the fisher hypothesis and the forecastability and persistence of inflation abstract for the period 1860 to 1939 the simple correlation of the u s commercial paper rate with the contemporaneous inflation rate is 0 17 the corresponding correlation for the period 1950 to 1979 is 0 71 this paper attributes this apparent change in the fisher relation to differences in the stochastic process of inflation rather than a change in any structural relationship between interest rates and expected inflation contrary to recent claims in the literature there is little evidence of inflation non neutrality in data from the pre world war i period

employer matching and 401 k saving evidence from the health and retirement study abstract employer matching of employee 401 k contributions is often touted as a powerful incentive to save for retirement and is a key component in pension plan design in the united states using detailed administrative contribution earnings and pension plan data from the health and retirement study this analysis formulates a life cycle consistent econometric specification of 401 k saving and estimates the determinants of saving accounting for non linearities in the household budget set induced by matching the participation estimates indicate that an increase in the match rate by 25 cents per dollar of employee contribution raises 401 k participation by 5 percentage points the parametric and semi parametric estimates for saving indicate that an increase in the match rate by 25 cents per dollar of employee contribution raises 401 k saving by 365 in 1991 dollars overall the analysis reveals that the 401 k saving response to matching is quite inelastic and hence matching is a rather poor policy instrument with which to raise retirement saving

bounds for the correlations of expected inflation with real and nominal interest rates abstract this paper derives bounds for the correlations of the unobservable expected rate of inflation with nominal and expected real interest rates for quarterly u s data from 1955 to 1990 the bounds suggest that expected changes in cpi inflation have a weak positive correlation with changes in the nominal t bill yield and a strong negative correlation with expected changes in the real t bill yield

is inflation always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon using a sample of about 160 countries over the last 30 years we test for the quantity theory relationship between money and inflation when analysing the full sample of countries we find a strong positive relation between long run inflation and the money growth rate the relation is not proportional however the strong link between inflation and money growth is almost wholly due to the presence of high or hyper inflation countries in the sample the relationship between inflation and money growth for low inflation countries on average less than 10 per annum over the last 30 years is weak

taxpayers responses to tax based incentives for retirement savings evidence from the saver s credit notch abstract this paper uses the saver s credit to analyze taxpayers understanding of and responses to tax incentives the saver s credit is a tax credit designed to encourage retirement savings among low and middle income households however the credit s structure creates notches or discontinuous jumps within a household s budget constraint these notches provide an incentive to manipulate adjusted gross income to fall just below the level where the credit decreases i use public use tax files from the internal revenue service to test whether taxpayers bunch their income at the notch created by the saver s credit i find strong evidence that bunching occurred in response to the credit which implies that taxpayers claiming the credit understood the incentives for bunching and indeed manipulated their incomes accordingly i then exploit the discontinuity in credit rates to analyze the credit s impact on retirement contribution behavior using a regression discontinuity approach and find that the credit failed to generate a statistically significant effect on the level of retirement contributions these results imply that the saver s credit is more effective at providing transfers to low and middle income taxpayers than at increasing retirement contributions

how retirement saving programs increase saving this paper summarizes the authors work on the effect of ira and 401 k contributions on net personal saving they consider many different nonparametric approaches to controlling for heterogeneity in individual saving behavior and conclude that the weight of the available evidence suggests that contributions to both iras and 401 k s largely represent new saving the authors devote particular attention to reconciling their results with the findings in other studies that reach different conclusions sometimes using the same databases that the authors analyze methodological limitations that undermine the reliability of results in other studies explain many of these disparities

bounds on elasticities with optimization frictions a synthesis of micro and macro evidence on labor supply how can price elasticities be identified when agents face optimization frictions such as adjustment costs or inattention i derive bounds on structural price elasticities that are a function of the observed effect of a price change on demand the size of the price change and the degree of frictions the degree of frictions is measured by the utility losses agents tolerate to deviate from the frictionless optimum the bounds imply that frictions affect intensive margin elasticities much more than extensive margin elasticities i apply these bounds to the literature on labor supply the utility costs of ignoring the tax changes used to identify intensive margin labor supply elasticities are typically less than 1 of earnings as a result small frictions can explain the differences between micro and macro elasticities extensive and intensive margin elasticities and other disparate findings pooling estimates from existing studies i estimate a hicksian labor supply elasticity of 0 33 on the intensive margin and 0 25 on the extensive margin after accounting for frictions

