes differ in volatility the probability of transition from one regime to another is found to be significantly related to the inflation rate regime and to the political regime the results highlight the importance of regime switching in the dynamics of the real interest rate as well as the role of inflation and political regimes in explaining this switching

does monetary policy affect the long run expectations of non stationary real interest rates in this article we analyse whether the monetary policy affects the long run expectation of the non stationary real interest rate the analysis is conducted through beveridge nelson trend decomposi

the long run fisher effect can it be tested empirical support for the long run fisher effect a hypothesis that a permanent change in inflation leads to an equal change in the nominal interest rate has been hard to come by this paper provides a plausible explanation of why past studies have been unable to find support for the long run fisher effect this paper argues that the necessary permanent change to the inflation rate following a monetary shock has not occurred in the industrialized countries of australia austria belgium canada denmark france germany greece ireland italy japan the netherlands norway sweden switzerland the united kingdom and the united states instead this paper shows that inflation in these countries follows a mean reverting fractionally integrated long memory process not the nonstationary inflation process that is integrated of order one or larger found in previous studies of the fisher effect applying a bivariate maximum likelihood estimator to a fractionally integrated model of inflation and the nominal interest rate the inflation rate in all seventeen countries is found to be a highly persistent fractionally integrated process with a positive differencing parameter significantly less than one hence in the long run inflation in these countries will be unaffected by a monetary shock and a test of the long run fisher effect will be invalid and uninformative as to the truthfulness of the long run fisher effect hypothesis

monetary policy arithmetic reconciling theory with evidence empirical evidence indicates that in countries with low inflation rates a permanent decrease in inflation rate either has no impact on capital stock and output superneutrality or causes them to fall moderately existing budget arithmetic models of monetary policy cannot deliver superneutrality in this paper we conduct a budget arithmetic analysis of monetary policy using a money demand specification money in the utility function that is new to this literature we find that one simple assumption about utility from money delivers superneutrality while a more general assumption delivers departures from superneutrality in the direction consistent with the evidence jel classification e60 e13

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

why are real interest rates not equalized internationally 1 introductioninternational financial economists are intensely concerned with several parity conditions that relate goods prices and asset returns across countries these include purchasing power parity ppp interest rate parity irp and variations of these two such as relative ppp ex ante ppp and real interest rate parity rip each of these parity conditions measures a degree of integration between the economies of the world the greater the economic integration across countries the greater the likelihood that the more restrictive of these parity conditions will have empirical support for example the strict ppp hypothesis implies that aggregate price levels will be equal in terms of a common currency this condition is very stringent because it does not allow for even temporary deviations from the equilibrium condition 1 a less restrictive version is long run ppp where price levels measured in a common currency across countries converge over some period of time may be a very long period of time recognizing all of the impediments that keep strict ppp from holding economists have put their efforts in studying the long run version of this equilibrium condition there is a relatively large literature examining the equality of real interest rates internationally 2 in all of these studies the real interest rate is defined by the fisher equation these studies then go on to estimate and test for the simultaneous existence of uncovered interest parity uip which is also called the open economy fisher relation and ex ante ppp eappp the other conditions sufficient for rip the problem in this strategy is that the fisher equation may not hold many studies have been devoted to examining the validity of the fisher relationship for both the u s and other economies 3 the results of this line of inquiry have been decidedly mixed even if the fisher relation does hold it is unlikely that the fisher effect will be one for one as implied by defining the real interest rate from the simple fisher equation both mundell tobin and tax effects can drive a wedge between inflation expectations and the effect on nominal interest rates 4 it would seem more appropriate to treat the fisher relation as another testable parity condition than as an assumption in this study we examine the underlying parity conditions sufficient for rip treating them as hypotheses to be tested the four parity conditions or equilibrium relationships upon which rip is predicated uncovered interest parity uip ex ante ppp eappp the fisher relation in each country i e the fisher relation in country a and the fisher relation in country b imply time series implications for the observable variables specifically if any of the nominal interest rates or inflation rates can be characterized as integrated variables evidence of which we will provide then the four parity conditions imply one common stochastic trend between them therefore an initial examination of the sufficient conditions for rip should include a test for a unit root in the observable variables and then a test for the number of common stochastic trends in a given rip system because the power of univariate unit root and stationarity tests is notoriously low many exploit the power gains available by using panel tests however there are serious drawbacks to some of these panel unit root tests for example o connell 1998 taylor and sarno 1998 and breuer mcnown and wallace 2001 we overcome these drawbacks by taking advantage of recent innovations in univariate and multivariate unit root tests that have substantially greater power to reject a false null but are not subject to the size distortions associated with some popular panel based tests our use of these methods leads us to conclude that each rip system analyzed can be characterized to some degree as a system of integrated variables that share more than one common trend

