do the foreign exchange rates really follow a random walk an empirical question revisited abstract the random walk behavior of nominal exchange rates using daily weekly and monthly data and of real exchange rates using monthly data is investigated for seven major currencies and fails to be confirmed but fails less frequently for the post 1979 period

mean reversion in real exchange rates evidence and implications for forecasting abstract the stationarity of real exchange rates over the recent flexible exchange rate period is an issue that has long bedeviled researchers in international finance using a constrained multivariate framework this paper provides the strongest evidence yet that real exchange rates were mean reverting over the 1973 93 period we also investigate shifts in long run real exchange rates which may be important for the purpose of forecasting out of sample forecasting shows that the random walk model is outperformed by a mean stationary model especially at long horizons in addition there are substantial forecasting benefits from using a multivariate approach

forecasting foreign exchange rates with an intrinsically nonlinear dynamic speed of adjustment model forecasting foreign exchange rates is an important but difficult process therefore it is important to use a superior forecasting model the paper takes up this criterion and proposes to describe and forecast foreign exchange rates by developing an intrinsically nonlinear model with variable and dynamic speeds of adjustment it is found that the speed of adjusting the random or expected to the equilibrium rate is very slow implying that fiscal policy statistically insignificat and monetary policy statistically significant may be ineffective to induce changes in the adjustment speed we also find that the nonlinear dynamic model improves forecasting performance implying that nonlinearities in the sense of functional forms are exploitable for improved point forecasting of foreign exchange rates

deviations from purchasing power parity in the long run this paper demonstrates that deviations from purchasing power parity reveal a remarkable and possibly startling consistency with martingale behavior during both fixed and flexible rate periods for a wide variety of countries and in both monthly and annual data since this pattern appears to be much more general than one would expect on the basis of models founded on international commodity arbitrage the paper proposes an alternative explanation which instead relies on financial arbitrage in bonds as the underlying mechanism this paper will demonstrate that deviations from purchasing power parity ppp reveal a remarkable and possibly startling consistency with martingale behavior during both fixed and flexible exchange rate periods for a wide variety of countries and in both monthly and annual data this pattern appears to be much more general than one would expect on the basis of models founded on international commodity arbitrage the paper therefore proposes an alternative explanation which does not presuppose free trade in goods but which instead relies on financial arbitrage in bonds as the underlying mechanism the major implication of the theory and the results is that ppp is as likely to be violated in the long as in the short run as an empirical matter deviations from ppp can be observed for most currencies at any instant see kravis et al 21 stockman 37 and genberg 15 among others these deviations are typically both cumulative and persistent the real exchange rate can remain on either side of parity for lengthy but variable time intervals of a year or more as a consequence the current consensus shared

national price levels purchasing power parity and cointegration a test of four high inflation economies abstract the time series properties of exchange rates and wholesale prices from four high inflation countries show some evidence in support of purchasing power parity tests for stationarity of real exchange rates and cointegration among price and exchange rate variables are presented for argentina brazil chile and israel during the 1970s and 1980s error correction models describe the mechanism of adjustment to long run equilibrium

sources of real exchange rate fluctuations empirical evidence from four pacific basin countries in international finance the competing hypothesis that the logarithms of real exchange rates appear to be well described as random walks during a period of floating rate has found some support studies by adler and lehmann 2 hakkio 12 and mark 18 are examples of work supporting this view if a real exchange rate process has been approximated to be non stationary it implies there is little tendency for the real exchange rate to be mean reverting and also that deviations from the purchasing power parity ppp are permanent modern models of exchange rate determination suggest that real shocks can induce permanent changes in the real exchange rate stockman 21 pointed out that according to the equilibrium approach the behavior of real exchange rates since the collapse of bretton woods could reflect not the importance of sluggish price level adjustment but rather the influence of real shocks with significant permanent components moreover the evidence in campbell and clarida 5 and huizinga 13 suggests that real exchange rates contain both permanent and transitory components with most of their variation explained by the permanent components however recent studies employing long run data or more powerful tests tend to confirm the ppp hypothesis studies by abuaf and jorion 1 kim 16 whitt 22 and diebold husted and rush 7 are four such examples their evidence shows that real exchange rates are stationary which implies that the behavior of real exchange rates are influenced by transitory nominal disturbances hence the validity of ppp remains at issue identifying the sources of exchange rate fluctuations is important not only for establishing the validity of ppp but also for achieving successful exchange rate stabilization attempts to stabilize exchange rate changes that are due to economic fundamentals could be futile and even harmful to the economy in addition measuring the relative importance of permanent and transitory shocks on exchange rates is essential for exchange rate modeling if exchange rates are dominated by real shocks then the equilibrium approach offered by stockman 21 is appropriate in analyzing the behavior of exchange rates conversely if the evidence suggests the contrary then the disequilibrium approach of dornbusch 8 should be considered as an alternative as a consequence

