longevity risk subjective survival expectations and individual saving behavior abstract we provide evidence of individuals awareness of longevity risk the uncertainty about future survival probabilities based on subjective survival expectations elicited in the survey of health ageing and retirement in europe share and matching data on longevity risk from the human mortality database we find a positive relationship between the forecast dispersion in subjective survival estimates and longevity risk which indicates that individuals are to some extent aware of longevity risk our analysis of savings behavior shows that the dispersion in survival estimates is primarily explained by individuals disagreeing on the survival probability and not by their true awareness of the underlying uncertainty individuals do not save more on average when faced with longevity risk although theory suggests they should

optimal price and inventory adjustment in an open economy model of the business cycle this paper presents a macroeconomic model containing optimizing inventory holding firms that is consistent with a number of prominent empirical regularities concerning fluctuations in output exchange rates relative prices and money prices are sticky but they are not predetermined still our model is consistent with exchange rate overshooting in the sense of dornbusch typical sticky price models allow a divergence between current production and current demand but this divergence is never allowed to feed back into the model our optimal inventory adjustments reconcile divergences between current demand and production and the inventory stock movements provide expected future dynamics

fixed production capacity menu cost and the output inflation relationship this paper analyses the impact of inflation when firms face frictions in both price and quantity adjustments a vast literature examines the consequences of price adjustment costs assuming frictionless quantity adjustments however temporary quantity adjustments may be expensive for example because continual adjustments of the optimal production plant are impossible moreover recent findings suggest that frictions in quantity adjustment may remove the linkage between output and inflation in this paper we show that this is not the case when inflation is anticipated on the contrary a predetermined production capacity may significantly amplify the consequences of price adjustment costs

competing macro hypotheses in the united states a kalman filtering approach the empirical validity of alternative views about the short run determinants of real output growth in the united states is investigated a nested framework is used to test the macro rational expectations mre hypothesis directly against two competing hypotheses the neo keynesian view that anticipated and unanticpated monetary policy both matter and friedman s 1977 proposition that increased inflation uncertainty reduces real output at least temporarily the unobservable explanatory variables are obtained from time varying parameter models of inflation and money growth which generate forecast errors and their conditional variances consistent with rational expectations under a continuously chaning policy regime the empirical results strongly support friedman s view the mre hypothesis must be rejected since both anticipated and unanticipated monetary changes matter the results prove robust across different model specifications and estimation techniques

how does women s life satisfaction respond to retirement a two stage analysis we quantify the adjustment of women s life satisfaction to retirement as a two stage process the transition to retirement leads to an immediate increase in women s life satisfaction after becoming retired their life satisfaction declines with the duration of retirement

inflation costly price and quantity adjustments and time spent in the keynesian regime abstract this paper considers a menu cost firm under inflation due to costly quantity adjustments the firm is sometimes in a keynesian regime where sales are demand determined with a positive real interest rate the proportion of time in the keynesian regime is less than the inverse of the absolute value of the average elasticity of demand in that regime

some evidence on lump sum versus convex costs of changing prices 2 two models in which price stickiness results from price adjustment costs are tested one an s s pricing model assumes lump sum adjustment costs and predicts firms will make relatively large infrequent price changes the other assumes convex adjustment costs and predicts frequent partial price adjustments survey data of firms price behavior reveal patterns consistent with the s s model however many of the patterns are also consistent with partial adjustment rules although the high percentage of firms which fix prices for a quarter or more casts doubt on the plausibility of the partialadjustment hypothesis i introduction in new keynesian economics price stickiness arises not because of wage rigidity so much as because either the gains to individual firms from changing prices are negligible or the costs of doing so deter full and immediate price changes as a result nominal shocks which affect demand for the firm s product as well as real shocks give rise to changes in output the nature and the timing of the effects of demand changes such as those initiated by monetary policy thus depend on how individual firms respond to the signals they receive sticky price models based on costs of price adjustment take at least two different forms one assumes a lump sum cost to changing prices which leads to predictions that firms generally keep prices fixed and make infrequent relatively large price changes the other assumes convex adjustment costs and leads to the prediction that firms make relatively small and frequent partial adjustments toward a target level evidence drawn from a series of surveys conducted by the national federation of independent business will be used to test the predictions from these two types of models while the data do not allow a definitive test between the two models the available evidence supports the model with lump sum costs of changing prices with the important proviso that there be substantial heterogeneity in the relative costs to firms of making price changes so that the frequency and size of changes vary considerably across firms ii s s rules with lump sum costs of price changes how frequently should a firm change its price when a change takes place how large should it be sheshinski and weiss 1977 and barro 1972 provided the first answers to these questions in their models an individual firm incurs a lump sum cost when changing its nominal price and the firm s profits depend on its real price where real price is defined as the firm s nominal price divided by an index of the prices of all other firms in the economy sheshinski and weiss assume that the firm tries to maximize the present value of its real profits their solution amounts to what is known in the optimal inventory literature as an s s rule in which s s units are ordered when stocks run down to s as applied to a pricing rule when prices rise elsewhere in the economy the firm s real price falls to a lower bound s at which point the firm raises its nominal price so that its real price jumps to s they prove that a more rapid general inflation rate calls for a lower s and higher s furthermore subject to a monotonicity condition a higher general inflation rate calls for a shorter time between price changes after showing a number of numerical examples sheshinski and weiss report that numerical experiments with a quadratic profit function give high intervals between price changes 1 2 years even with very low adjustment costs 1977 300 when the profit function is flat in the neighborhood of the profit maximizing real price there is little benefit from changing price a similar argument appears in the menu cost explanation for real effects of nominal disturbances in the absence of private incentives for individual price changes there may be real aggregate effects of nominal disturbances for example see mankiw 1985 akerlof and yellen 1985 kuran 1986 blanchard and kiyotaki 1987

