disentangling demand and supply shocks in the crude oil market how to check sign restrictions in structural vars given the growing dissatisfaction with exclusion and long run restrictions in structural vector autoregressive analysis sign restrictions are becoming increasingly popular so far there are no techniques for validating the shocks identied via such restrictions although in an ideal setting the sign restrictions specify shocks of interest sign restrictions may be invali dated by measurement errors data adjustments or omitted variables we model changes in the volatility of the shocks via a markov switching ms mechanism and use this devise to give the data a chance to object to sign restrictions the approach is illustrated by considering a small model for the market of crude oil

the federal funds rate and the channels of monetary transmission the authors show that the interest rate on federal funds is extremely informative about future movements of real macroeconomic variables then they argue that the reason for this forecasting success is that the funds rate sensitively records shocks to the supply of bank reserves that is the funds rate is a good indicator of monetary policy actions finally using innovations to the funds rate as a measure of changes in policy the authors present evidence consistent with the view that monetary policy works at least in part through credit i e bank loans as well as through money i e bank deposits copyright 1992 by american economic association

monetary policy matters abstract this paper addresses hoover and perez s comments on our 1989 paper we first show that the estimated impact of monetary policy shifts remains large and ranges from marginally to strongly significant when oil shocks are controlled for we then extend our previous work by expanding the sample period and identifying an additional policy shift in december 1988 with this extension the estimated effects of monetary policy shifts are large and highly significant for all reasonable specifications of oil shocks we also demonstrate that hoover and perez s other objections have little bearing on our conclusions

econometric analysis of structural systems with permanent and transitory shocks this paper considers the implications of the permanent transitory decomposition of shocks for identification of structural models in the general case where the model might contain more than one permanent structural shock it provides a simple and intuitive generalization of the influential work of blanchard and quah 1989 the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances the american economic review 79 655 673 and shows that structural equations with known permanent shocks cannot contain error correction terms thereby freeing up the latter to be used as instruments in estimating their parameters the approach is illustrated by a re examination of the identification schemes used by wickens and motto 2001 estimating shocks and impulse response functions journal of applied econometrics 16 371 387 shapiro and watson 1988 sources of business cycle fluctuations nber macroeconomics annual 3 111 148 king et al 1991 stochastic trends and economic fluctuations american economic review 81 819 840 gali 1992 how well does the islm model fit postwar us data quarterly journal of economics 107 709 735 1999 technology employment and the business cycle do technology shocks explain aggregate fluctuations american economic review 89 249 271 and fisher 2006 the dynamic effects of neutral and investment specific technology shocks journal of political economy 114 413 451

fluctuations in the foreign exchange market how important are monetary policy shocks abstract we study the effects of u s monetary policy shocks on the bilateral exchange rate between the u s and each of the g7 countries we also estimate deviations from uncovered interest rate parity conditional on these shocks the analysis is based on a structural vector autoregression in which monetary policy shocks are identified through the conditional heteroscedasticity of the structural disturbances unlike earlier work in this area our empirical methodology avoids making arbitrary assumptions about the relevant policy indicator or transmission mechanism in order to achieve identification at the same time it allows us to assess the implications of imposing invalid identifying restrictions our results indicate that the nominal exchange rate exhibits delayed overshooting in response to a monetary expansion depreciating for roughly ten months before starting to appreciate the shock also leads to large and persistent departures from uncovered interest rate parity variance decomposition results indicate that monetary policy shocks account for a non trivial proportion of exchange rate fluctuations

credit demand and supply shocks in italy during the great recession in this article we use structural var analysis to disentangle credit demand and supply shocks and their effect on real economic activity in italy during the 2008 to 2014 crisis period the three e

monetary policy shocks testing identification conditions under time varying conditional volatility abstract we propose an empirical procedure which exploits the conditional heteroscedasticity of fundamental disturbances to test the targeting and orthogonality restrictions imposed in the recent var literature to identify monetary policy shocks based on u s monthly data for the post 1982 period we reject the non borrowed reserve and interest rate targeting procedures in contrast we present evidence supporting targeting procedures implying more than one policy variable we also always reject the orthogonality conditions between policy shocks and macroeconomic variables we show that using invalid restrictions often produces misleading policy measures and dynamic responses these results have important implications for the measurement of policy shocks and their temporal effects as well as for the estimation of the monetary authority s reaction function

meaning and credibility in cheap talk games i define neologism proofness a refinement of perfect bayesian equilibrium in cheap talk games it applies when players have a preexisting common language so that an unexpected message s literal meaning is clear and only credibility restricts communication i show that certain implausible equilibria are not neologism proof in some games no equilibrium is journal of economic literature classification numbers d83 d82 c73

uncertainty across volatility regimes we propose a nonrecursive identification scheme for uncertainty shocks that exploits breaks in the volatility of macroeconomic variables and is novel in the literature on uncertainty this approach allows us to simultaneously address two major questions in the empirical literature is uncertainty a cause or effect of decline in economic activity does the relationship between uncertainty and economic activity change across macroeconomic regimes results based on a small scale vector autoregression with us monthly data suggest that i uncertainty is an exogenous source of decline of economic activity and ii the effects of uncertainty shocks amplify in periods of economic and financial turmoil