purchasing power parity in the short and long run a reappraisal of the post 1973 evidence in this paper an attempt is made to separate the short run and long run aspects of the purchasing power parity ppp relationship using the techniques of band spectral regression and cointegration for eight industrialized countries the long run ppp is first tested for all the eight countries with reference to their nominal bilateral exchange rates vis a visthe us dollar for five european currencies the analysis is repeated with respect to the deutschmark with a separate consideration of the post ems period in the concluding sections possible reasons for ppp deviations are examined

on low frequency estimates of long run relationships in macroeconomics abstract a number of recent studies have attempted to test propositions concerning long run economic relationships by means of frequency domain time series techniques that concentrate attention on low frequency comovements of variables the present paper emphasizes that many of these propositions involve expectational relationships that are not inherently related to specific frequencies or periodicities thus the association of low frequency time series test statistics with long run economic propositions is not generally warranted that such an association can be misleading is demonstrated by analysis of examples taken from notable papers by geweke lucas and summers

money output and the expected real interest rate this paper tests the exclusion of lagged growth rates of money and output from regression equations with serially correlated disturbances for the expected real interest rate the authors empirical approach is an extension of the empirical strategies of eugene f fama 1975 and frederic s mishkin 1981 which invoke the orthogonality of the inflation forecast error to predetermined regressors under the maintained hypothesis of rational expectations they discuss the implications of their tests for simple real business cycle models copyright 1991 by mit press

spatial competition with heterogeneous firms i model endogenous horizontal and vertical product differentiation with arbitrarily many heterogeneous firms firms are asymmetric in that they differ in their marginal costs i prove that under an equilibrium refinement all economically relevant firm outcomes are uniquely determined across all strict subgame perfect nash equilibria there are two central results first a firm s price market share and profit are independent of its neighbors marginal costs conditional on the average marginal cost in the market second more productive firms are more isolated all else equal in particular the distance between two firms is strictly decreasing in their average marginal cost

information provision by interest groups we investigate interest groups incentives to inform consumers about the damaging practices of firms and the impact such an ig has on firms technology choices the ig aims to reduce the production of some bad say pollution it can at a cost investigate firms production practices and inform consumers about its findings since consumers care about the environment revealing differences in pollution levels between firms leads to vertical product differentiation the information by shifting sales from dirty towards clean firms reduces pollution we show that the ig is most inclined to investigate firms in relatively competitive industries and that the threat of being unmasked as a polluter prompts dirty firms to adopt a clean technology

interest rates and inflation in the frequency domain new evidence abstract we employ new data on interest rates from the tax free sector to test the fisher hypothesis tax free rates permit a test without determining the appropriate marginal tax rate to assign to investors we use band spectral estimation

does 401 k eligibility increase saving evidence from propensity score subclassification abstract by comparing 401 k eligible and ineligible households wealth this paper estimates that on average about one half of 401 k balances represent new private savings and about one quarter of 401 k balances represent new national savings responses to eligibility vary considerably however with households who normally save the most largely contributing funds they would have saved anyway this paper improves on previous research by 1 employing propensity score subclassification to control more completely for observed household characteristics 2 controlling for more household characteristics including several correlated with unobserved savings preferences and 3 adjusting the observed measure of households wealth to reduce measurement error

cheap talk with two audiences these problems have in common a simple structure an informed sender says something to two interested but uninformed receivers who then take actions based on their beliefs these actions affect the sender as well as the receivers in this paper we study how costless nonverifiable claims cheap talk can affect these beliefs and hence the actions and how the incentives for truthful revelation to one receiver are affected by the presence of the other we then ask how welfare is affected by whether claims are made in public or in private as some of the above examples suggest public messages may be more credible than private messages addressed to either audience one possibility is that the presence of one audience can discipline the sender s relationship with the other we call this one sided

the deficit interest rate link empirical evidence for canada this paper explores whether a positive relationship exists between interest rates nominal or real and deficits as postulated by a conventional macroeconomic model mundell fleming using spectral and time series techniques annual and quarterly data for canada and a variety of definitions for the deficit and government spending variables no empirical link between deficits and interest rates could be detected it is suggested therefore that the evidence is inconsistent with themundell fleming model which predicts a positive association between interest rates and deficits a possible explantion for the observed empirical results may be found in the ricardian equivalence theorem

