long run purchasing power parity evidence from some european monetary system countries long run purchasing power parity ppp for five countries participating in the european monetary system ems during the recent floating exchange rate period is studied using new econometric techniques evidence is found supporting long run purchasing power parity moreover the long run ppp relationship is generally stable throughout the period since the dissolution of the bretton woods period even with the advent of the european monetary system frequent realignments within the ems may have served to maintain competitiveness between member countries

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

new evidence on purchasing power parity from 17 oecd countries there is a large literature that investigates whether or not real exchange rates are stationary in an attempt to unravel support for purchasing power parity ppp at best the empirical results are mixed this paper applies a unit root test that allows for a simultaneous structural break in the intercept and slope shown by sen 2003 to minimize power distortions to examine ppp for 17 oecd countries our results on ppp are mixed when the real exchange rate is based on the us dollar evidence is found of ppp for only france portugal and denmark when the real exchange rate is based on the deutschmark we find evidence of ppp for austria belgium norway spain netherlands switzerland and denmark

co integration error and purchasing power parity between canada and the united states the concept of cointegration and the associated error correction representation of a dynamic process see r f engle and c w g granger 1987 is applied to the purchasing power parity relationship between canada and the united states the results are supportive of purchasing power parity as a long run equilibrium relationship between the canadian dollar american dollar exchange rate the purchasing power parity relationship is maintained although with different dynamic mechanisms during both fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes

mean reversion in g 10 nominal exchange rates according to conventional wisdom industrial country floating exchange rates contain unit roots sur tests on panels of monthly group of ten g 10 log nominal rates reject the null of unit roots for various samples over the current float with significance levels from 0 5 to 15 on average in out of sample forecasts mean reversion models beat random walks significantly in some forecast periods for monthly data the range of expected usd dem appreciation rates exceeds 15 per year in the mean reversion model mean reversion places strong restrictions on international models over the sample period the g 10 had to run monetary policies consistent with stable long run nominal rates

seasonal adjustment in a market for female agricultural workers this article explores seasonal adjustment in the market for temporary agricultural labor we estimate a model of participation allowing for unobserved heterogeneity and endogeneity selection bias using daily observations from chilean panel data and a model of daily earnings results indicate that seasonal wage variation is an important aspect of labor market adjustment contributing to a large change in labor force participation the labor force participation rate of women is significantly more elastic to changes in the expected wage than is that for men nonetheless we find evidence of substantial open unemployment during the slack season especially for females probably due to frictional and efficiency wage effects

earnings productivity and performance related pay jobs with performance related pay prp attract workers of higher ability and induce workers to provide greater effort we construct an integrated model of effort and sorting that clarifies the distinction between observable and unobservable ability and the relationship between earnings and productivity predictions are tested against data from the british household panel survey bhps the prp raises wages by 9 for men and 6 for women theoretical calculations show that these estimated earnings differentials represent average productivity differentials net of monitoring costs at the marginal firm using prp but not of the disutility of additional effort expended by workers

mean reversion in long horizon real exchange rates evidence from latin america abstract this paper examines mean reversion in real effective exchange rates in six leading latin american economies during the xxth century using a new data set a unit root approach is complemented by an error correction model including key fundamentals such as terms of trade trade openness and relative productivities unit root testing shows a very slow process of reversion if any to a constant mean in the original series rejecting the strict ppp hypothesis however mean reversion is found after allowing for trends and structural breaks with a half life average of 1 years for the six countries we also found reversion to a conditional mean defined by the co integrating relationship with an average half life of 2 years our estimates although lower than the 3 5 year range that motivated the rogoff s puzzle still indicate the presence of important obstacles to the adjustment process that need further investigation

purchasing power parity and cointegration the greek evidence from the 1920s abstract this paper presents empirical evidence which supports the purchasing power parity ppp hypothesis for three bilateral exchange rates involving the greek drachma during the 1920s using the technique of cointegration of economic time series the results are obtained for a period of high money supply growth and a high and variable rate of inflation which gave rise to large differentials in price movements between greece and the other countries the speed at which long run ppp was reached following a shock was 50 per cent per month confirming the results of other studies of ppp over the 1920s and explaining the supportive evidence for long run ppp even though data over a short period were used jel f31

