bertrand equilibria with entry limit results abstract we study the limiting behaviour of bertrand equilibria where firms must supply the whole of the demand coming to them for two different cases first when entry is exogenous and second when it is free the limit equilibrium set is characterised for both cases for a large class of cost functions

regional house price dynamics and voting behavior in the fomc i introduction interest rate decisions by the federal open market committee fomc are not always made unanimously different individual views about the appropriate monetary policy stance may lead to the result that members cast dissenting interest rate votes in fomc meetings that is they opt for a higher or lower interest rate than proposed by the chairman of the fomc several studies find that fomc members have different views about the appropriate monetary policy when casting interest rate votes belden 1989 chappell and mcgregor 2000 chappell mcgregor and vermilyea 2005 2008 2012 gildea 1990 1992 havrilesky and gildea 1991 1995 havrilesky and schweitzer 1990 meade and sheets 2005 meade 2010 tootell 1991 1996 an important source of such dissenting votes may be the regional bias of the fomc member which is constituted by its regional affiliation several studies have examined the impact of the regional unemployment rate on the interest rate votes of fomc members while gildea 1992 meade and sheets 2005 and chappell mcgregor and vermilyea 2008 find that a higher regional unemployment rate relative to the national rate increases decreases fomc members preference for monetary easing tightening tootell 1991 finds no significant evidence 1 in this article we analyze whether fomc members align their interest rate voting behavior with house price developments of the federal reserve district they represent in addition to the regional unemployment rate studied so far in this way we can test whether regional house prices and or regional unemployment rates have a significant impact on the voting behavior of fomc members and we examine whether there are systematic differences between regional bank presidents and board members various studies have examined the link between monetary policy and asset price developments according to gilchrist and leahy 2002 there are some good reasons why central banks should align their monetary policies with asset prices first the consumer price index cpi or gross domestic product gdp deflator are incomplete measures since they only signal information on the prices of goods consumed today whereas a more complete measure would also signal future cost of living such as the information contained in asset prices alchian and klein 1973 second asset prices may be useful in forecasting inflation goodhart and hofmann 2000 third asset prices may directly affect real economic activity and inflation since for example wealthier consumers spend more which may affect price developments carroll otsuka and slacalek 2011 whether central banks should react to asset prices is however debated in the literature the traditional view is that central banks should only react to asset prices to the extent that they feed back into the conventional monetary policy goals inflation and output bernanke and gertler 1999 2001 on the contrary cecchetti et al 2000 conclude that it may be reasonable for central banks to react to asset prices in particular house prices in order to avoid the buildup of asset price bubbles as the burst of asset price bubbles may lead to financial crises reinhart and rogoff 2009 leaning against the buildup of extreme asset price changes may therefore be a reasonable choice for central banks as a part of their mission to manage systemic risk allen and carletti 2009 bordo and jeanne 2002 another rationale that central banks should take asset prices particularly house prices into account is that house prices have been shown to be suitable early warning indicators for the outbreak of the recent financial crisis kemme and roy 2012 several empirical papers analyze the impact of asset prices on interest rate setting rigobon and sack 2003 and dupor and conley 2004 find evidence that fomc interest rate decisions are influenced by equity prices on the contrary fuhrer and tootell 2008 find that fomc interest rate decisions are not a direct response to equity price movements and are an indirect response only to the extent that equity prices helped forecast the conventional monetary policy goals

power sharing in monetary policy committees evidence from the united kingdom and sweden committees may make better monetary policy decisions than individuals however the benefits of group decision making could be lost if committee members cede power to a chairman we develop an econometric model to describe intracommittee power sharing across members estimation of the model permits us to classify monetary policy committees into the typology developed by blinder 2004 2007 we estimate our model for the united kingdom s bank of england boe and sweden s riksbank results for the boe suggest that the governor has little influence over other committee members while those for the riksbank indicate that the governor is highly influential

price setting supergames with capacity constraints this paper examines the role of industry capacity in enforcing collusion in the context of repeated games for a fixed capacity per firm it is shown that changes in the number of firms have a non monotone effect on the best enforceable cartel price this is due to the fact that while an additional firm lowers the share that each of the other firms enjoys at the collusive price it also increases the losses to each firm should the cartel fail

does a good central banker make a difference the personalities of central bankers moved center stage during the recent financial crisis indeed several central bankers even became superstars in this article we investigate whether superstar central bankers have an impact on economic performance we employ school grades given to central bankers by the financial press defining as superstars those central bankers receiving the top grade first we explain the grades in a probit estimation with measures of economic performance institutional features and personal characteristics second we employ a matching approach to account for the endogeneity of grading with respect to economic performance using entropy balancing we identify credible counterfactuals for top graded central bankers that is nonsuperstar central bankers who face similar situations comparing the economic performance of both groups we find that superstars do indeed matter a top graded central banker faces a significantly more favorable output inflation tradeoff than his peers this effect is driven by outstanding central bankers in both advanced and emerging economies and is especially prevalent in the precrisis subsample jel e52 e58