the identification of monetary policy disturbances explaining the liquidity puzzle abstract this paper examines recent work on the identification of monetary policy disturbances its main finding is that the empirical anomalies found in the literature reflect a failure to properly address the federal reserve s policy of accommodating reserve demand shocks a new method of identifying monetary policy using nonborrowed reserves is proposed using this specification policy has a strong persistent liquidity effect regardless of subsample policy granger causes output even in the presence of interest rates explaining approximately 49 of the variance in output at a two year horizon and the residual explanatory power of interest rates for output is negligible

a model of public consultation why is binary communication so common this article studies information transmission between multiple agents with heterogeneous preferences and a welfare maximising decision maker who chooses the quality or quantity of a public good e g size of a public project pace of lectures in a classroom government regulation that is consumed by all of them as the number of agents becomes larger the quality of information transmission diminishes the use of binary messages e g yes or no is shown to be a robust mode of communication even when the preferences and policy space are non binary

bilateral delegation in wage and employment bargaining in monopoly we study efficiency and distributional implications of bilateral delegation in wage and employment bargaining in monopoly delegation causes underproduction and the bargaining pie severely contracts rendering mutual gains from delegation impossible with an increase in the union s bargaining power profit may perversely rise and the union s utility may fall

re examining the consumption wealth relationship the role of model uncertainty this paper discusses the consumption wealth relationship we use data on consumption assets and labor income and a vector error correction framework this framework defines a set of models that differ in the number of co integrating vectors the form of deterministic components and lag length further models can be defined through parametric restrictions and in particular interest centers on a weak exogeneity restriction that says that the co integrating residuals do not affect consumption and income directly key results in previous work relate to the roles of permanent and transitory shocks in driving wealth and how consumption responds to these shocks we investigate the robustness of these results to model uncertainty and argue for the use of bayesian model averaging we find that there is a large degree of model uncertainty whether this uncertainty has important empirical implications depends on the researcher s attitude toward the theory used to motivate a co integrating relationship between consumption assets and income if we work with models consistent with this theory and impose the weak exogeneity restriction we find precisely estimated results that show that permanent shocks have only a small role in driving assets and that the predominant transitory shocks have little effect on consumption these findings are consistent with the previous literature however if we work with a broader set of models and let the data speak we find that the exact magnitude of the role of permanent shocks is hard to estimate precisely thus although some support exists for the view that their role is small we cannot rule out the possibility that they have a substantive role to play copyright c 2008 the ohio state university

measuring the business cycle effects of permanent and transitory shocks in cointegrated time series abstract this paper proposes a statistical framework to evaluate the contribution of permanent and transitory shocks to the cyclical fluctuations of cointegrated variables an empirical application with us macroeconomic data reveals that transitory shocks are responsible for most of the variability at the business cycle frequencies

interpreting the macroeconomic time series facts the effects of monetary policy existing theory and evidence on the effects of monetary policy are reviewed substantial room for disagreement among economists remains new evidence based on multivariate time series studies of several countries is presented while certain patterns in the data consistent with effective monetary policy are strikingly similar across countries others particularly the tendency of interest rate increases to predict high inflation are harder to reconcile with effective monetary policy

optimal voting schemes with costly information acquisition a group of individuals with identical preferences must make a decision under uncertainty about which decision is best before the decision is made each agent can privately acquire a costly and imperfect signal we discuss how to design a mechanism for eliciting and aggregating the collected information so as to maximize ex ante social welfare we first show that of all mechanisms a sequential one is optimal and works as follows at random one agent at a time is selected to acquire information and report the resulting signal agents are informed of neither their position in the sequence nor of other reports acquiring information when called upon and reporting truthfully is an equilibrium we next characterize the ex ante optimal scheme among all ex post efficient mechanisms in this mechanism a decision is made when the precision of the posterior exceeds a cut off that decreases with each additional report the restriction to ex post efficiency is shown to be without loss when the available signals are sufficiently imprecise on the other hand ex post efficient mechanisms are shown to be suboptimal when the cost of information acquisition is sufficiently small

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

markov switching stochastic trends and economic fluctuations abstract i investigate cointegrating relationships such that even though the long run attractors are assumed to be linear the dynamics of the equilibrium errors depends on the business cycle i postulate a markov switching common stochastic trends model to study both the short run responses to permanent shocks and the effects of recessions in the long run growth i apply these findings to explore the short and long run asymmetric relationships among output consumption and investment

an integration of trade union models in a sequential bargaining framework this paper aims to embed two popular models of trade union behavior the monopoly model and the efficient bargaining model in a more general framework it does this by analyzing sequential bargaining models where wages are determined before employment and the power of the union in the two stages of the bargain differs as well as finding that the monopoly and efficient bargain models are special cases of this model a new class of models is also discovered this framework is used to analyze the relationship between union pow er and efficiency the empirical analysis of trade unions and the effects of trade union legislation copyright 1987 by royal economic society

delegation and threat in bargaining abstract two principals nations appoint one agent each to bargain over the provision of a public good two institutional set ups are studied each with a different level of authority given to the agents here authority means the right to decide the own side s provision if negotiations break down in equilibrium the principals choose agents with preferences differing from their own the low authority equilibrium pareto dominates with regard to the principals the case of the principals deciding on the provisions simultaneously autarchy the high authority equilibrium is pareto dominated by the low authority equilibrium and it may even be dominated by autarchy journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c71 and c72