high and low frequency variations and the cyclical behaviour of real wages the conflicting empirical evidence on the cyclicality of real wages may be a result of the fact that the measure of comovements employed in the literature is affected by coherence among non business cycle variations in the data by recursively removing components the degree to which long and short term cycles contaminate the existing evidence is studied while confirming many of the results of the current literature it is found that evidence of cyclicality is affected more by long rather than by short term components even though the data have been detrended by a number of different methods it has been suggested in the literature that wages become more countercyclical as the deflators used represent less finished bundles of goods this study shows that this result is robust to the removal of components from either end of the spectrum

competitive search equilibrium in this paper i construct an equilibrium for markets with frictions which is competitive in the sense that all agents are price takers and maximize utility subject to a set of market parameters i show that the equilibrium allocation is socially optimal i also show how the competitive search equilibrium can be achieved if employers with vacancies can advertise publicly the wages they pay

exchange rate volatility and u s monetary policy an arch application this paper examines the effect of shifts in u s monetary policy regimes on the stochastic process that generates foreign exchange rates to account for the observed behavior of the data record the author models nominal dollar exchange rates as univariate autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic processes he then tests the stability of this process across u s monetary policy regimes for four of the currencies in the sample accounting for regime shifts improves the fit of the model regime shifts also appear to diminish the degree of persistence of variance making it less likely that exchange rates are integrated in variance copyright 1989 by ohio state university press

purchasing power parity and unit root tests using panel data abstract this paper reports the results of unit root tests for real exchange rates using a panel framework this panel approach provides greatly improved power compared to conventional univariate time series unit root tests we obtain evidence supporting ppp over the recent flexible exchange rate period for g 6 and oecd countries we show explicitly that failure to find such evidence in previous research was due to the low power of the tests

real exchange rates in the short medium and long run abstract this paper uses long horizon autocorrelations and variance ratio statistics to test for long term mean reversion in real exchange rates unlike most previous tests of this hypothesis the tests do reject a random walk for monthly data in the post bretton woods era however the statistics indicate that positively correlated innovations rather than mean reversion are the source of the rejection tests using annual data for the twentieth century also reject the random walk in this case however the rejection can be attributed to mean reversion and confirms that ppp is a long term phenomenon

an empirical examination of long run purchasing power parity as theory of international commodity arbitrage an empirical analysis of long run purchasing power parity ppp as a theory of international commodity arbitrage between uk and us prices and the sterling us dollar exchange rate for the period 1975 1980 is presented econometric techniques concerning the cointegration of economic time series are applied to a sample of 35 manufactured commodities which in 1977 constituted approximately a quarter of the net output of all manufacturing industry in great britain our results are extremely unfavourable to the ppp hypothesis as a stable long run proportionality between exchange rates and disaggregated prices

the foreign exchange market a random walk with a dragging anchor this paper explores some anomalies in the foreign exchange market it is hard to find evidence of either short term overshooting or of longer term reversion to an equilibrium the forward exchange rate contains virtually no information on future spot rates discussions with practitioners indicate that longer term speculation based on fundamentals is strictly limited and survey data and other evidence suggest that expectations and speculation are based on a variety of models the interplay between speculation based on fundamentals and on a random walk or chartist approach influences the outcome this endorses the prior model of j a frankel and k a froot copyright 1988 by the london school of economics and political science

real and nominal exchange rates in the long run an empirical investigation abstract this paper reports on econometric tests of the hypothesis that purchasing power parity holds as a long run relationship using data on eight industrialized countries during the flexible exchange rate period the empirical work proceeds by i testing whether nominal exchange rates and relative price levels are co integrated and ii conducting impulse response analysis of long run exchange rate and relative price level changes to explain the data keynesian models suggest that shocks during the estimation period were due principally to exogenous shifts in aggregate demand while equilibrium models suggest that monetary factors have been relatively more important