overconfidence monetary policy committees and chairman dominance abstract monetary policy decisions are typically characterized by three features i decisions are made by a committee ii the committee members often disagree and iii the chairman is almost never on the losing side in the vote we show that the combination of overconfident policymakers and a chairman with agenda setting rights can explain all these features the optimal agenda setting power to the chairman is a strictly concave function of the degree of overconfidence we also show that the quality of advice produced by the central bank staff is higher in a flat organization than in a hierarchical one

money politics and the post war business cycle abstract the political economy literature has enshrined as stylized fact the view that lower inflation and temporarily lower growth follow the election of republican presidents and has emphasized political manipulation of monetary policy as an explanation support for the monetary explanation comes in econometric work that largely ignores identification issues that dominate the literature on measuring the effects of monetary policy we generalize a standard vector autoregression framework to accommodate discrete political party variables we find almost no support for the view that political effects on the macroeconomy operate through monetary policy and only weak evidence that political effects are significant at all

the dissent voting behaviour of central bankers what do we really know we examine the determinants of the dissent in central bank boards voting records about monetary policy rates in the czech republic hungary sweden the uk and the us in contrast to previous studies we consider 25 different macroeconomic financial institutional psychological or preference related factors jointly and use bayesian model averaging bma to formally assess the attendant model uncertainty we find that the rate of dissent is between 5 and 20 for the examined central banks our results suggest that most of the examined regressors including factors that capture the effects of inflation and output are not robust determinants of voting dissent this result suggests that unobserved characteristics of central bankers and different communication strategies drive the dissent rather than the level of macroeconomic uncertainty

how do competitive pressures affect incentives to innovate when there is a market for inventions competition and intellectual property ip protections are complements in stimulating innovation when ip is appropriable a market for inventions forms and competitive pressures increase incentives to innovate competition among producers the demand side of the market for inventions and competition among inventors the supply side of the market for inventions create incentives to innovate when ip is not fully appropriable markets for inventions are limited and competitive pressures can decrease incentives to innovate firms vertically integrate r d and production and share technology to appropriate the returns to ip this implies that antitrust policy and ip protections are complements

the school lunch program and nutrient intake a switching regression analysis the nutrient impact of the school lunch program is examined using the basic sample of the national food consumption survey the results clearly indicate the program s substantial positive effect on nutrient consumption by both low income and high income children moreover the nutrient impact of school lunch participation is shown to be greater for low income children

price quantity strategic market games this paper is yet another in a rapidly growing series e g 2 11 on strategic approaches to economic equilibrium our aim here is to make precise the remark implicitly due to bertrand 1 or 10 ch 4 5 that if the agents in an economy use price setting strategies then the strategic nash equilibria will in fact be walrasian and this without any assumption of a large number of small agents however in our models not only prices but also quantities are set by the agents thus it might actually be more appropriate to call them bertrand cournot types of models we begin with a standard walras exchange economy with a finite number of traders and commodities this is recast as a game in strategic form in essentially two different ways there is a trading post for each commodity to which traders send contingent statements about how much they wish to buy and sell and at what prices in model 1 the trading point is determined by the intersection of the aggregate supply and demand curves in model 2 trade takes place so as to meet as many contingent statements as possible each buyer whose orders are filled pays the price he quoted using a fiat money which can be borrowed costlessly and limitlessly but after trade is over there is a settlement of accounts and a penalty is levied on those who are bankrupt no attempt is made to model the penalty in any detail it is simply described in the form of a disutility but this in turn may be imagined to stem from confiscation of assets see remark 5 or the necessity of procuring highly priced loans etc call a noncooperative equilibrium active if it turns out that no trader is isolated i e trapped as the sole buyer or seller at some trading post then our results may be described as follows in model 1 the active2 n e of the game coincide with the c e of the market furthermore there is a subset of tight active n e which also coincide with the c e and each n e in this subset is strong

the objectives and priorities of monetary policy under different federal reserve chairmen this paper utilizes a monetary policy reaction function that relates policy intentions to forecasts of policy objectives estimates of this reaction function over the post accord period suggest that the burns period was unique while the martin and volcker periods were extremely similar the burns period was structurally distinct from both the martin and volcker periods further model specifications that allow for an independent influence on monetary policy from different presidential administrations also imply that there are significant differences in monetary policy under different fed chairmen copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