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

a model of expertise we study a model in which perfectly informed experts offer advice to a decision maker whose actions affect the welfare of all experts are biased and thus may wish to pull the decision maker in different directions and to different degrees when the decision maker consults only a single expert the expert withholds substantial information from the decision maker we ask whether this situation is improved by having the decision maker sequentially consult two experts we first show that there is no perfect bayesian equilibrium in which full revelation occurs when both experts are biased in the same direction it is never beneficial to consult both in contrast when experts are biased in opposite directions it is always beneficial to consult both indeed in this case full revelation may be induced in an extended debate by introducing the possibility of rebuttal

on union preferences and labour market models insiders and outsiders this paper constructs a model of trade union behavior in which there is a distinction between insiders and outsiders this is used to examine one of the most troublesome issues in macroeconomic theory namely the extent to which a rise in aggregate demand might generate wage increases rather than growth in employment a generalization of the most widely used union utility function is presented the analysis reveals the conditions under which insiders will agree to let outsiders into employment derives two step wage preferences and proves a new result on wage rigidity copyright 1987 by royal economic society

commodity price comovement and financial speculation the case of cotton recent booms and busts in commodity prices have generated concerns that financial speculation causes excessive commodity price comovement driving prices away from levels implied by supply and demand under rational expectations we develop a structural vector autoregression model of a commodity futures market and use it to explain two recent spikes in cotton prices in doing so we make two contributions to the literature on commodity price dynamics first we estimate the extent to which cotton price booms and busts can be attributed to comovement with other commodities finding such comovement would be necessary but would not be sufficient evidence to establish that broad based financial speculation drives commodity prices second after controlling for aggregate demand and comovement we develop a new method to point identify shocks to precautionary demand for cotton separately from shocks to current supply and demand to do so we use differences in volatility across time implied by the rational expectations competitive storage model we find limited evidence that financial speculation caused cotton prices to spike in 2008 or 2011 we conclude that the 2008 price spike was driven mostly by precautionary demand for cotton and the 2011 spike was caused by a net supply shortfall

transmission of government default risk in the eurozone abstract this paper analyzes the reasons behind the rising ten year government bond spreads in the eurozone during the recent euro debt crisis we develop a structural vector autoregressive model that allows us to test whether the upsurges in the spreads reflect breaks in the instantaneous shock propagation mechanisms between the spreads contagion changing dynamical effects or changing country specific risk factors especially a new approach to test the stability of the instantaneous shock propagation mechanisms is introduced our results show that although contagion appears as the single most important reason for the increasing spreads there are notable differences between the countries for example and ireland spain and italy see statistically significant increases in their country specific risk factors

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations are business cycles mainly the result of permanent shocks to productivity this paper uses a long run restriction implied by a large class of real business cycle models identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trend in output consumption and investment to provide new evidence on this question econometric tests indicate that this common stochastic trend cointegration implication is consistent with postwar u s data however in systems with nominal variables the estimates of this common stochastic trend indicate that permanent productivity shocks typically explain less than half of the business cycle variability in output consumption and investment copyright 1991 by american economic association

bootstrapping impulse responses of structural vector autoregressive models identified through garch abstract different bootstrap methods and estimation techniques for inference for structural vector autoregressive svar models identified by generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch are reviewed and compared in a monte carlo study the bootstrap methods considered are a wild bootstrap a moving blocks bootstrap and a garch residual based bootstrap estimation is done by gaussian maximum likelihood a simplified procedure based on univariate garch estimations and a method that does not re estimate the garch parameters in each bootstrap replication the latter method is computationally more efficient than the other methods and it is competitive with the other methods and often leads to the smallest confidence sets without sacrificing coverage precision an empirical model for assessing monetary policy in the u s is considered as an example it is found that the different inference methods for impulse responses lead to qualitatively very similar results

endogenous business cycle propagation and the persistence problem the role of labor market frictions contrasting sharply with a recent trend in dsge modeling we propose a business cycle model where frictions and shocks are chosen with parsimony the model emphasizes a few labor market frictions and shocks to monetary policy and technology the model estimated from u s quarterly postwar data accounts well for important differences in the serial correlation of the growth rates of aggregate quantities the size of aggregate fluctuations and key comovements including the correlation between hours and labor productivity despite its simplicity the model offers an answer to the persistence problem chari et al 2000 that does not rely on multiple frictions and adjustment lags or ad hoc backward looking components we conclude modern dsge models need not embed large batteries of frictions and shocks to account for the salient features of postwar business cycles

measuring the effects of fiscal policy measuring the effects of discretionary fiscal policy is both difficult and controversial as some explicit or implicit identifying assumptions need to be made to isolate exogenous and unanticipated changes in taxes and government spending studies based on structural vector autoregressions typically achieve identification by restricting the contemporaneous interaction of fiscal and non fiscal variables in a rather arbitrary way in this paper we relax those restrictions and identify fiscal policy shocks by exploiting the conditional heteroscedasticity of the structural disturbances we use this methodology to evaluate the macroeconomic effects of fiscal policy shocks in the u s before and after 1979 our results show substantive differences in the economy s response to government spending and tax shocks across the two periods importantly we find that increases in public spending are in general more effective than tax cuts in stimulating economic activity a key contribution of this study is to provide a formal test of the identifying restrictions commonly used in the literature