the j curve effect and us agricultural and industrial trade this paper examines the j curve hypothesis for us agricultural and manufactured goods using the shiller lag model the results support the j curve effect for agricultural goods but not for manufactured goods these findings explain why many studies in the literature fail to support the j curve phenomenon there are two explanations for these findings 1 the aggregation bias of data that combine both agricultural and manufactured goods and 2 the country under study is often an industrial nation like the us or japan with a high proportion of manufactured goods in both exports and imports

panel unit root tests of purchasing power parity for price indices abstract this paper adopts four panel unit root tests to evaluate ppp over the floating period for six different price indices results generally support ppp albeit the speeds of adjustment differ considerably between price indices and test procedures the degree of contemporaneous and serial correlation as well as heterogeneity of the series in the panel affect stationarity and the speed of mean reversion

cointegration between exchange rates and relative prices another view abstract in this paper the cointegration property of exchange rates and relative prices as implied by the purchasing power parity theory ppp is reexamined using a time varying parameter tvp approach such an approach recognizes the possibility that the lack of cointegration between exchange rates and relative prices found in recent literature may be the result of the nonstationarity of the cointegrating regression parameters themselves the tests of cointegration in a tvp framework indicate that ppp is better supported and point to the presence of structural instability in the long run equilibrium relationship between exchange rates and relative prices

the impact of oil prices on gdp in european countries an empirical investigation based on asymmetric cointegration this paper investigates the existence of a long term relationship between oil prices and gdp in 12 european countries to account for the fact that economic activity responds asymmetrically to oil price shocks we propose an approach based on asymmetric cointegration our results show that while standard cointegration is rejected there is evidence for asymmetric cointegration between oil prices and gdp in the majority of the considered european countries

real exchange rates ppp and the relative price of nontraded goods the purchasing power parity hypothesis ppp states that nominal exchange rates move with differences in relative prices between economies the theory has received considerable attention in the economic literature since cassell 6 and is the foundation of many long run theoretical hypotheses in international finance yet its empirical validity remains in question many tests of ppp focus on the stationarity of the real exchange rate the nominal exchange rate adjusted for changes in price levels between economies if domestic and foreign price levels and the nominal exchange rate are integrated then cointegration between these variables implies the existence of both a long run equilibrium relationship and ppp the residual the real exchange rate then follows a stationary process the paper uses the multivariate cointegration methodology of johansen 16 and johansen and juselius 17 18 to examine the source of real exchange rate nonstationarity is the nonstationarity due to shifts in the domestic and foreign price of nontradeables or productivity differentials between traded and nontraded sectors or is the nonstationarity a possible outcome of difficulties in intercountry comparisons of prices movements associated with construction of these price indices most research finds the real exchange rate follows a nonstationary process due to the presence of a unit root 8 12 1 9 19 27 however the existence of a variable trend in the real exchange rate does not imply the absence of a long run relationship between relative prices levels and nominal exchange rates for two reasons first a long run relationship between price levels and nominal exchange rates may exist but not the one for one relationship implicit in the calculation of real exchange rates due to measurement differences in the construction of price indices between economies second ppp violations may occur due to the presence of permanent productivity innovations which affect the relative price of nontradeables if these shocks are not represented by measurable variables a cointegrating relationship will not exist the paper constructs traded and nontraded gdp price indices and productivity rates for 14 oecd economies and tests 1 if the variable trend the nonstationary process in the real exchange rate is due to permanent innovations in relative price of domestic and foreign nontradeables 2 if long run ppp violations are due to permanent movements in the relative price of nontradeables 3 if the nonstationarity in the real exchange rate is due to permanent innovations in domestic and foreign productivity differentials between the traded and nontraded sectors 4 if the variable trend in the relative price of nontradeables is due to permanent innovations in productivity between sectors lastly the paper constructs a cointegrating error correction model