a decade of dissent explaining the dissent voting behavior of bank of england mpc members we examine the dissent voting record of the bank of england monetary policy committee contrary to findings in the fomc literature for example havrilesky and schweitzer in the political economy of american monetary policy pp 197 210 1990 chappell et al in q j econ 108 1 185 218 1993 the effects of members career backgrounds and the political channel of appointment on voting behavior are negligible reflecting the distinct institutional constraints and incentives associated with uk monetary policy our findings also suggest that literature which characterizes voting behavior as being predominantly determined by members internal or external status is overly simplistic this view is supported by econometric results appertaining to the introduction of member specific fixed effects which account for possible unobserved heterogeneity

monetary policy theory and practice in respect of the theory of monetary policy i am reminded of the comment that jacob viner made many years ago at a meeting of the american economic association about alfred marshall s economics what is new is highly unlikely at this late date also to be true and significant 1 consequently i shall restrict my remarks on theory to trying to summarize what i regard as the present intellectual position

socioeconomic factors affecting dietary status an appraisal this paper is to identify selected studies which have contributed to the present knowledge on socioeconomic characteristics of households and dietary status studies of the socioeconomic factors influencing dietary status have undergone significant change in recent years because of developments in statistics and household decision theory in the latter case households utilize various inputs for example food as purchased and the labor of household members to produce diets with varying features including nutrient compositions as indicated by the work of basiotis et al 1983 blanciforti green and lane davis et al 1982b sanderson and sexauer this framework provides a systematic rationale for the incorporation of socioeconomic variables into integrated statistical analyses of food consumption and dietary status more specifically the scope of traditional consumer demand theory has been significantly increased by household economic decision theory in addition permitting explicit incorporation of socioeconomic variables in engel and full demand systems this theory makes a plausible linkage between food intake and dietary status since household economics merely extends rather than refutes the intrinsic utility maximization properties of traditional demand theory the engel and demand systems relationships postulated linking socioeconomic characteristics food expenditure and dietary status are admitted by the theory stigler and b cker as will be demonstrated research results are accumulating on household size household income and expenditure nutrient levels in household food supplies and individual diets efficiency of food use away from home food consumption and use of convenience foods however studies of the relationship between socioeconomic characteristics of households and or individuals and nutrient availability and or dietary intake levels have produced varyingly conclusive results among other factors these varying results can be attributed to a different measures of diet quality and b differences in individual food intake versus food disappearance data further diet quality has been assessed directly units of nutrients available or consumed as well as indirectly expenditure levels on food the dietary components studied most frequently are food energy protein calcium iron vitamins a and c riboflavin thiamin and niacin however recently studies have given less attention to thiamin riboflavin niacin and vitamin c and instead have investigated vitamin b6 and magnesium in the near future this list of target dietary components will probably include cholesterol sodium dietary fiber zinc and copper this extension will occur for two reasons a consumer interest in these dietary components and b availability of survey data on these dietary components e g the u s department of agriculture s usda 1985 continuing survey of food intake by individuals and the 1987 88 nationwide food consumption sur

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

the influence of the federal advisory council on monetary policy the federal advisory council consists of twelve bankers elected by federal reserve bank directorates who advise the federal open market committee every three months on their desired direction for monetary policy this paper tests the conjecture that the council s directives to the committee contain information that predicts subsequent changes in interest rates and committee directives regression equations and granger causality tests do not disprove the conjecture this is the first hard evidence of private interest group influence on monetary policy copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games ii applications in part i of this study we established two existence theorems for mixed strategy equilibrium in games with discontinuous payoff functions see theorems 4 4 and 5 5 in dasgupta and maskin 1986 hereafter d m 1986 in this second part we use the second of these two theorems to prove the existence of mixed strategy equilibrium in some wellknown discontinuous economic games that fail to have pure strategy equilibria the models we analyse are the bertrand edgeworth example of price setting duopolists with capacity constraints see section 2 2 price competition among firms producing differentiated products hotelling 1929 and d aspremont gabszewicz and thisse 1979 see section 2 3 spatial competition eaton and lipsey 1975 and shaked 1975 see section 3 and models of market dependent information rothschild and stiglitz 1976 and wilson 1977 section 4 the paper concludes section 5 with a classification of these models

bertrand edgeworth equilibrium large markets with non manipulable residual demand abstract in a model of price competition among capacity constrained firms with non manipulable residual demand we demonstrate that if the number of firms is large then the unique equilibrium yields the competitive price the result goes through even when firms produce to order