what drives us foreign borrowing evidence on external adjustment to transitory and permanent shocks the joint dynamics of us net output consumption and valuation adjusted foreign assets and liabilities characterized empirically following lettau and ludvigson 2004 is shown to be strikingly consistent with current account theory while us consumption is virtually insulated from transitory shocks these contribute considerably to the variation in net output and even more so in gross foreign positions arguably smoothing temporary variations in returns a single permanent shock naturally interpreted as a productivity shock raises consumption swiftly while causing net output to adjust only gradually this leads to persistent procyclical external deficits but interestingly moves gross assets and liabilities in the same direction

the theory of implementation when the planner is a player abstract in this paper we study a situation where the planner cannot commit to a mechanism and the outcome function is substituted by the planner herself we assume i agents have complete information and play simultaneously and ii given the messages announced by the agents the planner reacts in an optimal way given her beliefs this transforms the implementation problem into a signaling game we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for interactive implementation under different restrictions on the planner s out of equilibrium beliefs we compare our results to standard results on nash implementation journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c72 d71 d82

structural vector autoregressions checking identifying long run restrictions via heteroskedasticity long run restrictions have been used extensively for identify ing structural shocks in vector autoregressive var analysis such restric tions are typically just identifying but can be checked by utilizing changes in volatility this paper reviews and contrasts the volatility models that have been used for this purpose three main approaches have been used exoge nously generated changes in the unconditional residual covariance matrix changing volatility modelled by a markov switching mechanism and multi variate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity garch models using changes in volatility for checking long run identifying restric tions in structural var analysis is illustrated by reconsidering models for identifying fundamental components of stock prices

price differentials in monetary unions the role of fiscal shocks we study the effect of regional expenditure and revenue shocks on price differentials for 47 us states and 9 eu countries we identify shocks using sign restrictions on the dynamics of expenditures revenues deficits and output and construct two estimates for structural price differentials dynamics one for the average and one for each unit which optimally weight information contained in the data for all units on average expansionary fiscal disturbances produce positive while distortionary balance budget shocks produce negative price differential responses the negative price differentials responses in some units is partially explained by spillovers and labour supply effects

the liquidity effect in the federal funds market evidence at the monthly frequency in this paper we argue that much of the research into the link between money and interest rates suffers from misspecification the measure of money and the measure of interest rates are not always well matched in examining the transmission of monetary policy we show that using an appropriate measure of money federal reserve balances and the appropriate interest rate the federal funds rate a clear liquidity effect exists furthermore we explain how a lack of a clear institutional understanding may have contributed to the finding of a liquidity puzzle in the past

the dynamic impacts of monetary policy an exercise in tentative identification it is currently popular to identify monetary policy shocks with innovations in some measure of reserves or in the federal funds rate these assumptions about the interest elasticity of the supply of or demand for reserves imply monetary policy shocks that produce dynamic responses of macroeconomic variables that are anomalous relative to traditional monetary analyses this paper tentatively identifies supply and demand shocks in the markets for reserves and m2 for the 1980s and contrasts them with results for the 1970s in the later period identified monetary policy shocks have dynamic impacts that are fully consistent with traditional analyses

the effects of fiscal shocks on employment and the real wage we study the transmission of fiscal shocks in the labor market we employ a structural var and base identification on the restrictions that shocks to government consumption investment and employment must raise output and deficits these restrictions hold in both prototype real business cycle rbc and new keynesian models shocks to government consumption and investment increase real wages and employment contemporaneously both at state level and in the aggregate the dynamics in response to employment shocks are mixed increases in government employment raise the real wage and total employment in the aggregate however in one third of the states they reduce total employment

impulse response analysis of cointegrated systems abstract impulse response or dynamic multiplier analysis of vector autoregressive systems with cointegrated variables is considered the asymptotic distribution of the responses estimated with johansen s 1988 maximum likelihood procedure is derived the results are illustrated with an analysis of a west german money demand system the investigation shows that a direct interpretation of the cointegration relations may be difficult or misleading thereby the virtue of impulse response analysis for applied work is illustrated

information aggregation in debate who should speak first abstract privately informed individuals speak openly in front of other members of a committee about the desirability of a public decision each individual wishes to appear well informed for any given order of speech committee members may herd by suppressing their true information with individuals of heterogeneous expertise optimizing over the order of speech can improve the extraction of information but not perfectly so it is not always optimal to use the common anti seniority rule whereby experts speak in order of increasing expertise a committee with more able experts may be afflicted by greater herding problems yielding a worse outcome

how to solve the price puzzle a meta analysis the short run increase in prices following an unexpected tightening of monetary policy constitutes a frequently reported puzzle yet the puzzle is surprisingly easy to explain away when all published models are quantitatively reviewed we collect about 1 000 point estimates of impulse responses from 70 articles using vector autoregressive models and present a simple method of research synthesis for graphical results our ndings indicate publication selection in favor of the intuitive response of prices to a tightening the estimates depend systematically on study design when misspecications are