arima and cointegration tests of ppp under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes real exchange rates between the united states and its major trading partners were calculated for the bretton woods and flexible exchange rate periods unit root tests indicate that purchasing power parity performed poorly in both periods tests for cointegration reveal limited instances in which it is possible to estimate the deviations from ppp as an error correcting model the estimated error correcting models indicate that foreign but not u s prices responded to deviations from ppp frenkel s 1981b finding that purchasing power parity ppp worked better during the 1920s than the 1970s caused considerable controversy for example davutyan and pippenger 1985 contend that the socalled collapse of ppp is a result of an increase in the relative importance of real versus monetary shocks they argue that the 1970s as opposed to the 1920s was characterized by real supply shocks and the international coordination of monetary policies the argument is that ppp did not fail rather there was an increase in the volatility of those factors giving rise to deviations from ppp hakkio 1984 reestimated ppp over the 1920s and 1970s using cross country tests i e sure estimates to improve the efficiency of his estimates he was able to support the hypothesis that ppp worked better in the 1970s than in the 1920s on the other hand papers by adler and lehman 1983 dornbusch 1980 frenkel 1981a junge 1985 and krugman 1978 report findings contrary to the ppp hypothesis moreover kenen and rodrik 1986 find that the volatility of real exchange rates has increased throughout the flexible rate period this paper tries to shed some light on the importance and persistence of the observed deviations from purchasing power parity under alternative exchange rate systems while it is interesting to compare ppp in the 1920s versus the 1970s it is equally useful to compare the 1960s versus the 1970s and 1980s if real supply shocks and lack of monetary coordination are characteristic of the latter period ppp should perform better in the 1960s to illustrate the issues involved consider the following econometric model of relative purchasing power

multi country evidence on the behavior of purchasing power parity under the current float abstract using panel data for the united states and 22 other oecd countries for the current float this paper presents evidence that despite substantial short term perturbations purchasing power parity actually performed much better than commonly believed average rates of growth of real exchange rates over long horizons bear little relationship either to average rates of growth of nominal exchange rates or to average inflation differentials thus implying a close to one to one relation between average rates of growth of nominal exchange rates and average inflation differentials panel data variants of standard unit root tests suggest that the real exchange rates of these countries can be characterized as mean reverting

optimal allocation and backup of computer resources under asymmetric information and incentive incompatibility abstract this paper presents the optimal allocation and backup of computing resources in a multidivisional firm in the presence of asymmetric information and incentive incompatibility a game theoretic model is developed and transformed to a linear programming problem the solution to this linear programming problem enables the corporate headquarters to design a resource allocation scheme such that the revelation principle prevails and all divisions tell the truth to cope with the combinatorial explosion of complexity caused by the resource constraint a greedy type algorithm and an averaged version of the original linear programming problem are developed to provide the upper and lower bounds the greedy type algorithm generates exact solutions for a wide range of instances the lower bounds coincide with the exact solutions for the cases where the computer resource is either scarce or abundant the averaged version resource allocation model with slight modifications solves the optimal computer backup capacity problem it determines how much back up capacity the firm should purchase when the firm s computer breaks down

evidence on ppp for selected asian countries from a panel cointegration test with structural breaks the goal of this article is to examine evidence for purchasing power parity ppp for a panel of asian countries namely malaysia thailand india pakistan sri lanka and the philippines our main contribution is that for the first time in this literature we use a panel cointegration test developed by westerlund 2006 which allows us to incorporate multiple structural breaks we find that using gregory and hansen s 1996 residual based test for cointegration and pedroni s 1999 panel cointegration test without structural breaks provide weak evidence of cointegration between nominal exchange rates vis a vis the us dollar and relative prices however when we use the lagrange multiplier panel structural break cointegration test we find strong evidence of panel cointegration providing evidence for ppp