deliberation and learning in monetary policy committees i introduction recent theoretical and experimental work on the monetary policy decision process supports the argument that committees may make better policy decisions than individuals e g blinder 2007 blinder and morgan 2005 gerlach kristen 2006 lombardelli proudman and talbot 2005 blinder 2004 38 39 offers four reasons why monetary policy committees mpcs might make better choices than individuals first when members have different preferences diversification avoids extreme outcomes second even if members have similar preferences they might use different models to reach their conclusions third members might use different forecasts or forecasting techniques finally individuals might use different modes of reasoning or heuristics to approach problems the last three reasons in blinder s list suggest that members bring distinct perspectives or information to a committee meeting deliberation in the committee meeting requires members to confront their differences and could result in both learning and better policy decisions former bank of england mpc member richard lambert 2005 and former federal reserve bank of boston president cathy minehan 2006 have pointed to the importance of deliberation in mpc meetings particularly revealing are minehan s 2006 comments about her experience on the federal open market committee fomc one highly important element in dealing with uncertainty is the strength of the committee itself in that regard it is perhaps fashionable to deride committee decision making in general as bureaucratic and cumbersome my view is that in situations where there are many possible philosophical approaches and a lot at stake a committee helps its members to both see all aspects of the issue and weigh the risks and costs of a particular decision as with other vital institutions like the supreme court there is value to a committee decision on policy versus one taken by a single executive the importance of deliberation in various decision making contexts has also been addressed in political science austen smith and feddersen 2006 contribute to the literature on jury deliberation by offering a theoretical analysis of how different voting rules shape voters incentives to share information prior to a vote being taken barabas 2004 finds evidence that deliberation is an effective way to disseminate information and shape opinions about public policy issues u s supreme court justice stephen breyer has explained how deliberation matters in supreme court conferences cited in brafman and brafman 2009 kindle location 1764 if someone is going to write a dissent they have a point they have some kind of point they re trying to make quite often the opinion of the majority is changed somewhat in response to comments and opinions of the dissenters occasionally maybe once or twice a year the whole court shifts even when dissenters do not have enough votes to change the court s opinion they still affect the process it makes the other person take account of the point they have to answer it or they have to take it into account breyer said in the case of the fomc bailey and schonhardt bailey 2008 use a full text content analysis of the 1979 and 1980 fomc transcripts to study the importance of deliberation in the decision to shift to anti inflationary policy under chairman paul volcker they conclude that deliberation in the fomc did indeed matter both in 1979 and 1980 p 404 as volcker led his colleagues to adopt a new operating procedure and maintain a more restrictive monetary policy stance bailey and schonhardt bailey 2009 extend their analysis to the 1979 1999 period and find that the role of deliberation declined from the volcker era to the greenspan era woolley and gardner 2009 concur with this result even in light of previous theoretical and empirical work on deliberation though bailey and schonhardt bailey 2009 22 nevertheless argue that too little attention has been given to understanding the process of deliberation in policymaking and how this yields outcomes decisions and the quality of those outcomes

the persuasive power of a committee chairman arthur burns and the fomc this paper investigates persuasion as a means of influence for the federal reserve chairman in meetings of the federal open market committee fomc using textual records of fomc meetings federal funds rate targets have been recorded for committee members who served in the arthur burns era 1970 1978 results show that burns member differences in stated funds rate targets were lower when burns made recommendations early in the meeting consistent with the hypothesis that the chairman is persuasive additional results show that members tendencies to respond to burns s recommendations were related to their personal and political loyalties

taking two steps at a time on the optimal pattern of policy interest rates abstract most central banks change interest rates in steps of 25 50 or 75 basis points at scheduled dates this paper models the optimal step size and frequency of policy decisions in contrast to the existing literature we argue that a fixed step size facilitates policy decisions which we assume are taken by a monetary policy committee the step pattern depends on the variability of the optimal interest rate policymakers uncertainty and institutional aspects of the committee the model extends the literature by predicting that interest rates are occasionally adjusted by two or more steps

distinguished lecture on economics in government what central bankers could learn from academics and vice versa academic writing about monetary policy has been useful to practical central bankers but more of certain aspects of the economists way of thinking could profitably be imported on the other hand academics could improve their analysis and make it more useful to policymakers if they would pay more attention to certain real world aspects of monetary policy the author draws on his experience at the federal reserve board to point out a number of specific lessons for each side

large scale service marketplaces the role of the moderating firm recently large scale web based service marketplaces where many small service providers compete among themselves in catering to customers with diverse needs have emerged customers who frequent these marketplaces seek quick resolutions and thus are usually willing to trade prices with waiting times the main goal of this paper is to discuss the role of the moderating firm in facilitating information gathering operational efficiency and communication among agents in service marketplaces surprisingly we show that operational efficiency may be detrimental to the overall efficiency of the marketplace furthermore we establish that to reap the expected gains of operational efficiency the moderating firm may need to complement the operational efficiency by enabling communication among its agents the study emphasizes the scale of such marketplaces and the impact it has on the outcomes this paper was accepted by yossi aviv operations management