measuring international business cycles by saving for a rainy day macroeconomics inevitably begins with a trend cycle decomposition of a nation s output we propose a decomposition in which consumption is the trend component and savings is the cycle component using data from the g 7 plus australia we show that this decomposition identifies international business cycles that are i more volatile ii of longer mean duration and iii less correlated across countries than the cycle component from the hodrick prescott filter we argue that this difference stems from the fact that our method imposes a basic theoretical restriction arising from the permanent income hypothesis similar to the restriction used in cochrane s 1994 decomposition resume mesurer les cycles d affaires internationaux par l epargne les travaux en macroeconomie commencent inevitablement par une decomposition du profil de la production nationale en tendance et cycles les auteurs proposent une decomposition ou la composante consommation est la tendance et l epargne est la composante cyclique utilisant les donnees du g 7 et de l australie on montre que cette decomposition identifie les cycles d affaires internationaux qui sont i plus volatiles ii d une duree moyenne plus longue et iii moins co relies entre pays que la composante cyclique a la hodrick prescott les auteurs suggerent que la difference provient du fait que leur methode impose une restriction theorique de base emergent de l hypothese du revenu permanent semblable a la restriction utilisee dans la decomposition a la cochrane 1994

permanent and transitory shocks in the presence of asymmetric error correction this article highlights the potential importance of asymmetries in the loading vector of a set of cointegrated variables for the construction analysis and interpretation of permanent and transitory shocks using impulse response functions we derive an asymmetric version of the permanent transitory decomposition suggested by gonzalo and ng 2001 and illustrate the potential importance of such asymmetries using the cay data of lettau and ludvigson 2004

on the long run neutrality of demand shocks we revisit the seminal paper by blanchard and quah 1989 and investigate their long run identification scheme we use a structural var model with smoothly changing covariances for the identification of shocks formal testing rejects the long run neutrality of demand shocks

committee design with endogenous information this paper is concerned with the arrangements for collective decision making in a world where agents must be motivated to acquire information the analysis identifies some basic forces shaping the design of panels of decision makers referees managers jurors etc in situations where decision makers are useful only in so far as they expend some effort to gain information about the alternatives at hand these situations are common one being the refereeing process where an editor requires the opinions of a number of experts who must read the paper acquire information in order to give an opinion as to publication analogously in committees which screen applicants to a programme the committee members must gain information about the applicant s qualifications and likelihood of success in order to evaluate whether to admit him her finally in trial juries it is important that jurors pay attention to the evidence in order to make an informed judgement 1 we focus on environments where information is a public good in the sense that the social benefits of one decision maker acquiring information exceed the private benefits a good mechanism in this environment must not only aggregate information efficiently but also induce the decision makers to acquire information we analyse the design of voting mechanisms our problem is to choose two parameters which determine both the incentive to acquire information and the efficiency with which information is aggregated the first parameter is the size of the decision making unit the number of committee members the second is the plurality required to overturn the status quo the voting rule our main result is this a voting rule that requires a large plurality in the extreme unanimity to upset the status quo can be optimal only if the information available to each committee member is sufficiently accurate when individual information is noisy the drawback

risk and return long run relations fractional cointegration and return predictability univariate dependencies in market volatility both objective and risk neutral are best described by long memory fractionally integrated processes meanwhile the ex post difference or the variance swap payoff reflecting the reward for bearing volatility risk displays far less persistent dynamics using intraday data for the standard poor s 500 and the volatility index vix coupled with frequency domain methods we separate the series into various components we find that the coherence between volatility and the volatilityrisk reward is the strongest at long run frequencies our results are consistent with generalized long run risk models and help explain why classical efforts of establishing a

stochastic trends and fluctuations in national income wages and profits macroeconomics and especially the theory of business cycles went through very important changes during the last ten years during the seventies most macroeconomists believed that economic activity evolved around a deterministic trend cyclical components and unanticipated changes in policy were believed to be the source of economic fluctuations the real business cycle rbc models which began to emerge in the early eighties cast doubt on this belief according to the rbc theory the cumulative effect of permanent shocks to productivity explains economic fluctuations the proponents of the rbc theory assume that productivity shocks are exogenous and are not affected by aggregate demand shocks therefore monetary shocks have no role in explaining economic fluctuations in fact according to the rbc theories money responds positively to fluctuations in production induced by technological shocks therefore the positive correlation between output and money is one of reverse causation critics of the rbc theories argue that productivity shocks cannot be treated strictly as exogenous evans 5 provides evidence that a significant portion of the variance of productivity impulse can be attributed to aggregate demand shocks another line of research by christiano and eichenbaum 4 shows that monetary policy shocks have persistent liquidity effects as well as persistent increases in output in this paper we investigate the role of monetary factors in explaining fluctuations in both

measuring core inflation in this paper we argue that measured rpi inflation is conceptually mismatched with core inflation the difference is more than just measurement error we propose a technique for measuring core inflation based on an explicit long run economic hypothesis core inflation is defined as that component of measured inflation that has no medium to long run impact on real output a notion that is consistent with the vertical long run phillips curve interpretation of the co movement in inflation and output we construct a measure of core inflation by placing dynamic restrictions on a vector autoregression var system

bayesian inference for structural vector autoregressions identified by markov switching heteroskedasticity abstract in this study bayesian inference is developed for structural vector autoregressive models in which the structural parameters are identified via markov switching heteroskedasticity in such a model restrictions that are just identifying in the homoskedastic case become over identifying and can be tested a set of parametric restrictions is derived under which the structural matrix is globally or partially identified and a savage dickey density ratio is used to assess the validity of the identification conditions the latter is facilitated by analytical derivations that make the computations feasible and numerical standard errors small as an empirical example monetary models are compared using heteroskedasticity as an additional device for identification the empirical results support an identified interest rate reaction function with money