random walk or bandwagon some evidence from foreign exchanges in the 1980s the predicitive performance of the bandwagon expectations model foe weekly spot exchange rates over the 1980 6 period is evaluated empirical results generally indicate the presence of significant bandwagon effects in the exchange rate dynamics as found in survey expectations data specifically we find the the bandwagon forecasting scheme can improve the forecasting accuracy in terms of both mean squared errors and market timing upon the random walk and vector autoregressive models the results illustrate that bandwagon expectations can be rational and the exchange rate appears to follow a more general integrated process than a random walk

political vs currency premia in international real interest differentials a study of forward rates for 24 countries abstract different approaches to quantifying the degree of capital mobility for a cross section of currencies particularly saving investment correlations and tests of real interest parity have appeared to show a surprisingly low degree of financial integration we use a new data set forward rate data for 24 countries including many small industrialized countries and seven ldcs to decompose the real interest differential into two parts the covered interest differential or political premium and the real forward discount or currency premium the latter in turn can be decomposed into the exchange risk premium and expected real depreciation we find a high degree of capital mobility across political boundaries for most of the g 11 countries plus hong kong and singapore for our sample period of 1982 to 1987 even for most of the other ldcs and smaller industrialized countries for which covered interest parity clearly fails the political premium is not as big a component of the real interest differential as the currency premium france would appear to have higher capital mobility than most by the criterion of real interest differentials but is seen in fact to have low capital mobility by the criterion of covered interest differentials a clear example of the superiority of the latter criterion

does the exchange rate follow a random walk a monte carlo study of four tests for a random walk abstract several authors have urged that real and nominal exchange rates follow a random walk conditions under which the exchange rate follows a random walk are reviewed in this paper many of these do not appear to hold therefore the empirical evidence presents a puzzle some evidence suggets the exchange rate follows a random walk while other evidence suggests the opposite should be true this paper attempts to reconcile the evidence it is argued that the tests for a random walk have low power monte carlo evidence on four tests for a random walk is presented that suppors this claim

relative ppp in the medium run abstract this paper tests the relative purchasing power parity rppp hypothesis on month by month post 1972 data and still obtains regression coefficients that are close to unity two methodological aspects have contributed to this encouraging result firstly although all rppp tests are vis a vis the usa we nevertheless exploit our a priori knowledge about the implications of these usd based equations on ppp relations between cross rates so in a sense we use all information implicit in all cross rates too secondly we selected an instrumental variable that is specifically designed to cope with lead and lag effects in non traded vs traded goods inflation our estimates indicate that most lead and lag effects seem to occur within a six month window jel f31

imperfect information and the comovement of the exchange rate and the interest rate a signal extraction approach this paper analyzes the joint determination of the exchange rate and the interest rate in a signal extraction framework in principle a given disturbance should generate a systematic relationship between the exchange rate and the interest rate as two endogenous variables in the context of any specified economic model when expectations matter however the introduction of imperfect information would weaken the comovement between the two endogenous variables that results from a given disturbance this simple point is demonstrated in a flexible price model of a small economy

market efficiency and cointegration an application to the sterling and deutschemark exchange markets abstract the assumption that the foreign exchange market is efficient that is that agents are risk neutral and use all available information rationally so that the forward exchange rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate is a property often imposed in theoretical international macroeconomic models although a vast empirical literature has evolved to test market efficiency we use recent developments in the theory of cointegration to provide new methods of testing several aspects of foreign exchange market efficiency we ffind evidence inconsistent with market efficiency for both germany and the united kingdom

an empirical examination of long run purchasing power parity using cointegration techniques this paper presents an empirical analysis of long run purchasing power parity ppp for five major exchange rates using recently developed econometric techniques on the cointegration of economic time series our empirical results are extremely unfavourable to the ppp hypothesis as a long run equilibrium condition even with an allowance made for measurement error and or tranportation costs in particular we are unable to reject the hypothesis of non cointegration of the exchange rate and relative prices for any of the countries concerned far from finding a stable long run proportionality between exchange rates and relative prices our results therefore suggest that they tend to drift apart without bound

interest rates inflation and taxes the foreign connection abstract in this note it is shown that the existence of taxes on nominal interest receipts in an international setting introduces a non neutrality in that a change in expected inflation in one country must change at least one expected real interest rate or the path of the real exchange rate