price competition in a capacity constrained duopoly abstract this paper characterizes the set of nash equilibria in a model of price setting duopoly in which each firm has limited capacity and demand is continuous and decreasing in general there is a unique equilibrium so that comparative static exercises are meaningful the properties of the equilibrium conform with a number of stylized facts the equilibrium prices are lower the smaller is demand relative to capacity when demand is in an intermediate range the firms use mixed strategies they randomly hold sales if capacities are chosen simultaneously before prices the set of equilibrium capacities coincides with the set of cournot quantities

the educational and professional background of central bankers and its effect on inflation an empirical analysis we assume that central banks can control inflation so that inflation rates reflect the preferences of the central bank council the hypothesis to be tested is that these preferences depend on the central bankers educational and or professional background in a panel data analysis for the euro area and eleven countries since 1973 we explain inflation either by the weights with which the educational and professional characteristics of the 391 council members were represented in the various central bank councils or by the education or profession of the median council members control variables are added using professional background weights we find that former members of the central bank staff and in some specifications former insurance executives commercial bankers other businessmen and public servants prefer significantly lower inflation rates than former union leaders and politicians do in the median voter analysis former central bankers commercial bankers businessmen and public servants are also significantly more inflation averse than economic scholars as for the education of the council members our results are less robust however if the median member of the central bank council has studied business the inflation rate is significantly lower than if she has studied economics taking educational and professional background together central banks seem to attract or produce primarily economists who are monetary conservatives whereas keynesian economists are more prominent in academia jel classification e42 e58

determining the appropriate depth and breadth of a firm s product portfolio abstract some firms have broad product lines others have lean product lines to determine the appropriate number of entries in a specific firm s product line the author develops a model that balances the benefits of increased revenue from a broad product line against production and engineering costs two innovations were central in the development of the model 1 redefining how products are scored on various product attributes so that attribute scores vary normally across the population of products and 2 redefining how the number of entries in a product portfolio is calculated in order to discount the significance of entries that are highly similar to existing products the author also introduces the notion of a centroid time to more easily adjust sales and total development costs for product life cycle and investment life cycle effects these redefinitions enable a firm s profit to be modeled as a simple function of its effective number of product entries the effective number of competitors entrie

approximate bertrand equilibria in a replicated industry this paper considers the existence and properties of approximate bertrand equilibria in a replicated industry price setting firms produce a homogeneous product with weakly convex costs the main results are that a given e 0 an e equilibrium exists if the industry is large enough b if the e is small enough and the industry large enough any e equilibrium is approximately competitive these results depend on how contingent demand is specified

bertrand edgeworth equilibria with unobservable output uncoordinated consumers and large number of firms abstract we examine a bertrand edgeworth model of price competition where the output levels of the firms are unobservable and consumers are uncoordinated we show that if the number of firms is large enough then any price greater than the competitive one can be sustained as a pure strategy nash equilibrium

the policy preferences of fomc members as revealed by dissenting votes comment the purposes of this comment are to present evidence that casts doubt on several of the conclusions of susan belden s recent paper in this journal 1989 and to suggest directions for future research in this area to begin there is skepticism that dissenting votes at least as belden measures them can be unbiased indicators of policy preferences in addition belden partially recognizes but does not fully specify three influences on federal open market gommittee fomc member voting that are prominently featured in the literature these influences are 1 fomc member training background and career experience 2 state of the economy measures and 3 partisanship measures each of these factors alone may help to explain one of belden s three major findings first the training backgrounds and career experiences of bank presidents may help to explain belden s affirmation of their penchant to dissent from fomc directives on the side of monetary tightness second the state of the economy may help to explain belden s finding of a decline in dissent voting when arthur burns was chairman of the federal reserve third differences between the party of the president and the partisan composition of the board of governors may help to explain belden s discovery of shifts in ease and tightness dissent voting behavior under different chairmen since this comment will indicate how these influences qualify belden s elndings it will at the same time suggest fruitful directions for the research agenda in this area