divisia monetary aggregates the great ratios and classical money demand functions king et al 1991 evaluate the empirical relevance of a class of real business cycle models with permanent productivity shocks by analyzing the stochastic trend properties of postwar u s macroeconomic data they find a common stochastic trend in a three variable system that includes output consumption and investment but the explanatory power of the common trend drops significantly when they add money balances and the nominal interest rate in this paper we revisit the cointegration tests in the spirit of king et al using improved monetary aggregates whose construction has been stimulated by the barnett critique we show that previous rejections of the balanced growth hypothesis and classical money demand functions can be attributed to mismeasurement of the monetary aggregates

determining long run neutrality in a partially nonstationary model abstract the objective of this paper is to derive the conditions for long run neutrality assuming a model with nonstationary variables first we derive expressions that account for the long run differential of a variable on another variable we then obtain the conditions for long run neutrality in terms of restrictions on the parameters of what we call the structural form of the model

the real interest rate a multi country empirical study how real interest rates behave over time is critical to our understanding of many macroeconomic issues and much recent research has pursued this question very little of the research however has focused on real interest rates outside the united states this paper is an empirical exploration of real interest rate movements in seven oecd countries from 1967 ii to 1979 ii further research is needed on real rates in other countries for several reasons not only are measures of foreign real rates of interest in their ownright but extending an analysis of real rates to other countries also has the following additional benefits it can generate more powerful statistical tests of propositions previously tested on u s data and yield information on whether results found for the u s hold up in other countries this study pursues several questions that have arisen naturally from this earlier work is the hypothesis that the real rate is constant rejected when the analysis is extended to other countries does the real rate decline with increased inflation and money growth in other countries besides the united states how reliable is the fisher effect in which nominal interestrates reflect changes in expected inflation are movements in nominal interest rates a reliable indicator of movements in real rates what kind of variationsin real interest rates are there in different countries have real rates declined from the 60s to the 70s for other countries besides the u s this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

intertemporal substitution in labor supply evidence from micro data the sensitivity of the supply of labor to intertemporal variation in the wage is an important issue in macroeconomics the analysis of social security and pensions and the study of life cycle patterns of work this paper explores two approaches to the measurement of intertemporal substitution that have appeared in the literature the first approach is to use consumption to control for wealth and unobserved expectations about future wages in the labor supply equation the second approach is to estimate a first difference equation for hours in which labor supply from the previous period serves as a control for wealth and wage expectations the results indicate that intertemporal substitution elasticity for married men is positive but small

a tale of two effects abstract this paper investigates the relationship between nominal interest rates and prices using nearly two centuries of data from ten industrial countries both a positive relationship between interest rates and price levels that is a positive gibson effect and a negative relationship between interest rates and subsequent price changes that is a negative fama fisher effect prevailed until world war i we propose a simple explanation wherein this doubly paradoxical juxtaposition of effects arises when money is supplied inelastically and prices are flexible this double paradox disappeared after world war ii when economies became mostly characterized by elastic money and sticky prices during that period a positive fama fisher effect emerged while the gibson effect largely dissipated