an examination of aggregate price uncertainty in four countries and someimplications for real output this stu dy constructs measures of aggregate price uncertainty for four countries canada west germany great britain and the united states and examines the relationship across countries and through time between the inflation rate inflation variability and measures of price uncertainty the results suggest that the higher and more variable inflation of the 1970s increased uncertainty about the aggregate price level in canada great britain and the united states but not west ge rmany and there was a significant negative output effect of aggregate price uncertainty for canada and the united kingdom but not for the united states or west germany copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

empirical measures of inflation uncertainty a cautionary note a direct ex ante measure of inflation uncertainty in the us is compared with a number of proxies used in empirical studies the direct estimate is the root mean subjective variance of the probability distributions for inflation reported by respondents to the asa nber survey the proxies include forecast standard deviations from arima arch and structural models of inflation these proxies are not significantly correlated with the direct measure nor with one another use of the proxies leads to incorrect inferences about the correlation between inflation and inflation uncertainty and between inflation uncertainty and the real interest rate

efficient market testing of the expectations adjusted supply function hypothesis for italy 1985 efficient market testing of the expectations adjusted supply function hypothesis for italy applied economics vol 17 no 6 pp 1065 1070

bargaining structure and nominal wage flexibility in a model with hetergenous agents wage setting by monopoly unions and monetary policy conducted by a central bank we show that the duration of nominal wage contracts is u shaped in the degree of centralization with intermediate bargaining systems yielding contracts of shorter duration and thus more flexible nominal wages than both decentralized and centralized systems we also find the degree of heterogeneity in the economy the theoretical predictions of the model are tested on oecd data there is empirical support for the main results regarding contract length while there is less support for the predictions regarding the level of centralization

the long run relationship between inflation and output in postwar economies abstract we investigate the relationship between inflation and real output in a large sample of postwar economies our methodology is to use a structural vector autoregression to estimate the response of the level of real output to permanent inflation shocks separately for each country we find that a permanent shock to inflation is not associated with a permanent movement in the level of real output for most countries in our sample the main exceptions are certain low inflation countries in which permanent inflation shocks permanently increase the level of output we also find that permanent inflation shocks do not permanently influence real output growth rates in our sample

unanticipated monetary growth output and the price level in latin america an empirical investigation abstract this paper provides statistical evidence on the response of real output and the price level to movements in unanticipated monetary growth for 16 latin american countries in the context of barro s version of the rational expectations natural rate theory arima p d q modeling of the growth rate of m2 is employed for each country and the residuals of the selected model utilized to estimate the parameters of the real output and price level equations careful attention is devoted to the autocorrelation structure of the residuals of the real output and price level equations the empirical results suggest that generally unanticipated monetary growth has positive effects on real output and negative effects on the price level such patterns however do not exhibit an unambiguous symmetric response

source of monetary growth uncertainty and economic activity the time varying parameter model a large body of research suggests that uncertainty is an important factor affecting economic activity most earlier research however fails to consider the possibility that uncertainty may affect the value of new information and economic activity differently depending upon its source the author first examines the importance of these different sources for modeling u s monetary growth uncertainty he then empirically relates different sources of monetary growth uncertainty to economic activity measured by real gnp the results suggest that different sources of uncertainty have different impacts on economic activity the results tend to confirm predictions arising in the literature on irreversible investment and uncertainty copyright 1993 by mit press

offshore commodity hedging under floating exchange rates exchange rate uncertainty can have significant effects on the optimal hedging behavior of offshore commodity traders in this paper the standard commodity hedging framework is extended first to incorporate exchange rate uncertainty and second to forward cover transactions in the foreign exchange market the implications of exchange rate movements and forward cover decisions for offshore commodity hedgers are illustrated using data relevant to hedging australian export wheat on the chicago board of trade

nominal wage flexibility wage indexation and monetary union membership in a monetary union implies stronger incentives for nominal wage flexibility in the form of wage indexation and shorter contract length than non membership this counteracts the stabilisation policy cost of giving up monetary independence but more wage flexibility is only an imperfect substitute for an individual monetary policy it is possible that an increase in wage flexibility is welfare decreasing because of the accompanying rise in price variability the interaction between wage setting and central bank behaviour may result in either multiple equilibria or a unique full indexation equilibrium

financial market efficiency the decomposition of anticipated versus unanticipated money growth and further tests of the relation between money and real output note probably the most controversial empirical findings in macroeconomics in the last decade stem from robert barro s investigations into the relative effects of unanticipated versus anticipated money growth on unemployment and real output these studies generally proceed by decomposing observed money growth into what is defined to be its anticipated and unanticipated components and then test the restriction that only the unanticipated money measure has important effects for unemployment and real output in black box reduced form real side equations that include determinants of the natural rates of unemployment and real output as additional explanatory variables l the results of these tests for the annual postwar u s data generally cannot reject the hypothesis that only unanticipated money growth is important for the determination of aggregate real activity 2 anticipated money growth is found to be neutral for unemployment and real output these results are important because they give empirical support to the assertion that the apparent nonneutrality of observed money growth does not provide any firm basis for the efficacy of a systematic countercyclical monetary policy it should be clear that a crucial problem in testing for the neutrality nonneutrality of anticipated unanticipated money growth lies in developing an appropriate decomposition of observed money growth into its anticipated and unanticipated parts small 13 mishkin 8 and weintraub 14 among others have

anomalies in intertemporal choice evidence and an interpretation research on decision making under uncertainly has been strongly influenced by the documentation of numerous expected utility eu anomalies behaviors that violate the expected utility axioms the relative lack of progress on the closely related topic of intertemporal choice is partly due to the absence of an analogous set of discounted utility du anomalies we enumerate a set of du anomalies analogous to the eu anomalies and propose a model that accounts for the anomalies as well as other intertemporal choice phenomena incompatible with du we discuss implications for savings behavior estimation of discount rates and choice framing effects