inflationary expectations and the fisher effect prior to world war i we use univariate and multivariate techniques to estimate the expected price level changes for the u s during the pre world war i period we also examine contemporaneous evidence from agricultural commodity futures markets to measure inflationary expectations using previously neglected data on consumer prices and a variety of techniques we draw three main conclusions not traditionally found for this period 1 price level changes were not white noise 2 a significant portion of deflationary and inflationary episodes was indeed expected and 3 expected inflation is positively and significantly correlated with nominal interest rates thus providing support for a short run fisher effect

the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates a critical review this paper critically surveys the large and growing literature estimating the elasticity of taxable income with respect to marginal tax rates using tax return data first we provide a theoretical framework showing under what assumptions this elasticity can be used as a sufficient statistic for efficiency and optimal tax analysis we discuss what other parameters should be estimated when the elasticity is not a sufficient statistic second we discuss conceptually the key issues that arise in the empirical estimation of the elasticity of taxable income using the example of the 1993 top individual income tax rate increase in the united states to illustrate those issues third we provide a critical discussion of selected empirical analyses of the elasticity of taxable income in light of the theoretical and empirical framework we laid out finally we discuss avenues for future research jel h24 h31 j22

testing the long run neutrality of money in a developing economy the case of india abstract seasonal integration and cointegration techniques are used to test the hypothesis of long run money neutrality using indian data on the basis of money real output and price level quarterly data empirical evidence is presented showing that money is cointegrated with prices but not with output at the zero frequency this evidence is interpreted to imply that money affects nominal but not real variables in the long run it is concluded that money is neutral in the long run

the long run relationship between interest rates and inflation some cross country evidence abstract this paper analyzes the effect of anticipated inflation on nominal interest rates paying special attention to the stability of this relationship over various regimes these regimes are analyzed to find out whether the inflation forecastability proposition recently advanced by barsky explains the observed poor performance of the fisher equation with historical data the analyses make use of the so called threshold and digression models and data from 11 western countries for 1875 1984 the main result of this paper is that the forecastability proposition does not explain the weakness of the anticipated inflation effect on interest rates rather various institutional factors seem to be of more importance

the neutrality properties of competing relative price models tests using linear feedback this article uses a variant of geweke s 1982 linear feedback measure to test common characterizations of monetary neutrality implicit in classes of relative price models the neutrality properties are defined in terms of relative price changes response to monetary policy shocks in a system including average price changes an interest rate and industrial production growth the magnitude and patterns of monetary feedback found in u s relative price data provide no support for any of the structurally neutral models

a linearized version of lucas s neutrality model the model developed in robert lucas s influential expectations and the neutrality of money has not been widely used for extensions or modifications of the original analysis in part because of its difficulty of manipulation the present paper describes a linearized version that unlike other models prominent in the rational expectations literature retains the original s mainfeatures yet is comparatively easy to manipulate two examples of modifications facilitated by this linearization are included these involve an autoregressive money growth specification and the assumption of lump sum rather than proportional monetary transfers this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the sources of the movements in interest rates the paper investigates the sources of interest rate movements in italy during the 1970s in that decade the country experienced the highest and most variable inflation rate among the industrial nations and was affected both by external shocks and by shocks to the labor and financial markets the paper shows that movements in inflationary expectations dominated the nominal interest rate variability the part of variability that was not explained by expected inflation was accounted for by unanticipated changes in the terms of trade by contrast domestic monetary and real disturbances did not have a sizeable impact on the variability

the fisher effect in a signal extraction framework the recent brazilian experience abstract this paper derives a signal extraction framework for examining all testable implications of the fisher equation the signal is the net of taxes nominal interest rate which under the fisher model equals inflation expectation plus the real rate assumed to be constant or a constant plus a martingale difference all alternative linear models can be represented as noise added to the signal the international and brazilian literature are briefly reviewed and the empirical tests reinterpreted in the signal extraction framework the model is tested with brazilian data for the period 1973 1990 using interest rate data on non indexed certificates of deposit from a sample of major brazilian banks the framework detects little noise i e the fisher equation seems to reasonably fit the brazilian evidence this result carries the policy implication that the government cannot have the burden of financing its fiscal deficits ameliorated by issuing non indexed debt in periods when inflation is escalating given the large fluctuations observed in ex post real rates in brazil the reasonable success of the fisher equation also implies the existence of large inflation forecast errors which suggest the need for further research on how agents form inflation expectations when inflation escalates rapidly as it did in the late 1980s in brazil price indices lag behind true inflation this generates a fisher effect even for indexed securities the empirical evidence also corroborates the existence of this fisher effect for indexed securities