international evidence on the long run impact of inflation in this paper i use a structural vector autoregression framework to analyze the effects of a permanent change in inflation on the long run real interest rate and real output level in 14 industrialized countries long run monetary superneutrality is rejected for all 14 countries using annual data the results indicate that a permanent increase in inflation lowers the long run real interest rate in each country a permanent increase in inflation also increases the long run real output level in a number of countries long run monetary superneutrality is also rejected for four out of the five countries examined using quarterly data under long run monetary superneutrality lrsn a per

on the complementarity of money and credit i propose a model where agents choose to conduct their business using two payment instruments money and bilateral credit a friction in the timing of transactions rationalizes the use of both instruments and makes it optimal for agents to use money as a means of settlement for credit money and credit complement each other with anticipated inflation complementarity implies that the credit to money ratio decreases with inflation

rationally inattentive macroeconomic wedges abstract this paper argues that the solution to a dynamic optimization problem of consumption and labor under finite information processing capacity can simultaneously explain the intertemporal and intratemporal labor wedges it presents a partial equilibrium model where a representative risk adverse consumer chooses information about wealth with limited attention the paper compares ex post realizations of models with finite and infinite capacity the model produces macroeconomic wedges and measures of elasticity consistent with the literature these findings suggest that aconsumption labor model with information processing constraints can explain the difference between predicted and observed consumption and employment behavior

the fisher hypothesis a multi country analysis this paper tests whether the fisher hypothesis holds for a sample of 26 countries by assessing the long run relationship between nominal interest rates and inflation rates taking into consideration the short run dynamics of interest rates the empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that there is a one to one relationship between the interest rate and inflation for more than half of the countries under study

a long run non linear approach to the fisher effect we argue that the empirical failure of the fisher effect found in the literature may be due to the existence of non linearities in the long run relationship between interest rates and inflation we present evidence that for the u s during the 1960 2004 period the fisher relation presents important non linearities we model the long run non linear relationship and find that an estr model for the pre volcker era and an lstr model for the post volcker era are able to control for non linearities and constitute long run co integration vectors monte carlo evidence produces support for the hypothesis that non linearities may also be responsible for the less than proportional coefficients of inflation usually found in the linear specifications

trend breaks and the fisher hypothesis in canada and the united states using the sequential estimation methodology developed by banerjee lumsdaine and stock journal of business and economic statistics 10 3 271 87 1992 zivot and andrews journal of business and economic statistics 10 3 251 70 1992 and extended by lumsdaine and papell review of economics and statistics 79 2 212 18 1997 empirical evidence is found consistent with the hypothesis that the 90 day treasury bill rate and the inflation rate in canada and the us are stationary around a deterministic trend with two breaks when the breaks are filtered out the data is consistent with partial long run adjustment of the nominal interest rate to an inflation shock but not of the size predicted by the fisher effect

optimal sticky prices under rational inattention this paper presents a model in which price setting firms decide what to pay attention to subject to a constraint on information flow when idiosyncratic conditions are more variable or more important than aggregate conditions firms pay more attention to idiosyncratic conditions than to aggregate conditions when we calibrate the model to match the large average absolute size of price changes observed in micro data prices react fast and by large amounts to idiosyncratic shocks but only slowly and by small amounts to nominal shocks nominal shocks have strong and persistent real effects we use the model to investigate how the optimal allocation of attention and the dynamics of prices depend on the firms environment jel e 3 e5 d8

implications of rational inattention abstract a constraint that actions can depend on observations only through a communication channel with finite shannon capacity is shown to be able to play a role very similar to that of a signal extraction problem or an adjustment cost in standard control problems the resulting theory looks enough like familiar dynamic rational expectations theories to suggest that it might be useful and practical while the implications for policy are different enough to be interesting

psychological traits and earnings differentials among men a study of second generation immigrants in sweden the purpose of this study is to analyse the impact of psychological traits on earnings differentials between second generation immigrants and individuals with native born parents the study is base