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

beyond the purchasing power parity testing for cointegration and causality between exchange rates prices and interest rates abstract this paper reexamines the causality between the dollar and the yen in a multivariate framework with the aid of cointegration and error correcting modeling for the 1951 94 period the phillips perron tests and johansen s tests are performed while causality from interest rates to exchange rates is found in the short run no causality between prices and exchange rates is found in the short run however causality is found running from relative prices to exchange rates along with interest rates between the u s and japan in the long run which supports the long run ppp hypothesis

the trade off between supervision cost and performance based pay does gender matter the study adds to the literature by providing new empirical evidence consistent with efficiency wage theory and by providing estimates of the average cost of supervising a worker by industry this research uses the 1996 wave of the nlsy and incorporates estimates of supervision cost computed from industry classifications we further detect presence of no gender differences neither in risk averseness nor in productivity gains associated with cost of supervision and performance based pay while the findings imply that employers should consider the incentive effects of supervision and performance based pay when constructing pay schemes there is no need for employers to devote resources to constructing gender specific payment mechanisms our evidence suggests that profit maximizing firms should treat males and females equally and develop gender neutral pay schemes

does comovement among exchange rates imply market inefficiency abstract this paper argues that contrary to what has been reported in the empirical literature previously cointegration between pairs of exchange rates does not necessarily rule out informational efficiency in currency markets the basic reason is that market efficiency does not rule out predictable exchange rate movements but only rules out arbitrage opportunities from predictable exchange rate movements as the usual parity conditions dictate

oil prices and economic activity an asymmetric cointegration approach the aim of this paper is to study the long term relationship between oil prices and economic activity proxied by gdp to account for asymmetries existing in the links between the two variables we propose an approach based on asymmetric cointegration our empirical analysis concerns the u s economy but also the g7 europe and euro area economies results indicate that while standard cointegration is rejected there is evidence for asymmetric cointegration between oil prices and gdp

compensation policy and worker performance identifying incentive effects from field experiments the role of field experiments in evaluating the effect of compensation policies on worker productivity is considered particular attention is paid to the ability of a field experiment to identify the effect of a permanent change in firm policy while field experiments solve endogeneity problems through randomization they do so within a specific and at times artificial environment that may not be replicated by a permanent policy change as such rather than providing a basis for the unrestricted identification of incentive effects experiments are better thought of as providing exogenous variation with which to identify structural parameters these parameters can in turn be used to predict the effects of policy changes jel j3 l2 c9

the response of exchange rates to permanent and transitory shocks under floating exchange rates abstract using the joint behavior of inflation and real exchange rates we develop an empirical model to uncover the sources of the fluctuations in the real dollar exchange rates of four major industrial countries under the current float this model allows us to construct two time series for each country pair one representing the permanent component of each real exchange rate and the other the purely transitory component over the period as a whole transitory shocks played a relatively small but statistically significant role real dollar exchange rates therefore did not simply evolve in response to permanent shocks instead there are instances in which temporary shocks made a substantial contribution we conclude that the random walk model though an approximate statistical description of real exchange rate behavior is a poor guide to model structure jel f31

are real exchanges rate series really persistent evidence from three commonwealth of independent states countries this article sets out to examine the degree of persistence in the real exchange rates of kazakhstan kyrgyzstan and russia and tests the validity of purchasing power parity ppp using monthly data covering 1995 01 2013 12 period the sum of autoregressive ar coefficients is used in order to examine persistence of the real exchange rate series and grid bootstrap method is employed for the confidence intervals the tests performed suggest two results 1 covering the full sample and sub sample periods excluding kyrgyzstan in 1995 01 1998 07 and russia in 2008 09 2013 12 periods disregarding the structural breaks in the data generating process there is high persistency in real exchange rates 2 there is evidence in support of ppp covering the full sample for every country except for kyrgyzstan in 1995 01 1998 07 and russia in 2008 09 2013 12 periods

cointegration and threshold adjustment this article proposes an extension to the engle granger testing strategy by permitting asymmetry in the adjustment toward equilibrium in two different ways we demonstrate that our test has good power and size properties over the engle granger test when there are asymmetric departures from equilibrium we consider an application namely whether there exists cointegration among interest rates for instruments with different maturities this issue has been widely tested with mixed results we argue that either cautious policy or possibly opportunistic behavior on the part of the federal reserve implies that an equilibrium relationship between short and long term interest rates exists but that adjustments from disequilibrium are asymmetric in nature empirical tests using u s yields confirm the asymmetric nature of error correction among interest rates of different maturities