hyperbolic discounting and the phillips curve using a standard dynamic general equilibrium model we show that the interaction of staggered nominal contracts with hyperbolic discounting leads to inflation having significant long run effects on real variables

unemployment hysteresis in canada an approach based on long memory time series models long memory univariate time series models known as arfima are applied to measure shock persistence for canada and the usa both output and unemployment exhibit higher persistence in canada than in the usa the finding that the rate of unemployment in canada exhibits high shock persistence supports the notion of hysteresis in unemployment the analysis of disaggregated canadian unemployment rates indicates that hysteresis is most pronounced for adult male workers the same class of models is used to obtain a generalization of the beveridge nelson decomposition of time series into a permanent and a cyclical component the permanent component of the canadian unemployment rate exhibits a kink in the early 1970s

non stationarities in macro economic time series further evidence and implications two sources of non stationarities in the mean of macro economic time series are investigated the empirical evidence for several countries clearly implies that differencing is to be preferred to the assumption of a deterministic linear time trend this result is somewhat weaker with respect to the analogous choice between seasonal differencing and seasonal dummy variables it is recommended that the time series properties of the variables considered in empirical work be carefully checked because the estimated relationships may heavily depend on the chosen detrending procedure les non stationarites dans ies chroniques macro economiques resultats supplmentaires et implications l auteur examine deux sources de non stationarite dans la mnoyenne des chroniques macroeconomiques les resultats d analyses de donnees pour plusieurs pays montrent clairement qu on doit preferer l usage d un processus de differences finies a l emploi d une tendance lineaire deterministe ce resultat est un peu moins robuste pour ce qui est du choix analogue entre l utilisation de differences saisonnieres par rapport a

monetary policy and inflation uncertainty in the united states and germany friedman s 16 proposition that increased inflation uncertainty may adversely affect real economic variables has received much attention over the last decade the theoretical arguments for such real effects are compelling however the empirical evidence on their presence and magnitude in different countries is mixed most results for the postwar u s economy strongly support the proposition 28 25 26 19 24 7 whereas it is generally rejected for the german economy 23 17 8 2 while a direct comparison of the u s and german results is difficult due to a lack of uniform sample periods data definitions estimation techniques and or measures of inflation uncertainty the evidence to date nevertheless suggests that the role of inflation uncertainty differs sharply between the two countries the question then arises what factor s can explain the difference one popular explanation is that the monetary authorities in the united states and germany respond quite differently to accelerating inflation 3 so that the behavior of uncertainty differs across countries 4 the u s federal reserve is often criticized for switching frequently between the primary policy goals of price stability and full employment possibly due to political pressures 21 30 since inflation is primarily a monetary phenomenon in the long run it is likely that such stop and go policies increase the uncertainty about future steady state inflation which in turn can adversely affect real output growth by reducing overall economic efficiency the german bundesbank on the other hand is reputed for its staunch and credible commitment to price stability which often takes precedence over other policy goals a more consistent and predictable

the near optimality of mark up pricing mark up pricing policies result in a loss of profits compared to marginal pricing behavior these losses however are often very small even for large changes in the money supply but by adopting a simple pricing rule the firm does not have to forecast the future and avoids the informational and computational costs required to determine the profit maximizing price each period thus even if these costs are small mark up pricing policies may be optimal or approximately so at least for some firms in a macro model this is likely to imply large monetary non neutralities

what explains the difference in the effect of retirement on health evidence from global aging data this paper analyzes the reasons for differences in the effect of retirement on health estimated results in previous studies we investigate these differences by focusing on the analysis methods used by these studies using various health indexes numerous researchers have examined the effects of retirement on health however there are no unified views on the impact of retirement on various health indexes consequently we show that the choice of analysis method is one of the key factors in explaining why the estimated results of the effect of retirement on health differ moreover we re estimate the effect of retirement on health by using a fixed analysis method controlling for individual heterogeneity and endogeneity of the retirement behavior we analyze the effect of retirement on health parameters such as cognitive function self report of health activities of daily living adl depression and body mass index in eight countries we find that the effects of retirement on self report of health depression and adl are positive in many of these countries

monetary variability and real output abstract utilizing engel s econometrica 1982 50 987 1008 autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch model to consistently parameterize the conditional variance of money growth i find an inverse relationship between monetary variability and real output this provides some additional evidence in favor of friedman s journal of political economy 1977 85 451 472 famous conjecture

stochastic inflation and the optimal policy of price adjustment this paper analyzes the optimal policy of price adjustment for a monopolistic firm in the presence of stochastic inflation it shows that an increase in the expected rate of inflation or in the cost of price adjustment leads to an increase in the initial real price and a decrease in the terminal real price in each period with a fixed nominal price it also shows that the effects of increased riskiness of inflation are ambiguous

real interest rates anticipated inflation and unanticipated money a multi country study a bstractin this paper we examine real interest rate behavior in canada west germany the united states and the united kingdom using a model that yields a semi reduced form equation linking the real interest rate to monetary growth shocks anticipated inflation and expected inflation variance the estimator used in our analysis accommodates regressors from other regressions ensuring that accurate inferences are obtained in all countries we find that increases in anticipated inflation initially dampen real interest rates in addition a significant and negative relationship between unanticipated money shocks and real interest across all countries is discovered inflation variance typically exhibits little explanatory power

ambiguity aversion and the absence of wage indexation abstract this paper analyzes optimal wage contracting assuming agents are not subjective expected utility maximizers but are instead ambiguity or uncertainty averse decision makers who maximize choquet expected utility we show that such agents will choose not to include any indexation coverage in their wage contracts even when inflation is uncertain unless the perceived inflation uncertainty is high enough significantly the exercise does not presume any exogenous costs e g transactions costs of including indexation links