technology shocks and robust sign restrictions in a euro area svar we use a model based identification strategy to estimate the impact of technology shocks on hours worked and employment in the euro area the sign restrictions applied in the vector autoregression var analysis are consistent with a large class of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge models and are robust to parameter uncertainty the results are in line with the conventional real business cycle rbc interpretation that hours worked rise as a result of a positive technology shock by comparing the sign restrictions method to the long run restriction approach of gali quaterly journal of economics 1992 709 38 we show that the results do not depend on the stochastic specification of the hours worked series or the data sample but only on the identification scheme

price discovery and trade fragmentation in a multi market environment evidence from the mts system this paper proposes new metrics for the process of price discovery on the main electronic trading platform for euro denominated government securities analysing price data on daily transactions for 107 bonds over a period of twenty seven months we find a greater degree of price leadership of the dominant market when our measures as opposed to the traditional price discovery metrics are used we also present unambiguous evidence that a market s contribution to price discovery is crucially affected by the level of trading activity the implications of these empirical findings are discussed in the light of the debate about the possible restructuring of the regulatory framework for the treasury bond market in europe

eliciting information from a large population abstract this paper studies information transmission in social surveys where a welfare maximizing decision maker communicates with a random sample of individuals from a large population who have heterogeneous preferences the population distribution of preferences is unknown and has to be estimated based on answers from the respondents the decision maker cannot identify the true distribution of preferences even if the sample size becomes arbitrarily large since the respondents have incentive to exaggerate their preferences especially as the sample size becomes larger and each respondent has weaker influence on the decision the quality of communication with each respondent may improve as the sample size becomes smaller and thus we identify the trade off between the quality and quantity of communication we show that the decision maker may prefer to sample a smaller number of individuals when the prior is weaker

fiscal policy in general equilibrium this paper studies four classic fiscal policy experiments within a quantitatively restricted neoclassical model the authors main findings are as follows 1 permanent changes in government purchases can lead to short run and long run output multipliers that exceed one 2 permanent changes in government purchases induce larger effects than temporary changes 3 the financing decision is quantitatively more important than the resource cost of changes in government purchases and 4 public investment has dramatic effects on private output and investment these findings stem from important dynamic interactions of capital and labor absent in earlier equilibrium analyses of fiscal policy copyright 1993 by american economic association

unconventional monetary policy and bank risk taking abstract we analyze the presence of bank risk taking associated with unconventional monetary policy in the united states between 2008 and 2015 using corporate syndicated loan data at the bank firm level we measure monetary policy using the identification through heteroskedasticity approach with a var model to identify the risk taking channel we control for time varying heterogeneity in credit demand and supply our results indicate that accommodating monetary conditions are associated with overall lower loan spreads however the spread reduction is lower for riskier firms suggesting that there is no risk taking behavior in the syndicated loan market during the ump period

a systematic framework for analyzing the dynamic effects of permanent and transitory shocks this paper proposes a systematic framework for analyzing the dynamic e ects of permanent and transitory shocks on a system of n economic variables we consider a two step orthogonolization on the residuals of a vecm with r cointegrating vectors the rst step separates the permanent from the transitory shocks and the second step isolates n r mutually uncorrelated permanent shocks and r transitory shocks the decomposition is computationally straightforward and entails only a minor modi cation to the choleski decomposition commonly used in the literature we then show how impulse response functions can be constructed to trace out the propagating mechanism of shocks distinguished by their degree of persistence in an empirical example the dynamic responses to the identi ed permanent shocks have properties similar to shocks to productivity the real interest rate and money growth even though no economic

testing for identification in svar garch models abstract changes in residual volatility in vector autoregressive var models can be used for identifying structural shocks in a structural var analysis testable conditions are given for full identification for the case where the volatility changes can be modelled by a multivariate garch process formal statistical tests are presented for identification and their small sample properties are investigated via a monte carlo study the tests are applied to investigate the validity of identification conditions in two studies first we test an identifying condition employed in a study of the impact of financial market uncertainty on real activity second we illustrate our tests in the context of an investigation of the effects of u s monetary policy on exchange rates in the first application the identification conditions are confirmed and in the second application they are partly not supported by the data

information aggregation in polls we study information transmission via polling a policymaker polls constitu ents who differ in their information and ideology to determine policy full rev elation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample but not with a large one in large polls full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists who respond truth fully and extremists who do not we find polling statistics that ignore strate gic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the polvs margin of error we construct estimators that account for strategic behavior finally we compare polls and elections jel c42 d83

identifying monetary policy shocks via changes in volatility a central issue of monetary policy analysis is the speciflcation of monetary policy shocks in a structural vector autoregressive setting there has been some controversy about which restrictions to use for identifying the shocks because standard theories do not provide enough information to fully identify monetary policy shocks in fact to compare difierent theories it would even be desirable to have over identifying restrictions which would make statistical tests of difierent theories possible it is pointed out that some progress towards over identifying monetary policy shocks can be made by using speciflc data properties in particular it is shown that changes in the volatility of the shocks can be used for identiflcation based on monthly us data from 1965 1996 difierent theories are tested and it is found that as sociating monetary policy shocks with shocks to nonborrowed reserves leads to a particularly strong rejection of the model whereas assuming that the fed accommodates demand shocks to total reserves cannot be rejected