a cautionary note on the interpretation of long run equilibrium solutions in conventional macro models in recent years the modelling methodology associated with hendry and mizon i978 and davidson et al i978 has become standard practice in the econometric estimation of many key relationships in uk macro models this note takes issue with one aspect of this methodology namely the recommendation that the static equilibrium solution of final estimated forms should conform with static steady state economic theory the main contention is that dynamic estimated forms that make no explicit acknowledgement of expectational processes will often prove incapable on their own of yielding estimates of true steady state equilibrium or long run parameters particularly under rational expectations it is stressed that the long run solutions of conventional distributed lag equations cannot be interpreted in isolation from the parameters of the sample period datageneration processes for the rationally expected variables the point applies equally well to the interpretation of either staticor dynamic equilibrium solutions after developing the reasoning in a static equilibrium framework the natural extension to the context of dynamic equilibrium as characterised by currie i98i is presented the basic principles on which the argument is based are in no way new they were originally developed by sargent i97i and lucas i972 and have gained widespread application in the rational expectations literature for example in lucas s i976 critique of econometric policy evaluation recently mccallum i984 has applied them to discredit the general validity of using the lowfrequency or long periodicity components of economic time series to test the long run propositions of economic theory this note merely attempts a reexposition with particular reference to the evaluation of equation properties in models that purport to represent intertemporal behaviour without explicitly characterising expectational processes were it not a prevalent practice to identify the long run solutions particularly the static versions of such equations with the parameters of static steady state economic theory this note would not be necessary however the evidence suggests otherwise and seems to justify the need for a restatement that exposes the potential for this procedure to give rise to seriously misleading conclusions when expectational processes are important in the case of rational expectations it is shown that if proper thought is given to the dependence of expectations formation on sample period time series behaviour then the problems are by no means insurmountable

forecasting pre world war i inflation the fisher effect and the gold standard we examine interest and inflation rates from 1879 to 1913 deflation prior to 1896 was followed by inflation average u s inflation was 3 1 percentage points higher in the years after 1896 yet nominal interest rates were no higher after 1896 this nonadjustment of nominal rates would be consistent with rational expectations if inflation was not forecastable and indeed univariate tests show little sign of serial correlation but gold production does forecast inflation the relationship between mining and inflation was such that expected inflation should have risen 300 basis points between 1890 and 1910 we consider explanations of this failure to foresee the shift in inflation after 1896 and conclude that it is not persuasive evidence that investors ignored relevant information but does suggest great uncertainty about the appropriate model for analyzing the economy

the return of the liquidity effect a study of the short run relation between money growth and interest rates in this article i use band pass filters to investigate the short run relationship between money growth and interest rates i find a negative correlation between short run movements in money growth and interest rates which i interpret as evidence that the liquidity effect dominates the anticipated inflation effect

long run monetary neutrality in this article we provide a test of long run monetary neutrality employing cointegration and vector error correction modelling methodology using quarterly data for the united states we estimate the long run relationships among money supply and output and other key macroeconomic variables our findings in general raise doubts about the long run monetary neutrality proposition

the role of exchange rates in a popular model of international trade abstract this paper examines the empirical relationship between the real effective exchange rate and the aggregate real trade balance for five major oecd countries in the post bretton woods era a variety of parametric and non parametric techniques are used there is little evidence that the exchange rate significantly affects the trade balance

green business and blue angels this paper presents a model of a monopolist svoluntary overcompliance with legal environmentalstandards under asymmetric information about thefirm s environmental impacts the key assumptions are the existence of quality premia for environmentalsoundness a positive but imperfect degree ofmonitoring and adaptive consumer expectations conditions necessary for overcompliance to arise in aprofit maximizing equilibrium are derived the effectsof a third party eco labeling system are analyzed itis shown that the existence of an independent labelingauthority increases the likelihood of overcomplianceto be profit maximizing moreover firms might have anincentive to lobby for the introduction of such asystem the effect of consumers risk preferences andan instrument for preventing greenwash companieslying about their environmental performance is alsodiscussed