real shocks efficient risk sharing and the duration of labor contracts it is widely believed that increased uncertainty leads to shorter duration of labor contracts this is indeed also the result obtained in the formal analysis in gray 1978 who concludes that a s expected increased variability regardless of source shortens contract length 1978 p 8 the basic argument is that production is inefficient unless the real wage happens to equate the demand and supply of labor and that the loss due to inefficient production increases with the deviation of the actual real wage from the real wage that would equate the demand and supply of labor it is assumed that the economy is exposed to both aggregate real shocks and nominal shocks but that the wage can only be indexed to the general price level an imperfect signal of the underlying shocks since uncertainty is greater for more distant periods the deviation of the actual real wage from the real wage that would equate the demand and supply also tends to be greater for more distant periods and it follows that the per period expected loss due to inefficient production increases with contract duration consequently increased uncertainty provides an incentive to reduce contract durations the reason contracts do not become arbitrarily short is the existence of a fixed contracting cost that militates against shortening the contract duration the oil price hikes of 1973 and 1978 presumably increased the a priori importance of aggregate real shocks and the efficientproduction hypothesis therefore leads one to expect a decrease in contract durations in the years following the price hikes the empirical fact however is that there has been no such tendency at least not in the united states this is clearly brought out in table i which shows that the average duration of major collective bargaining settlements negotiated in 1972 1987 has remained roughly constant

indivisible labor and the business cycle abstract a growth model with shocks to technology is studied labor is indivisible so all variability in hours worked is due to fluctuations in the number employed we find that unlike previous equilibrium models of the business cycle this economy displays large fluctuations in hours worked and relatively small fluctuations in productivity this finding is independent of individuals willingness to substitute leisure across time this and other findings are the result of studying and comparing summary statistics describing this economy an economy with divisible labor and post war u s time series

is equilibrium indexation efficient this paper investigates the welfare properties of equilibrium indexation in a decentralized economy if indexation is costless so all firms index then the equilibrium degree of indexation is efficient but if indexation is costly and this leads some firms not to index equilibrium indexation is inefficient because indexation has externalities for nonindexed firms firms choose too little indexation if labor demand is more responsive to movements in real money than to movements in real wages the results do not depend on the relative importance of real and nominal shocks

output and welfare effects of inflation with costly price and quantity adjustments there exists by now a burgeoning literature concerned with the consequences of a fixed cost of price adjustment due to this cost a monopolistic firm does not necessarily adjust its price even though the current price deviates from the price that would maximize the firm s current profit as a result the production generally differs from what it would be in the absence of a menu cost with the effect of inflation on the average output and welfare under monopolistic competition being ambiguous and depending in a complicated way on the profit and demand functions 1 however one strong result holds unambiguously for all profit and demand functions at low inflation rates the average output and welfare are above their levels at full price stability where firms charge the static monopoly price 2 the driving force is that discounting makes a firm more concerned with its real profits earlier in a period with a constant nominal price than with its real profits later in the period in fact as the inflation rate approaches zero the firm s initial real price converges to the profit maximizing real price while the terminal real price converges to a smaller real price at low inflation rates therefore a firm s price is most of the time below the price that would maximize the current profit since output and welfare under monopolistic competition are inversely related to price average output and welfare are higher than under full price stability the inevitable conclusion is that the economy benefits from a little bit of inflation a critical assumption underlying this result is that firms can continuously adjust their production to satisfy demand so while the menu cost literature explicitly assumes that there is a small fixed cost incurred at each price adjustment it also implicitly assumes that it is costless to continuously adjust the quantity of output 3 this is however a questionable assumption there is some empirical evidence indicating the existence of a cost of quantity adjustment part of which is fixed in that it does not depend on the size of the adjustment 4 the cost of quantity adjustment stems from the need to rearrange and reorganize the factor inputs for the new level of production and includes managerial time and effort a fixed cost of quantity adjustment rules out any continuous adjustment of the production to satisfy the increasing demand that results from a decreasing real price within a period with a constant nominal price under the reasonable assumption that the menu cost does not exceed the fixed cost of quantity adjustment 5 in an inflationary environment a firm chooses to adjust its nomi

the relative rigidity of monopoly pricing this paper seeks to explain why monopolies keep their nominal prices constant for longer periods than do tight oligopolies the authors show that cost changes create a larger incentive for duopolists to change their prices while demand changes tend to have a greater effect on a monopolist when both costs and demand are affected by small changes in the overall price level the cost effect dominates in the presence of a small fixed cost of changing prices therefore duopolists change their prices in response to smaller perturbations in underlying conditions copyright 1987 by american economic association

the impact of age pension eligibility age on retirement and program dependence evidence from an australian experiment abstract governments around the world are reforming their social security systems in light of the challenges posed by population aging we study the 1993 australian age pension reform which progressively increased the eligibility age for women from 60 to 65 years we find economically significant responses to the reform an increase in the eligibility age of one year induced a decline in the probability of retirement by 12 to 19 percentage points in addition the reform induced significant program substitution with increases in enrollment in other social insurance programs particularly the disability support pension which effectively functioned as an alternative source of retirement income

procrastination and obedience in this lecture i shall focus on situations involving repeated decisions with time inconsistent behavior although each choice may be close to maximizing and therefore result in only small losses the cumulative effect of a series of repeated errors may be quite large thus in my examples decision makers are quite close to the intelligent well informed individuals usually assumed in economic analysis but cumulatively they make seriously wrong decisions that do not occur in standard textbook economics this lecture discusses and illustrates several pathological modes of individual and group behavior procrastination in decision making undue obedience to authority membership of seemingly normal individuals in deviant cult groups and escalation of commitment to courses of action that are clearly unwise in each case individuals choose a series of current actions without fully appreciating how those actions will affect future perceptions and behavior the standard assumption of rational forwardlooking utility maximizing is violated the nonindependence of errors in decision making in the series of decisions can be explained with the concept from cognitive psychology of undue salience or vividness for example present benefits and costs may have undue salience relative to future costs