reliable and unreliable partisan appointees to the board of governors every new appointment to the board of governors in recent years has triggered speculation as to how the new governor will vote in fomc meetings while several studies have hinted at partisan voting behavior by governors no study has yet attempted to identify reliable and unreliable partisan voting behavior and to pinpoint the background characteristics of governors that distinguish between the two this paper indicates that board members with a background in economics consistently voted in line with the economic ideology of the appointing president noneconomists on the board however displayed no such partisan voting behavior and were seen to be influenced by pressures emanating from the administration and by the monetary environment prior to their appointment over the 1951 to 1987 period most presidents have appointed reliable governors earlier in their presidential terms when the returns from being able to influence subsequent monetary policy are great and have chosen unreliable governors later in their terms when election support from the interest groups that these unreliables represent is important the results of the present paper suggest skepticism toward the recent spate of rational expectations game theoretic models which feature a dictatorial policy maker gaming atomistic market participants whose only political activity voting generates monetary surprises followed by convergence to an equilibrium because of their obsession with the ceremonial formalism of their genre these models ignore a vast complementary literature and as a consequence display conspicuously flimsy institutional and historical premises instead the present paper argues for the greater relevance of models of uncoordinated interaction between multiple political and private principals and federal reserve agents

the political economy of american monetary policy preface 1 introduction thomas mayer 2 studying the fed towards a broader public choice perspective thomas willett 3 the federal reserve reaction function a specification search salwa khouri 4 corporate profitability as a determinant of restrictive monetary policy estimates for the post war united states gerald epstein and juliet schor 5 federal reserve behavior since 1980 a financial market perspective william melton and v vance roley 6 the federal reserve and its institutional environment a review michael munger and brian roberts 7 the political economy of monetary policy robert hetzel 8 political monetary cycles nathaniel beck 9 congress and the fed why the dog does not bark in the night nathaniel beck 10 the federal reserve as a political power james pierce 11 monetary policy and political economy the federal reserve and the bank of japan thomas cargill and michael hutchinson 12 a positive analysis of the policymaking process at the federal reserve raymond lombra and nicholas karamouzis 13 a theory of fomc dissent voting with evidence from the time series thomas havrilesky and robert schweitzer 14 explaining fomc members votes john gildea 15 fed behaviour and x efficiency theory toward a general framework harinder singh and roger frantz 16 minimizing regret cognitive dissonance as an explanation of fomc behavior thomas mayer 17 the discount window william poole 18 leaning against the wind the behavior of the money stock in recession and recovery 1953 8 elmus wicker 19 bureaucratic self interest as an obstacle to monetary reform edward kane index

agent heterogeneity and consensual decision making on the federal open market committee the consensual aspects of decision making are essential for understanding policy made by administrative organizations that take the form of a commision or board consensual decision making reflects the degree of policy cohesion exhibited by high level officials within administrative organizations it is proposed here that this type of behavior may differ between heterogeneous agents the federal open market committee fomc of the federal reserve system serves as a salient setting for testing these propositions in a time series context the empirical results indicate that major intra institutional differences exist between board of governor bog and regional bank president rbp members of the federal open market committee fomc regarding consensual behavior in terms of policy decision making the econometric evidence clearly demonstrates that the consensual behavior of these agents are fundamentally different from one another this in turn has important implications for the study of other commission and board policy making bodies that consist of agents who are not all homogeneous

political parties and the business cycle in the united states 1948 1984 this paper tests the existence and the extent of a politically induced business cycle in the u s in the post world war ii period the cycle described in this paper is different from the traditional political business cycle of nordhaus it is based on a systematic difference between the monetary policies of the two parties in a model with labor contracts from an explicit optimization problem we derive a system of equations for output and money growth then we successfully test the non linear restriction imposed by the theory on the parameters of the system of equations we cannot reject the hypothesis that money growth has been systematically different under the two types of administration and that this difference contributes to explain output fluctuations

the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games i theory the article presents information about the existence of equilibrium in discontinuous economic games in this paper and its sequel presents study the existence of nash equilibrium in games where agents payoff functions are discontinuous the enquiry is motivated by a number of recent studies that have uncovered serious existence problems in seemingly innocuous economic games in the sequel to this paper authors have explained the utility function in the economic games referred to earlier are neither continuous nor quasi concave however they demonstrate that the payoff functions in mildly modified versions of these constructs exhibit two weaker forms of continuity which together with the requirement of quasi concavity suffice for the existence of an equilibrium from this one may conclude that at least in the modified versions of these models discontinuities in the payoff functions are not the real source of the problem rather it is the failure of the payoff functions to the quasi concave which is responsible for the non existence of equilibrium these observations bear on the existence of nash equilibrium in pure strategies

the existence of mixed strategy equilibria in a price setting oligopoly with convex costs this paper shows that a mixed strategy equilibrium will exist in an industry producing a homogeneous product with perfectly informed consumers if firms are identical and have weakly convex costs this generalises an earlier result by dasgupta and maskin