were there regime switches in u s monetary policy working paper 2004 14 june 2004 abstract a multivariate model identifying monetary policy and allowing for simultaneity and regime switching in coefficients and variances is confronted with u s data since 1959 the best fit is with a model that allows time variation in structural disturbance variances only among models that also allow for changes in equation coefficients the best fit is for a model that allows coefficients to change only in the monetary policy rule that model allows switching among three main regimes and one rarely and briefly occurring regime the three main regimes correspond roughly to periods when most observers believe that monetary policy actually differed and the differences in policy behavior are substantively interesting though statistically ill determined the estimates imply monetary targeting was central in the early 80s but was also important sporadically in the 70s the changes in regime were essential neither to the rise in inflation in the 70s nor to its decline in the 80s jel classification e52 e47 c53 key words counterfactuals lucas critique policy rule monetary targeting simultaneity volatility model comparison i the debate over monetary policy change in an influential paper clarida gali and gertler 2000 cgg presented evidence that us monetary policy changed between the 1970 s and the 1980 s indeed that in the 70 s it was drastically worse they found that the policy rule apparently followed in the 70 s was one that when embedded in most stochastic general equilibrium models would imply non uniqueness of the equilibrium and hence vulnerability of the economy to sunspot fluctuations of arbitrarily large size their estimated policy rule for the later period on the other hand eliminated this indeterminacy these results are a possible explanation of the volatile and rising inflation of the 70 s and of its subsequent decline the cgg analysis has two important weaknesses one is that it fails to account for stochastic volatility us macroeconomic variables and particularly the federal funds rate have gone through periods of tranquility and of agitation with forecast error variances varying greatly from period to period ignoring such variation does not lead to inconsistent estimates of model parameters when the forecasting equations themselves are constant but it strongly biases toward a finding of changed parameters tests of the stability of the forecasting equations the other weakness is that the cgg analysis rests on powerful and implausible identifying assumptions they require that we accept that the response of the monetary authority to expected future inflation and output does not depend on the recent history of inflation money growth or output it is hard to understand why this should be so especially in the 70 s when monetarism was a prominent theme in policy debates congress was requiring reports from the fed of projected time paths of monetary aggregates and financial markets were reacting sensitively to weekly money supply numbers the requirement for existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in dynamic models is that the monetary policy rule show a more than unit response of interest rates to the sum of the logs of all nominal variables that appear on the right hand side of the reaction function if we force a particular measure of expected future inflation to proxy for all the nominal variables that actually appear independently in the reaction function we are bound to get distorted conclusions on the one hand because expected future inflation will be a noisy measure of the full set of nominal influences on policy we might get downward bias in our estimates from the usual errorsin variables effect on the other hand to the extent that expected future inflation like most expected future values shows less variation than current nominal variables we could find a mistaken scaling up of coefficients

structural vector autoregressions with smooth transition in variances abstract in structural vector autoregressive analysis identifying the shocks of interest via heteroskedasticity has become a standard tool unfortunately the approaches currently used for modeling heteroskedasticity all have drawbacks for instance assuming known dates for variance changes is often unrealistic while more flexible models based on garch or markov switching residuals are difficult to handle from a statistical and computational point of view therefore we propose a model based on a smooth change in variance that is flexible as well as relatively easy to estimate and illustrate its use by analysis of the interaction between monetary policy and the stock market based on a five dimensional system of u s variables for the benchmark setup it is found that previously used conventional identification schemes in this context are rejected by the data if heteroskedasticity is allowed for we also illustrate the implications of using different transition variables and varying the sample period

measuring the reaction of monetary policy to the stock market movements in the stock market can have a significant impact on the macroeconomy and are therefore likely to be an important factor in the determination of monetary policy however little is known about the magnitude of the federal reserve s reaction to the stock market in part because the simultaneous response of equity prices to interest rates makes it difficult to estimate this paper uses an identification technique based on the heteroskedasticity of stock market returns to measure the reaction of monetary policy to the stock market we find a significant policy response with a 5 percent rise fall in the s p 500 index increasing the likelihood of a 25 basis point tightening easing by about a half

monetary shocks in the g 6 countries is there a puzzle les auteurs cherchent a clarifier la dynamique du mecanisme de transmission de la politique monetaire l identification des chocs de politique monetaire est au coeur de ce genre d analyse divers chercheurs ont reussi recemment a isoler de tels chocs en imposant des restrictions de suridentification a des modeles vectoriels autoregressifs var

information forecasts and measurement of the business cycle the beveridge nelson bn technique provides a forecast based method of decomposing a variable such as output into trend and cycle when the variable is integrated of order one i 1 this paper considers the multivariate generalization of the bn decomposition when the information set includes other i 1 and or stationary variables we show how the relative importance of the cyclical component depends on the size of the information set and is necessarily higher with multivariate bn decompositions the results are illustrated using post wwii united states data an explanation is also provided for the empirical finding of a positive association of the multivariate bn cycle with output growth

structural vector autoregressions with nonnormal residuals in structural vector autoregressive svar modeling sometimes the identifying restrictions are insufficient for a unique specification of all shocks in this paper it is pointed out that specific distributional assumptions can help in identifying the structural shocks in particular a mixture of normal distributions is considered as a possible model that can be used in this context our model setup enables us to test restrictions which are just identifying in a standard svar framework the results are illustrated using a u s macro data set and a system of u s and european interest rates