on the infrequent adjustment of price by firms i introduction recent research by blinder 1991 indicates that as many as 75 percent of all firms change price no more than twice a year according to the wall street journal these findings seem to have caused considerable surprise 1 there is however nothing unusual about these results infrequent price adjustment by firms can be readily explained by the existence of very small price adjustment or menu costs and the fact that deviations from optimal price adjustment policies often result in negligible reductions in a firm s average rate of profit this paper brings together in a dynamic setting two ingredients in the literature that have previously been linked only in a static framework the small menu cost argument of mankiw 1985 and the near rational argument of akerlof and yellen 1985 numerical examples are used to answer the familiar objection that price adjustment costs are too small to be important the main conclusions of the paper remain valid for a wide variety of plausible parameter values and do not depend on extreme assumptions concerning the flatness of the firm s profit function the basic insight that under imperfect competition first order deviations from optimal behavior imply second order losses was first made by bowley 1924 25 this idea was further developed by akerlof and yellen 1985 since the firm s profit function is flat at its maximum point failure to adjust price in response to small exogenous shocks implies very small losses even if price adjustment is costless if there are some costs associated with changing price a policy of rigid prices in the face of small nominal shocks may be optimal this would seem to provide a micro explanation for sticky prices these ideas are usually expounded in the framework of a static two period model 2 further the conclusions reached are only valid for small deviations from optimal behavior the present paper extends the argument to a dynamic framework of continual inflation and its conclusions are shown to remain valid for large deviations from optimal pricing policies 3 the paper makes two main points first very small price adjustment costs often lead to surprising long intervals between price changes even when the length of this interval is chosen optimally second the loss of profits suffered by the firm when the interval between price changes is much greater than the optimal value is often negligible large deviations from optimal policies typically imply very small losses this is a much stronger claim than the familiar argument that small deviations from optimality imply second order losses and it does not follow from the envelope theorem if a firm adopts a simple rule of say changing price twice a year regardless of the inflation rate it may earn a level of profit practically indistinguishable from that it would earn if it behaved optimally at least for inflation rates experienced in the western democracies since world war ii the standard objection to the menu cost explanation of infrequent price adjustment is that these costs are much too small to explain observed pricing behavior the examples presented below show that this objection can be discounted seemingly trivial price adjustment costs as small as one millionth of the firm s annual revenue can explain price adjustment frequencies as low as once or twice a year at inflation rates of 20 percent per annum and above part of the explanation concerns the flatness of the firm s profit function over a wide range of plausible values of demand and cost parameters profit functions are sufficiently flat to explain observed frequencies of price adjustment even when the interval between price changes is optimal but there is more too it than this large deviations from optimal price adjustment policies imply surprisingly small losses even for profit functions that would never be described as flat in particular the loss in profit caused by large deviations in the interval between price changes from its optimal value are normally very small

output effects of inflation with fixed price and quantity adjustment costs i introduction there is convincing evidence that fixed costs of price adjustment may be large levy et al 1997 found such costs to be 0 7 of a firm s revenue and zbaracki et al 2004 found them to be 1 22 in the presence of fixed costs of price adjustment a monopolistic firm does not adjust its nominal price continuously with the result that the real price and output generally deviate from their static monopoly level at low inflation rates the average output is higher than the static monopoly output if there is positive discounting danziger 1988 and depends on higher order derivatives of the profit and demand functions if there is no discounting benabou and konieczny 1994 1 most of the literature assumes that only price adjustments are costly while output can be continuously adjusted without cost however bresnahan and ramey 1994 document that there may be large fixed costs of quantity adjustments relatedly many publications show that adjusting labor and capital inputs involves significant fixed costs 2 such costs may derive from loss of organizational capital baily et al 2001 jovanovic and rousseau 2001 as well as from job protection rules severance pay and legal and administrative complications in a framework with both price and quantity adjustment costs andersen 1995 and andersen and toulemonde 2004 demonstrate that only intermediate size shock but not large or small shocks may affect output for a constant inflation rate danziger 2001 shows that a firm s permanent production decreases with inflation at low inflation rates if discounting is positive and danziger and kreiner 2002 that output capacity decreases with inflation if the elasticity of demand is constant and there is no discounting see also danziger 2003 the purpose of this article is to provide a simple general characterization of the output effects of a constant inflation rate if both price and quantity adjustments involve fixed costs it is assumed that quantity adjustments are at least as costly as price adjustments which implies that a firm s production is held constant at a permanent level 3 each firm then keeps its nominal price unchanged in periods of equal length and the nominal price is adjusted so that the initial real price is the same in each period thus a firm s optimal strategy consists of the initial real price the duration of the periods with unchanged nominal price and the permanent level of production the article shows that in the absence of discounting the effect of inflation on the aggregate production depends on how fast firms marginal real revenue decreases with demand and that this effect is fully determined by the elasticity of the marginal real revenue with respect to demand thus aggregate production decreases with inflation if the elasticity of the marginal real revenue always exceeds minus unity increases with inflation if the elasticity of the marginal real revenue is always less than minus unity and is invariant to inflation if the elasticity of the marginal real revenue always equals minus unity several studies have found that the comovement between output and prices is typically negative in the long run cooley and ohanian 1991 den haan 2000 den haan and sumner 2004 fiorito and kollintzas 1994 within the framework of the present model the negative comovement indicates that the empirically relevant situation is when the elasticity of the marginal real revenue always exceeds minus unity this will be the case among others if demand functions exhibit a constant price elasticity less than minus unity as assumed in danziger and kreiner 2002 ii the model consider an economy with a unit continuum of identical consumers and a unit continuum of monopolistic firms producing differentiated perishable products each firm and its product are indexed by i which is uniformly distributed on 0 1