monetary policy signaling from the administration to the federal reserve this chapter employs the index of monetary policy signaling from the administration to the federal reserve safer that was developed in chapter two the safer index is a simple weekly sum of articles that appeared in the wall street journal in which administration officials expressed a desire for easier 1 or tighter 1 monetary policy a key assumption is that systematically over time the financial media capture the essence of communication that is going on between the executive branch and federal reserve officials 1 the signaling index is employed in ordinary least squares regressions for the period from january 1964 to november 1991 cumulative values of the safer index over a three week period as an explanatory variable are found to have a statistically significant effect on the average federal funds rate during the third week as the dependent variable further evidence suggests that the safer index is granger causal with respect to the federal funds rate after classifying the signals by sources within the administration oval office council of economic advisers treasury and other and unidentified sources it is shown that for the overall 1964 1991 period signals from the treasury department and from other and unidentified sources have a statistically significant effect on the federal funds rate while signals from the oval office and the council do not when the data are segmented according to who was the chairman of the federal reserve board at the time ordinary least squares results indicate that the federal reserve did not systematically respond to executive branch signaling in a statistically significant way when william mcchesney martin g william miller and alan greenspan were chairmen but did respond statistically significantly to administration signaling during portions of the periods during which arthur burns and paul volcker were chairmen

partisan monetary policies presidential influence through the power of appointment we investigate the channels through which partisan influence from a presidential administration could affect monetary policy making influence could be a result of direct presidential pressure exerted on members of the federal open market committee fomc or it could be a result of partisan considerations in presidential appointments to the board of governors to investigate these two channels of influence we devise and apply a method for estimating parameters of monetary policy reaction functions that can vary across individual members of the fomc our results suggest that the appointments process is the primary mechanism by which partisan differences in monetary policies arise

is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect evidence from a school feeding programme are public transfers targeted toward children neutralised by the household as the theory of altruism implies or is there an intrahousehold flypaper effect whereby such transfers stick to the child this paper studies the impact of a school feeding programme on child caloric intake in the philippines using a quasi experimental methodology the empirical results confirm an intrahousehold flypaper effect indeed they indicate virtually no intrahousehold reallocation of calories in response to the feeding programme in poorer households however children s gains from the programme appear to be taxed more heavily

market size and substitutability in imperfect competition a bertrand edgeworth chamberlin model competition is often associated with the idea that there are many traders in the market or that each price maker is small as compared to the market this paper introduces this notion of market size in a model of price competition with imperfect substitutes by constructing a model which creates a bridge between the chamberlin and bertrand edge worth lines of work on price competition we investigate the role of two fundamental parameters in the existence of an equilibrium the market size given by the number n of competitors and the degree of substitutability we prove that a for a given number of n 2 of competitors a sufficiently large but finite degree of substitutability entails nonexistence this thus generalizes the bertrand edgeworth nonexistence result which applies only to perfect substitutes b conversely for a given upper bound on the degree of substitutability a sufficiently large number of competitors ensures existence which thus introduces a significant role for market size in models of imperfect competition we finally investigate the proximity of an equilibrium when it exists to a competitive outcome and we find that both high substitutability and large market size are a condition for competitiveness

dispersed communication by central bank committees and the predictability of monetary policy decisions the paper asks whether members of central bank decision making committees should communicate with the public in a collegial manner by conveying the consensus or majority view of the committee or in an individualistic way by providing the diversity of views among the committee members it finds that more active as well as more consistent communication by committee members improves the predictability of monetary policy decisions significantly this effect is sizeable as communication dispersion across committee members accounts on average for one third to one half of the market s prediction errors of fomc policy decisions moreover more active and more consistent communication are found to also reduce the degree of uncertainty about the future path of interest rates these findings suggest that a collegial communication which stresses the consensus view on policy inclinations can enhance the effectiveness of central bank communication

dietary fiber intake away from home and at home in the united states abstract this paper examines the impact of socio economic and demographic factors on individual intake of dietary fiber in both the away from home and at home markets empirical results generally indicated that height region sex diet status household size age and income significantly affect dietary fiber intake away from home on the other hand weight urbanization region race ethnicity sex diet status household size day of consumption age and income significantly affect dietary fiber intake at home knowledge of the influence of sociodemographic factors provides food policy makers with information necessary for the design and implementation of nutrition programs dealing with dietary fiber intake

existing food policies and their relationship to hunger and nutrition the federal government subsidizes either partially or fully 95 million meals each day through the food assistance programs u s department of agriculture usda 1984 despite the scope and cost of the food assistance programs table 1 recent studies have concluded that the incidence of hunger in the united states is increasing porter and washington chou 1 although there is general agreement that hunger reemerged in the united states during the 1980s there is much controversy regarding the extent of hunger the physician task force on hunger in america estimated that 20 million americans suffer from hunger at least some time each month but the president s task force on food assistance indicated that it is currently impossible to estimate the extent of hunger because of the absence of reliable data the objectives of this paper are twofold a to review current food programs and policies and their objectives relative to existing nutritional and hunger problems and b to appraise the existing food assistance programs based on their stated objectives this discussion is not intended to be a thorough discourse on key elements of food policy but is designed to highlight developments in food policy relating to the food assistance programs nutrition and hunger recent developments in food assistance programs