some evidence on the efficiency of the sterling dollar and sterling franc forward exchange rates in the interwar period abstract we present new evidence on the time series properties of spot and forward exchange rates for the sterling dollar and sterling franc exchange rates in the interwar period unlike previous researchers we examine the stationarity of the data our results are consistent with the hypothesis that the forward rates for both currencies exhibited a time varying risk premium but that this was non stationary for the former rate and stationary for the latter

testing long run purchasing power parity with a bayesian unit root approach the experience of canada in the 1950s a test is made for long run purchasing power parity with canadian monthly and quarterly data from the 1950s using a bayesian unit root test discussed by koop but first suggested by zellner and siow results show that the hypothesis that the real exchange rate is a stationary process receives relatively low posterior probability put differently the probability is low that the nominal exchange rate and the national price levels have a stable long run relationship furthermore it is also found that there are structural differences between the sample period from october 1950 to may 1962 and the sample period from january 1952 to november 1960

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

monetary policy real exchange rates and u s agricultural exports interest rates will attract capital to dollar money market instruments which in turn will cause the value of the dollar to rise in foreign exchange markets a stronger dollar makes our exports more expensive to other countries thereby reducing the quantity demanded and it also causes the price of imports into the united states to decline in dollar terms creating competitive pressures for domestic imports sic that compete with imports such as the automobile steel and textile industries the monetary authorities accomplish what they want to accomplish but the burden of adjustment is borne by the export sectors and the sectors that have strong import competition in this way one can see that the problems of agriculture and the automobile industry in the early 1980 s have been cut in part from the same cloth a period of very tight monetary policy

real wages over the business cycle a band spectrum approach this paper presents new evidence on the cyclical relationship between real wages and aggregate employment as is well known models that attribute fluctuations in output to movements in aggregate demand and retain the assumption of flexible product prices the adpf hypothesis imply countercyclical real wage movements as employment adjusts along a downward sloping aggregate demand for labor schedule in contrast real business cycle theories 10 15 13 suggest procyclical movements as workers substitute work for leisure along dynamic labor supply schedules the empirical evidence on these propositions remains mixed some influential studies report a negative relationship 4 5 25 others report a positive relationship 2 12 18 and geary and kennan gk 7 to identify the purely business cycle correlation and distinguish it from correlations at very high and very low frequencies the frequency domain decomposition provides a simple framework for reconciling the conflicting conclusions of previous studies and for focusing attention on the business cycle relationship i show that the highly significant positive or negative correlations reported in previous studies are attributable to variations at frequencies far too high or far too low to be associated with the business cycle the true business cycle relationship is quite different from that revealed by simple regressions of real wages on employment i find a weak but statistically significant negative relationship over business cycle frequencies for the post war u s data when wages are deflated by the producer price index ppi the negative relationship is particularly strong over the subperiod 1947 70 but becomes weak and insignificant over the last sixteen years 1971 86 this finding is consistent with the widely held belief that in the former period cyclical movements in employment were determined by changes in aggregate demand while real shocks dominated in the 1970s however when wages are deflated by the consumer price index cpi the business cycle relationship is weak and not statistically significant over both subperiods these results contrast sharply with those of previous studies that do not isolate business cycle components

flexible exchange rates prices and the role of news lessons from the 1970s recent experience with flexible exchange rate systems has led to renewed interest in the operation of foreign exchange markets as reflected in many recent studies of the principal determinants of exchange rates the 1970s witnessed the dramatic alteration of the international monetary system from a regime of pegged exchange rates which prevailed for about a quarter of a century since the bretton woods conference into a regime of flexible though managed rates as a consequence of the emergence of the new legal and economic system traders national governments and international organisations were confronted with new economic problems choices and instruments during the 1970s ex change rates fluctuated widely and inflation rates accelerated the international monetary system had to accommodate extraordinarily large oil related shocks which affected trade flows in goods and assets huge oil payments had to be recycled uncertainties concerning future developments in international politics reached new heights and the prospects for the world economy got gloomier these developments placed unprecedented pressures on the markets for foreign exchange as well as on other asset markets they were associated with a large slide in the value of the us dollar and resulted in speeding up the creation of new institutions like the european monetary system which provided the formal framework for the management of exchange rates among members