the output inflation trade off when prices are costly to change the output inflation trade off is investigated in a rational expectations equilibrium economy in which costly price setting makes it inefficient for agents to vary their prices at every instant it is shown that sticky prices are not some exogenous source of output fluctuation but result from the monetary policy process an economy with slow and counterinflationary money growth exhibits staggered changes in sticky prices as assumed in some new keynesian analyses an economy with fast money growth and a high degree of monetary accommodation exhibits either flexible prices or bunched frequently changing sticky prices

the optimality of partial price adjustment policies this paper studies the optimal price adjustment policies of a monopolistically competitive firm whose profit maximizing price is subject to a serially correlated random disturbance the firm chooses its price by comparing the expected cost of present and future price changes with the expected losses occurring when price deviates from its instantaneous profit maximizing value partial price adjustment often is the best way to minimize the sum of these losses prices tend to be more flexible both in response to large shocks to the firm s profit maximizing price and when much uncertainty exists about the future

testing the nairu model for the united states this paper tests using u s data the dynamics implied by the nairu view of the relationship between inflation and the unemployment rate the results are somewhat sensitive to the measure of inflation used but they generally reject the dynamics an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between inflation and the unemployment rate is suggested

fisher phillips friedman and the measured impact of inflation on interest a reply the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that empirical findings which persistently appear to contradict the fisher hypothesis that the nominal rate of interest should rise by the full amount of an increase in anticipated inflation are due basically to a failure to control for changes in the real rate of interest that are associated with changes in anticipated inflation we are guided in our search for proper specification of a fisher equation by a simple general equilibrium model which is employed to derive the impact of a change in anticipated inflation upon nominal interest given the requirement that commodity money and labor markets remain in equilibrium in effect we depart from the empirical tradition which has grown up around testing of the fisher hypothesis that takes the real interest rate to be independent of anticipated inflation and argues that for anticipated inflation properly measured the data ought to support the fisher hypothesis 1

retirement and health behaviour this article investigates whether and to what extent retirement changes health behaviour for identification we use an instrumental variable approach that exploits exogenous variations in the early

money supply variability in a macro model of monopolistic competition the effects of changes in money supply variability are examined for a macro model of monopolistic competition increases in money supply variability raise demand uncertainty causing individual firms to produce more for inventory in addition expected profits decrease inducing a number of firms to leave the economy aggregate income then falls in spite of an increase in firm level production the result on aggregate income is standard but the results on inventories and the number of firms in the economy distinguish this monopolistic macro model empirically from conventional macro models when changes in money supply variability occur

econometric issues in macroeconomic models with generated regressors the paper critically reviews the literature on the econometric issues raised by the use of generated regressors gr in empirical models the economic rationale for the use of gr is considered with examples being drawn from several macroeconomic examples including new classical macroeconomic ncm models which postulate monetary neutrality various estimation methods are discussed for models which include surprise or unexpected terms and the strengths and weaknesses of each approach are investigated drawing upon the work of mcaleer and mckenzie 1991 situations where the typically inefficient two step estimation 2se method will be efficient are highlighted problems of model misspecification and measurement errors are also investigated an empirical section highlights some of the dangers of using uncorrected 2se estimation results through a careful consideration of many recent attempts to test the ncm monetary neutrality hypothesis copyright 1993 by blackwell publishers ltd

cost of living escalators in major union contracts this paper analyzes the price indexation provisions of a sample of major canadian collective bargaining agreements concluded between 1968 and 1975 under these contracts escalated wage increases comprised about one third of total wage increases and represented a major source of erosion in the relative wages of skilled workers the author argues that indexation provisions are usefully characterized by the marginal elasticity of the contractual wage rate to increases in prices measures of this responsiveness indicate that on average contractual wage rates are only slightly less than unit elastic with respect to price increases there is considerable variation across industries however in the extent to which wages respond to price changes

anticipated inflation and aggregate employment the case of costly price adjustment even if inflation is perfectly anticipated a firm that finds nominal price adjustments sufficiently costly will reset its price at multi period intervals consequently its average output will change in a direction that depends on properties of its profit function on the basis of this observation which does not involve money illusion the paper shows that anticipated inflation can stimulate aggregate employment through a process that entails changes in the factor demands of individual monopolistic firms and in the intersectoral allocation of consumer expenditure simulations indicate however that the gain in aggregate employment is likely to be modest

self command in practice in policy and in a theory of rational choice an increasingly familiar occurrence for obstetricians is being asked by patients to withhold anesthesia during delivery the physician often proposes that a facemask be put beside the patient who may inhale nitrous oxide as she needs it but some determined patients ask that no such opportunity be provided if gas is available they will use it and they want not to be able to the request is interesting for decision theory and raises questions of ethics policy and physician responsibility even if the woman is merely making a mistake if she simply does not know how painful labor will be and how glad she will be even in retrospect if the pain is relieved but some women who make this request have had earlier deliveries during which they demanded anesthesia and received it they are acquainted with the pain they anticipate asking for relief and they want it withheld when they do they expect to regret afterwards any recourse to anesthesia this particular instance of attempted selfdenial has features that are special but many that are common the woman is so far as we know in good health physically and mentally she anticipates a transient period when her usual values and preferences will be suspended or inaccessible she has reasons for wanting to frustrate her own wishes at the critical time she needs cooperation she may ratify her choice afterward by expressing herself grateful that no anesthesia was offered even when requested there are ethical dilemmas and legal issues and there is conflict if say the husband disagrees with the physician in the delivery room about what his wife really wants

cost of living escalators and price wage linkages in the u s economy 1968 1980 this paper examines the importance of cost of living escalator clauses as a link between price changes and money wage changes it surveys the possible kinds of price wage linkages and estimates the importance of colas in overall wage changes in the economy the author concludes that despite growth in the coverage and yields of escalator clauses since the mid 1960s they still accounted in 1980 for less than 10 percent of total money wage changes in the u s economy and are therefore not a major cause of inflation