majority rule consensus building and the power of the chairman arthur burns and the fomc this paper investigates decision making within the federal open market committee of the federal reserve focusing on the competing pressures of majority rule consensus building and the power of the chairman to undertake this analysis we have constructed an original data set recording desired federal funds rates for each member of the committee over the 1970 78 period our results confirm a disproportionate influence of the chairman in the policy process they also confirm that other voting members of the committee have an impact on policy choices estimates indicate that the chairman exercises 40 to 50 of the voting weight in committee decisions

federal open market committee structure and decisions abstract this paper examines the dissents of federal open market committee members regarding the domestic monetary policy directive it shows that on balance governors appointed by democratic u s presidents dissented significantly on the easier side while governors appointed by republican u s presidents dissented significantly on the tighter side the pattern of dissents for the reserve bank presidents was like that of republican appointees to the board of governors the bank presidents voting did not reflect regional points of view furthermore the timing of the dissents by both the governors and presidents did not seem to be associated with the onset of congressional or presidential elections

policy preferences of fomc members as revealed by dissenting votes the composition of the federal open market committee the ability to predict the effect of policy decisions on economic and f1nancialvariables and political influence from the white house and the congress are all potentially significant determinants of monetary policy decisions this study uses the record of dissenting votes from federal open market committee meetings to consider the relevance of these influences tests for differences between voting patterns of bank presidents versus members of the board of governors and differences during various historical periods provide insight into four questions 1 are the policy preferences of bank presidents different from those of the members of the board 2 does uncertainty about the economic and financial results of policy actions influence the level of dissent 3 is there a difference in the pattern of dissent under different chairmen and 4 is there effective political influence on monetary policymakers the legitimacy of district bank presidents serving on the fomc has been challenged in the courts and the legislature challengers fear that district bank presidents who serve without executive or legislative approval prefer policy that produces lower inflation and higher unemployment relative to the policy preferred by members of the board who are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate rogoff 1985 argues that in the presence of market distortions it is better for society to have central bankers who attach a larger weight than the society s

walrasian equilibria as limits of noncooperative equilibria part ii pure strategies abstract we examine the connection between walrasian equilibria of a limit economy with infinitesimal firms and noncooperative cournot equilibria of approximating finite economies with significant firms nonconvex production sets decreasing returns in the aggregate and endogenous determination of the number of active firms are allowed a walrasian equilibrium is a limit of pure strategy noncooperative equilibria only if a condition loosely analogous to downward sloping demand in the partial equilibrium constant returns to scale case holds the condition is also sufficient to guarantee the existence of a robust sequence of pure strategy noncooperative equilibria which converges to the walrasian equilibrium

bertrand edgeworth equilibrium with a large number of firms abstract we examine a model of price competition with strictly convex costs where the firms simultaneously decide on both price and quantity are free to supply less than the quantity demanded and there is discrete pricing if firms are symmetric then for a large class of residual demand functions there is a unique equilibrium in pure strategies whenever for a fixed grid size the number of firms is sufficiently large moreover this equilibrium price is within a grid unit of the competitive price the results go through to a large extent when the firms are asymmetric or they are symmetric but play a two stage game and the tie breaking rule is weakly manipulable

bertrand edgeworth oligopoly in large markets the relation between perfectly competitive and monopolistically competitive equilibria is analysed for a bertrand edgeworth model of a single market in which capacity constrained firms choose prices as strategies the market always has a nash equilibrium in pure or mixed strategies as the number of firms increases the corresponding equilibria converge in distribution to a perfectly competitive price this result provides a justification for perfect competition that is based on an explicit account of price formation however monopoly prices persist with a positive but vanishing probability regularity or well defined inverse demand functions are not required

list pricing and discounting in a bertrand edgeworth duopoly list or retail pricing is a widely used trading institution where firms announce a price that may be discounted at a later stage competition authorities view list pricing and discounting as a procompetitive practice we modify the standard bertrand edgeworth duopoly model to include list pricing and a subsequent discounting stage both firms first simultaneously choose a maximum list price and then decide whether to discount or not in a subsequent stage we show that list pricing works as a credible commitment device that induces a pure strategy outcome this is true for a general class of rationing rules further unlike the dominant firm interpretation of a price leader the low capacity firm may have incentives to commit to a low price and in this sense assume the role of a leader