a simple time series test of endogenous vs exogenous growth models an application to the united states this paper presents evidence supporting endogenous growth models that emphasize public structural capital the authors apply a simple test of endogenous vs exogenous growth models in exogenous growth economies temporary innovations to policy variables lead only to temporary changes in gnp levels while in endogenous growth economies the innovations can lead to permanent changes in gnp levels of the seven u s policy variables they examine only non military equipment capital and non military structural capital have a statistically and economically significant effect upon long run gnp levels further estimation suggests that the non military equipment capital result is not robust and that several disaggregate components of structural capital contribute significantly copyright 1996 by mit press

does the long term interest rate predict future inflation a multi country analysis according to the fisher hypothesis an increase decrease in the spread between the long term or multiperiod interest rate and the one period inflation rate signals an increase decrease in future one period inflation this implication is tested on data from thirteen oecd countries for the period 1962 93 integration and cointegration techniques are applied to examine the time series properties of interest rates and inflation rates and the var methodology developed by john y campbell and robert j shiller 1987 is applied to examine the predictive power of the spread as well as in testing the fisher hypothesis under rational expectations and constant ex ante real rates copyright 1995 by mit press

interpreting long run equilibrium solutions in conventional macro models a comment c m kelly 1985 claims that long run solutions from econometric models may be seriously misleading when expectations variables are erroneou sly replaced by observed outcomes it is shown that his results deriv e uniquely from an invalid exogeneity assumption all inferences are therefore potentially invalid illustrated by a case where the long r un is correct while the short run is biased using an encompassing fr amework error variance rankings and related tests distinguishing exp ectational from conditional models are derived for stationary cases for nonstationary integrated series the long run will be correctly e stimated when the data are cointegrated whereas the short run remain s biased copyright 1988 by royal economic society

the effects of 401 k participation on the wealth distribution an instrumental quantile regression analysis we use instrumental quantile regression approach to examine the effects of 401 k plans on wealth using data from the survey of income and program participation using 401 k eligibility as an inst

savings incentives for low and moderate income families in the united states why is the saver s credit not more effective this paper uses data from the largest tax preparer in the united states to estimate the impact of the saver s credit a us federal program providing financial incentives to encourage retirement savings on the decision to contribute to an ira it finds significant but very modest effects this is contrasted with results from a field experiment showing much larger impacts of clearly presented matching incentives various explanations are discussed for why the saver s credit is not more effective jel h00 h31 c93 d14

relying on the information of interested parties we investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decisionmaker by providing verifiable information elicits all relevant information we find that if the decisionmaker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the relevant variables and about the preferences of the interested party or parties competition may be unnecessary to achieve this result if the decisionmaker is unsophisticated or not well informed competition is not generally sufficient if the interested parties interests are sufficiently opposed however or if the decisionmaker is seeking to advance the parties welfare then competition can reduce or even eliminate the decisionmaker s need for prior knowledge about the relevant variables and for strategic sophistication in other settings only the combination of competition among information providers and a sophisticated skepticism is sufficient to allow effective decisionmaking

two illustrations of the quantity theory of money of two central implications of the quantity theory of money that a given change in the rate of change in the quantity of money induces i an equal change in the rate of price inflation and ii an equal change in nominal rates of interest the illustrations were obtained by comparing moving averages of the three variables in question using quarterly u s time series for the period 1953 77 readers may find the results of interest as additional confirmation of the quantity theory as an example of one way in which the quantity theoretic relationships can be uncovered via atheoretical methods from time series which are subject to a variety of other forces or as a measure of the extent to which the inflation and interest rate experience of the postwar period can be understood in terms of purely classical monetary forces the theoretical background of the study is reviewed very briefly as it is familiar material in the next section the data processing methods are described and rationalized in section ii the illustrations

estimating the long run relationship between interest rates and inflation a response to mccallum abstract this note demonstrates that bennett mccallum s recent critique of low frequency estimates of macroeconomic relationships is of little empirical significance it also demonstrates that readily available and frequently used techniques can be used to diagnose the problem mccallum raises finally it shows that the standard critique of expectational distributed lags is not warranted once the role of learning by economic agents is recognized