price adjustment costs and the output inflation trade off when prices are costly to adjust there is a trade off between the rate of inflation and the firm s average level of output this trade off is the result of fully optimizing behaviour by the firm sufficient conditions are developed for inflation to have no effect on output however these conditions are unlikely to be met in practice this suggests that the superneutrality of money hypothesis is incompatible with the type of demand and cost curves normally encountered in economic theory if the discount rate is positive moderate rates of inflation will always lead to higher levels of output

the dynamic effects of retirement on well being in this paper we examine whether and to what extent people anticipate their retirement and adapt to it over time for identification we use an instrumental variable approach that exploits the eligi

comparing the point predictions and subjective probability distributions of professional forecasters we use data from the survey of professional forecasters spf to compare point predictions of gross domestic product gdp growth and inflation with the subjective probability distributions held by forecasters we find that most spf point predictions are quite close to the central tendencies of forecasters subjective distributions tend to be asymmetric with spf forecasters tending to report point predictions that give a more favorable view of the economy than do their subjective means medians modes

roads out of poverty assessing the links between aid public investment growth and poverty reduction the authors develop a macroeconomic framework that captures links between aid public investment growth and poverty public investment is disaggregated into education infrastructure and health and affects both aggregate supply and demand dutch disease effects are captured by accounting for changes in the relative price of domestic goods the authors assess the impact of policy shocks on poverty by linking the model to a household survey they calibrate the model for ethiopia and simulate the changes in the allocation of aid and public investment the authors also calculate the amount by which foreign aid should increase to reach the poverty targets of the millennium development goals

ramsey meets laibson in the neoclassical growth model the neoclassical growth model is modified to include a variable rate of time preference with no commitment ability and log utility the equilibrium features a constant effective rate of time preference and is observationally equivalent to the standard model the extended framework yields testable linkages between the extent of commitment ability and the rates of saving and growth the model also has welfare implications including the optimal design of institutions that facilitate household commitments steady state results are obtained for general concave utility functions and some properties of the transitional dynamics are characterized for isoelastic utility

indexation and the effect of inflation uncertainty on real gnp this article examines the combined effects of inflation uncertainty and indexation on the growth rate of real gross national product gn p the evidence suggests that greater indexation partially reduces t he adverse effect of inflation uncertainty on real gnp growth over time it also indicates that in contrast to earlier findings regarding th e effect of inflation uncertainty on employment the overall effect of inflation uncertainty on real gnp growth may be permanent a preliminary assessment of whether the discrepancy is the result of in flation uncertainty permanently affecting the growth rate of the capi tal stock is inconclusive copyright 1988 by the university of chicago

the degree of indexation in major u s union contracts the authors propose that the most appropriate measure of the degree of indexation in a union contract is the marginal elasticity of the average expected wage during the life of the contract with respect to unanticipated changes in the price level they present estimates of this elasticity for 68 u s contracts negotiated between 1971 and 1983 with cost of living escalators the average degree of indexation in the sample 48 is considerably smaller than previous estimates of similar marginal elasticities because the estimation method more accurately incorporates caps minimum colas and the exact specification of the cola clauses

optimum pricing policy under stochastic inflation we describe aggregate inflation as a stochastic process in which the rate of change of the price level can be positive or zero where the times spent in each state are of random duration this class of processes includes two state markov chains and renewal processes as special cases it is shown that the optimal pricing policy of a monopolistic firm with non convex costs of price adjustment is s s in its real price i e its nominal price relative to the price level a basic certainty equivalence result is proved i e the firm behaves as if it faces a certain and fixed rate of inflation higher than the actual expected rate the difference between the two rates being a risk premium which depends on the real interest rate and the parameters of the stochastic process one can thus apply previous results from the case of certainty sheshinski and weiss review of economic studies 1977 to obtain comparative static results in particular one finds that an increase in the variance of expected inflation leads firms to choose a pricing policy with larger amplitude in real price the paper also addresses the question of consistency in firms expectations when the price level is determined by the firms actions in this paper we consider pricing policies of individual firms in an inflationary environment each firm expects the general price level to increase and must determine the rate of increase of its own price it is assumed that the firm incurs an adjustment cost when it changes its nominal price consequently firms choose to change prices occasionally rather than continuously

staggered price setting staggered wage setting and business cycle persistence abstract staggered price setting and staggered wage setting are commonly viewed as similar mechanisms in generating persistent real effects of monetary shocks in this paper we distinguish the two mechanisms in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium framework we show that although the dynamic price setting and wage setting equations are alike a key parameter governing persistence is linked to the underlying preferences and technologies in different ways with reasonable parameter values the staggered price mechanism by itself is incapable of while the staggered wage mechanism plays an important role in generating persistence

small menu costs and large business cycles a macroeconomic model of monopoly i introduction the conflict between modern neoclassical and traditional keynesian theories of the business cycle centers upon the pricing mechanism in neoclassical models prices are fully flexible they represent the continuous optimization of economic agents and the continuous intersection of supply and demand in keynesian models prices are often assumed to be sticky they do not necessarily equilibrate all markets at all times one of the reasons for the resurgence of the equilibrium approach to macroeconomics has been the absence of a theoretical underpinning for this keynesian price stickiness this note shows that sticky prices can be both privately efficient and socially inefficient the business cycle results from the suboptimal adjustment of prices in response to a demand shock to the extent that policy can stabilize aggregate demand it can mitigate the social loss due to this suboptimal adjustment in some keynesian models prices are simply exogenously fixed 2 in others agents must set their prices in advance of the transaction date the act of altering a posted price is certainly costly these costs include such items as printing new catalogs and informing salesmen of the new price yet these menu costs are small and therefore generally perceived as providing only a weak foundation for these fixed price models however this inference is flawed small menu costs can cause large welfare losses the claim that price adjustment costs are small does not rebut the claim that they are central to understanding economic fluctuations