the cyclical behavior of marginal cost and price the author examines the cyclical behavior of price marginal cost margins for u s manufac turing after 1956 short run marginal cost is markedly procyclical this is primarily due to procyclical overtime payments incurred beca use employment is not perfectly flexible in most industries output price fails to respond to the cyclical movement in marginal cost so price marginal cost margins are markedly countercyclical the res ults contradict business cycle theories that explain low production i n a recession by a high real cost of producing they support theories that explain low production in a recession by the inability of firms to sell their output copyright 1987 by american economic association

holdups and efficiency with search frictions a natural holdup problem arises in a market with search frictions firms have to make a range of investments before finding their employees and larger investments translate into higher wages in particular when wages are determined by ex post bargaining the equilibrium is always inefficient recognizing that capital intensive production relations have to pay higher wages firms reduce their investments this can only be prevented by removing all the bargaining power from the workers but this in turn depresses wages below their social product and creates excessive entry of firms in contrast to this benchmark we show that efficiency is achieved when firms post wages and workers can direct their search toward more attractive offers this efficiency result generalizes to an environment with imperfect information where workers only observe a few of the equilibrium wage offers we show that the underlying reason for efficiency is not wage posting per se but the ability of workers to direct their search toward more capital intensive jobs

competitive pricing and efficiency in search equilibrium we consolidate and generalize some results on price determination and efficiency in search equilibrium extending models by rubinstein and wolinsky and by gale heterogeneous buyers and sellers meet according to a general matching technology and prices are determined by a general bargaining condition when the discount rate r and search costs converge to 0 we show that prices in all exchanges are the same and equal the competitive market clearing price given positive search costs efficiency obtains iff bargaining satisfies hosios condition and r 0 when prices are set by third party market makers however we show that search equilibrium is necessarily efficient

nominal exchange rates and unit roots a reconsideration abstract this paper provides empirical evidence that nominal exchange rates are stationary and are not random walks other studies using classical tests suggest that exchange rates contain unit roots thereby supporting the random walk hypothesis the apparently permanent nature of shocks to exchange rates has been interpreted to mean that disequilibrium models such as the dornbusch overshooting model are not useful in explaining exchange rate behavior this paper applies a new statistical test for unit roots proposed by sims and based on bayesian posterior odds ratios the results favor exchange rate stationarity for several countries jel f31

long run purchasing power parity during the recent float abstract this paper examines the relevance of long run purchasing power parity ppp which allows for measurement errors during the recent floating exchange rate period previous empirical studies generally fail to find support for long run ppp over this period in this paper in this paper the cointegration property of exchange rates and prices is examined using maximum likelihood procedure and we find significant evidence favorable to long run ppp further tests for symmetry and proportionality indicate that these two conditions are not generally with the data the results support the hypothesis of long run ppp with measurement errors in prices

exchange rate volatility international trade and the value of exporting firms abstract increased exchange rate volatility positively affects the value of exporting firms via the price and volume impacts of exchange rates and also makes an exporting strategy more attractive relative to the direct investment investment in export production capacity could therefore be a positive function of exchange rate volatility firms would also be more willing to sustain losses i e to engage in dumping before they abandon their export markets the effect on the volume and value of trade is ambiguous

modelling weekly data on uk interest and exchange rates this paper examines the short term dynamic relationships existing between four variables of major interest to market analysts in the uk long and short interest rates the dollar sterling exchange rate and the sterling effective exchange rate the sample period investigated is from july 1985 to december 1988 both interest and exchange rates are found to be first order integrated processes but they are not cointegrated this is inconsistent with the term structure of interest rates but is consistent with exchange markets being efficient a vector autoregression is developed and analysed through two alternative sets of structural restrictions on the contemporaneous correlations between the series the predominant relationship between the interest rates runs from long to short rates thus confirming the rejection of the term structure hypothesis there are negative contemporaneous relationships between interest and exchange rates while the lagged relationship runs from interest to exchange rates so that

on the deviations from purchasing power parity the case of the ringgit effective exchange rate the paper investigates the extent to which the ringgit exchange rate converges on its purchasing power parity level in the long run using the cointegration and variance ratio tests the results indicate that shifts in the real exchange rate are dominated by permanent stochastic shocks which prevent it from reverting to its ppp base level further analysis indicates that low frequency movements in the relative price of tradable goods and the external terms of trade cannot explain the long run swing in the real exchange rate