telltale tails a new approach to estimating unique market information shares the trading of securities on multiple markets raises the question of each market s share in the discovery of the informationally efficient price we exploit salient distributional features of multivariate financial price processes to uniquely determine these contributions thereby resolving the main drawback of the widely used hasbrouck 1995 methodology which merely provides upper and lower bounds of a market s information share we show how tail dependence of price changes which may emerge as a result of differences in market design can be exploited to estimate unique information shares two empiricalapplications illustrate the practical use of the new methodology

crowding out or crowding in public and private investment in india abstract this paper contributes to the debate on the relationship between public and private investment in india along the following dimensions first acknowledging major structural changes that the indian economy has undergone in the past three decades we study whether public investment in recent years has become more or less complementary to private investment in comparison to the period before 1980 second we construct a novel data set of quarterly aggregate public and private investment in india over the period 1996 2015 using investment project data from the capex cmie database third embedding a theory driven long run relationship on the model we estimate a range of structural vector error correction models svecms to re examine the public and private investment relationship in india identification is achieved by decomposing shocks into those with transitory and permanent effects our results suggest that while public investment crowds out private investment in india over the period 1950 2012 the opposite is true when we restrict the sample to post 1980 or conduct a quarterly analysis since 1996 this change can likely be attributed to the policy reforms which started during the early 1980s and gained momentum after the 1991 crisis

strategic delegation with endogenous costs a duopoly with wage bargaining abstract this paper examines the owners problem of strategic delegation when managers choose the level of sales and are responsible for cost control fershtman and judd american economic review 1987 77 927 940 and vickers economic journal 1985 95 1387ndash 147 showed that when managers are responsible for sales alone in oligopolistic markets then owners will want managers to maximise sales rather than profits in this paper the cost structure as well as sales depends on the choices of managers owners want managers to act more like profit maximisers when cost control is important this issue is analysed in the context of a model with union bargaining in the model it is shown that stronger unions may benefit owners because of the strategic incentive setting process and that the need for cost control can actually raise profitability

testing for arch in the presence of additive outliers in this paper we investigate the properties of the lagrange multiplier lm test for autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch and generalized arch garch in the presence of additive outliers ao s we show analytically that both the asymptotic size and power are adversely affected if ao s are neglected the test rejects the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity too often when it is in fact true while the test has difficulty detecting genuine garch effects several monte carlo experiments show that these phenomena occur in small samples as well we design and implement a robust test which has better size and power properties than the conventional test in the presence of ao s applications to the french industrial production series and weekly returns of the spanish peseta us dollar exchange rate reveal that sometimes apparent garch effects may be due to only a small number of outliers and conversely that genuine garch effects can be masked by outliers

the effect of the financial sector on the evolution of oil prices analysis of the contribution of the futures market to the price discovery process in the wti spot market abstract the aim of this article is to empirically measure the contribution of the futures market to the price discovery process in the spot market for benchmark crude oils specifically that for west texas intermediate wti for this purpose we test the hypothesis that the recent evolution of the financial markets has affected the future oil market so as to increase its contribution to the price discovery process of the spot market we modeled the relation between wti spot and future prices as a cointegration relation by using the kalman filter technique it was possible to obtain a time varying measure of the contribution of future markets to the price discovery mechanism the results show that in the case of wti the contribution of the futures market has been increasing especially between 2003 and 2008 and then again after the start of 2009 evidencing the growing importance of factors particular to the financial markets in determining oil prices in recent years during 2009 the spot prices adjusted to agents future expectations rather than to the current supply and demand conditions

state dependent transmission of monetary policy in the euro area we estimate a logit mixture vector autoregressive model describing monetary policy transmission in the euro area over the period 1999 2015 in contrast to other classes of nonlinear vector autoregressive models regime affiliation is neither strictly binary nor binary with a transition period and based on multiple variables we show that monetary policy transmission in the euro area can be described as a mixture of two states in both states output and prices are found to decrease after contractionary monetary policy shocks however the effects of monetary policy are less enduring in the crisis state

precious metals oil and the exchange rate contemporaneous spillovers abstractwe investigate the contemporaneous spillovers among precious metals crude oil and the us exchange rate we contend that conventional reduced form vector autoregressive var models based on lead lag relations do not fully capture the interactions among these series as these models ignore the contemporaneous effects using a structural var model we identify these contemporaneous spillovers which are shown to be strong and asymmetric we further show that not taking into consideration the contemporaneous interactions among these assets leads to inaccurate findings and inevitably to inaccurate interpretations of the causal relations among them

inflation output and markup dynamics with forward looking wage and price setters abstract medium scale new keynesian models are sometimes criticized for their use of backward looking wage and price setting mechanisms and for assuming several types of disturbances including some that would be difficult to interpret economically we propose a dsge model with purely forward looking wage and price setters and parsimoniously chosen disturbances our model emphasizes an interplay between production firms networking and working capital firms can use working capital to finance all or a fraction of their outlays on production factors and use the output of other firms as an input in a what is often called a roundabout production structure our model generates a response of inflation which is mute on impact of a monetary policy shock but highly persistent and very hump shaped afterwards it also yields a large contract multiplier for output two times larger than the one implied by a model relying on indexation only we also show that the response of the price markup can be positive on impact of an expansionary monetary policy shock which differs from the standard countercyclical markup channel emphasized in conventional new keynesian models in contrast to models relying on indexation to past inflation our model produces non inertial responses of inflation to productivity and investment shocks a finding which is broadly consistent with the existing var evidence