the real effects of nominal price rigidity abstract nominal price rigidity may arise from risk spreading contracts and be consistent with fully efficient trade we demonstrate this point by studying the contracts that a risk averse firm signs with its risk neutral supplier and its risk neutral customer before the general price level is publicly revealed there is an equilibrium in which the two contracts specify inflexible prices and efficient quantities

optimising agents staggered wages and persistence in the real effects of money shocks in this paper we incorporate taylor s 1979 staggered wage setting into an optimising dynamic general equilibrium framework to study whether staggered wages could induce a high degree of persistence in the real effects of money shocks we conclude that high persistence is an unlikely outcome sensible values of the microeconomic parameters and or a moderate rate of underlying inflation imply a low degree of persistence furthermore once explicit microfoundations are taken into account we show that i the model is highly non linear ii the inertia of the system is inversely related to the level of average inflation

interest rate variability and economic performance some international evidence using data for short term and long term interest rates across a major group of industrial countries his paper studies the impact of interest rate variability on the cyclical behaviour of real output and the price level in these countries theory predicts that the increased variability of the interest rate stemming from a rise in the level of uncertainty has a negaive impact on he ouput demanded and supplied and in turn an ambiguous impact on the price level the empirical evidence is generally consistent with this prediction next the investigation attempts to shed some light on major sources of uncertainty underlying the interest rate variability focus in on he variability of monetary growth the exchange rate and the energy price some evidence on he relative contribution of these sources of uncertainty of the variability of the interest rate and in turn to the cyclical behaviour of real output and the price level across countries is provided

inflation output and labour productivity when prices are changed infrequently when prices are changed infrequently the effect of inflation on output depends on the form of profit and demand functions this paper provides a general taxonomy at small inflation rates output falls rises stays the same if the demand function is concave convex linear in terms of the log of real price this holds when the frequency of price changes is fixed in case of a catalogue firm as well as when it is chosen optimally in case of a menu cost firm with fixed and variable price adjustments costs with some specifications inflation increases output but reduces labor productivity copyright 1990 by the london school of economics and political science

forecasting rational expectations and the phillips curve an empirical investigation abstract the rational expectations version of the phillips curve is empirically evaluated for switzerland using a wide variety of specifications it turns out that the results are highly sensitive to measurement of both the natural rate and expectations of nominal variables no reliable phillips curve seems to exist in addition information on the relative quality of different forecasting schemes is obtained for a number of important macroeconomic variables

unanticipated money growth and unemployment post sample forecasts in the late 1970s robert j barro published what has since become a popular model of business fluctuations barro s 3 findings provide evidence advocating the short run neutrality of money under rational expectations forging an important empirical link to the theoretical studies of lucas 19 20 and sargent and wallace 33 the original barro unemployment model has received additional support from further statistical testing 5 6 15 despite criticisms and modifications some of which are considered in barro s 6 updated model these equations have inspired numerous empirical studies analyzing unanticipated effects of macroeconomic variables this paper examines post sample forecasts of barro s original 3 and revised 6 unemployment equations for the 1974 84 period mayer 23 24 harvey 13 179 80 and lovell 18 among many contend that the ability to successfully forecast outside of the sample period is an important criterion for evaluating model robustness this view is also reflected in a substantial body of studies including 10 25 26 29 39 which investigate the post sample predictive performance of macroeconomic models one year ahead forecasts indicate that the barro 3 6 equations accurately predict unemployment for the 1974 79 period during 1980 84 however the predictive performance of both models sharply deteriorates augmenting the barro models with interest rate volatility in accordance with the findings of evans 11 and tatom 38 considerably improves the overall forecasting ability this modification also rectifies the 1980s structural instability of the barro unemployment equations furthermore the basic conclusions of the seminal barro work are retained with this augmented model the results reveal that increases in interest rate volatility exert significantly adverse effects upon unemployment corroborating with the findings of evans 11 and tatom 38 still interest rate volatility could be overlooked in previous estimations of the barro or other models of business fluctuations due to the variable s relative constancy prior to 1979

anticipated money inflation uncertainity and real economic activity this paper critically examines a number of maintained hypotheses that are necessarily being tested along with the basic notion derived from the rational expectations re formulation of lucas 1972 19 73 that only unanticipated money matters the trend stationary representation of secular real output of lucas and others is replaced by a difference stationary representation found by nelson and plosser 1980 to be consistent with u s historical data the impact of inflation uncertainty on real activity is considered attention is paid to possible mis measurement of agents ex ante anticipated money growth it is found that three alternative measures of anticipated money growth produce a stable impact on growth of output and employment contemporaneous and lagged values of unanticipated money growth have no significant additional explanatory power in the presence of any one of the three measures of anticipated money growth beyond this it is impossible to reject the hypothesis that the initial positive real impact of anticipated money is not temporary inflation uncertainty is found to act as a significant depressant of real economic activity in the presence of all tested combinations of anticipated and unanticipated money growth this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

real business cycles and the lucas paradigm when the lucas paradigm is generalized to include real effects the effects of real factors and monetary factors on the business cycle are always interrelated furthermore in such models monetary factors can affect the long run behavior of real output contrary to the commonly held view that they cannot real business cycle models and lucas type models are different paradigms but not in the sense of real versus monetary rather interrelationships between real and monetary factors are intrinsic to the lucas paradigm whereas the real business cycle literature implies a dichotomy between real and monetary factors

inflation uncertainty and real economic activity an alternative approach a bstracct increased uncertainty about inflation is shown to encourage inflation hedging which in turn reduces the macroeconomic costs of that uncertainty portfolio theory and empirical evidence support the contention that only the portion of inflation volatility that cannot be hedged has real economic effects additional empinrcal results suggest that i increased inflation volatility in the early seventies was eventually followed by portfolio reallocations that allowed for greatly improved inflation hedging and ii the deletenrous effect of inflation uncertainty on real economic activity shown in previouis studies is significantly smaller after 1975