the comovement between output and prices abstract in this paper i analyze the comovement of us prices and output in the postwar period i use a new set of statistics to characterize the comovement between variables the statistics capture important information about the dynamics in the system the estimation procedure does not require assumptions about the order of integration or the types of assumptions needed for var decompositions i find that the comovement between output and prices is positive in the short run and negative in the long run i show that a model in which demand shocks dominate in the short run and supply shocks dominate in the long run can explain these empirical results while sticky price models with only demand shocks cannot

persistence in foreign exchange rates abstract this study examines the long run behavior of seven daily nominal exchange rates using univariate and multivariate persistence measures our results indicate that for some currencies the long run behavior deviates from that of a pure random walk in certain periods the multivariate estimates reflect the effect of both the ems exchange rate mechanism and increased post louvre accord coordinated intervention a large portion of the effect of a shock in one currency on another currency s long run value can be attributed to contemporaneous effects on the other currencies

mean reversion in real exchange rates a modified dickey fuller test which is approximately uniformly most power invariant is employed to examine mean reversion in real exchange rates results from this test provide a wider and more significant support for mean reversion than the standard dickey fuller test

the out of sample forecasting performance of exchange rate models when coefficients are allowed to change abstract this study examines the out of sample forecasting performance of models of exchange rate determination without imposing the restriction that coefficients are fixed over time both fixed and variable coefficient versions of conventional structural models are considered with and without a lagged dependent variable while our results on fixed coefficient models support most of the meese and rogoff conclusions we find that when coefficients are allowed to change an important subset of conventional models of the dollar pound the dollar deutsche mark and the dollar yen exchange rates can outperform forecasts of a random walk model the structural models considered are the flexible price frenkel bilson and sticky price dornbusch frankel monetary models and a sticky price model which includes the current account hooper morton

cointegration tests of purchasing power parity in africa abstract despite two decades of implementing economic reforms there is still a significant gap between official and black market exchange rates in africa african policy makers continue to implement exchange rate policies based largely on the assumption that purchasing power parity ppp holds this paper examines whether there is empirical support for ppp in africa we used johansen s cointegration technique and error correction modeling on annual data for black market exchange rates and cpi in 30 countries covering 1960 97 we found strong support for the ppp doctrine as a useful guide for exchange rate policy reform in africa

on unit roots and real exchange rates empirical evidence and monte carlo analysis this paper presents some empirical evidence that real exchange rate series contain a unit root in their time series respresentation which cancels out on first differencing using the augmented dickey fuller test the power of this test is also tested using monte carlo methods and it is found to be quite powerful against a range of stationary local alternatives the findings imply the absence of any tendency of the nominal exchange rate to converge on purchasing power parity even in the long run

real wages and the business cycle the objectives of this review are threefold 1 to characterize the empirical literature on the cyclical behavior of real wages 2 to identify the sources of the differences in results across studies and 3 to enumerate key factors that determine the cyclicality of real wages given a host of measurement and methodological issues drawing firm conclusions is difficult but several generalizations can be made the estimated cyclicality of real wages depends crucially on the time period of analysis and the choice of whether to examine the production or the consumption wage composition effects play an important but complicated role as well

mobility costs frictional unemployment and efficiency with imperfect job information flows it is plausible that the distribution of job offerings becomes more attractive when there are more vacancies and more unemployed with word of mouth communication this condition is derived given this condition steady state equilibrium is not efficient with welfare increased by the introduction of unemployment compensation even though all agents are risk neutral in this way workers become more selective in the jobs they accept

some qualms about the test of the institutionalist hypothesis of the long run behavior of velocity this paper expresses econometric qualms about bordo and jonung s 1981 analysis of long run velocity they did not recognize that for u s and canadian data the log of velocity has a unit root hence estimation of a log level regression may produce spurious regressions when bordo and jonung s velocity equation is reestimated in rate of change form permanent income is significant contrary to their earlier conclusion moreover using this approach gives a stronger result for one of the institutional variables in the velocity function in the sense that the remaining variables become more significant

exchange risk exposure and the option to trade rather than impeding trade increased exchange rate uncertainty may on average create trade as it implies a higher probability that ex post deviations from commodity price parity will exceed tariffs and transportation costs we demonstrate such an effect in a small country short term model under the alternative assumptions of perfect competition and of a monopolist trader producer the proofs rely on the fact that such firms exposures can be replicated and hedged by standard options under partial monopoly scenarios the effect of volatility is ex ante unclear though jel f31