tests for symmetric and asymmetric nonlinear mean reversion in real exchange rates new tests based on smooth transition autoregressive models for mean reversion in time series of real exchange rates are proposed one test forces mean reversion to be symmetric about the integrated process central case while the other permits asymmetry the tests are applied to monthly series of seventeen real exchange rates against the u s dollar and fourteen against the deutsche mark they reveal stronger evidence against the unit root null hypothesis than does the usual dickey fuller test

are real exchange rates nonstationary evidence from a panel data test it is well documented that real exchange rates between the united states and many industrialized countries in the post bretton woods period are integrated this result implies that purchasing power parity ppp does not hold even as a long run relationship this paper demonstrates that the failure to reject the unit root hypothesis may result from the low power of existing univariate test procedures i test for unit roots in real exchange rates by employing a more powerful panel based procedure using both cpi and wpi real dollar exchange rate data i strongly reject the null hypothesis of a unit root my results provide overwhelming support for the long run ppp under the current float copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

method of pay in finnish industry in this paper a dynamic economic model of the method of pay is derived to serve as a background to an empirical study the model gives for example a prediction that employees who have a short attachment to a firm are apt to engage in incentive work special attention is paid to unobserved heterogeneity across workers in a logit model of the method of pay a new estimator based on a small variance approximation of unobserved heterogeneity is derived

econometric testing of purchasing power parity in less developed countries fixed and flexible exchange rate regime experiences we investigate the purchasing power parity ppp hypothesis for 16 less developed countries ldcs from all over the world during their fixed and flexible exchange rate experiences over the period 1957 01 1999 12 the main contribution of this article to the empirical literature on ppp is that our study is the first to consider ppp hypothesis on alternative exchange rate regimes for ldcs the bilateral exchange rates of ldcs and the united states and their respective price levels are considered three different time series methodologies are employed unit root tests engle granger 1987 cointegration technique and johansen multivariate var methodology 1988 the cointegration techniques improve the results which allows the examination of the more frequent long run relationship between relative prices and nominal exchange rates nevertheless using each of econometric techniques we find only a few and a nearly equal evidence in favour of ppp under the alternative regimes in ldcs hence the main conc

transitory and permanent disturbances and the current account an empirical analysis in the intertemporal framework the intertemporal models of current account determination demonstrate that in the analysis of the current account balance of a country it is important to distinguish between transitory and permanent disturbances in income and relative prices this paper attempts to decompose the observed data on income and real exchange rate into transitory and permanent components and then uses the decomposed series to test the empirical validity of the predictions of the intertemporal models evidence from the united states and japan provide very limited support for the intertemporal models in terms of the effects of transitory and permanent changes in income on current account balance for both us and japan the study finds that permanent changes in real exchange rate have significant effects on the current account balance statistical tests find no evidence of hysteresis in the trading relations of the two countries

generalized long memory and mean reversion of the real exchange rate definitive evidence regarding a rapid mean reversion of the real exchange rate is not present when using standard linear methodology including unit root tests and fractional integration to consider the robustness of these results we use an encompassing model the gegenbauer autoregressive moving average garma model which nests as special cases the existing linear methods the garma model accommodates a complete notion of persistence and allows shocks to dissipate slowly in a cyclical manner we find evidence supporting a weak version of purchasing power parity where equilibrium errors are long memory with strongly persistent cycles however this new form of cyclical mean reversion is likely too slow to be economically meaningful the inability to find a strong equilibrium attractor process using a very general encompassing linear methodology provides support for the recent models that allow for a nonlinear attraction process and for shifting real exchange rate equilibria

moral hazard economic meaning of the conditions justifying the first order approach abstract it is shown that the condition justifying the use of the agent s first order condition to describe his optimal action in a principal agent situation with pure moral hazard is related to but not the same as diminishing returns to effort examples are provided to illustrate the joint implications for the production function the nature of the underlying uncertainty and the disutility of effort

validity of purchasing power parity for selected latin american countries linear and non linear unit root tests abstract the aim of this study is to examine empirically the validity of ppp in the context of unit root tests based on linear and non linear models of the real effective exchange rate of argentina brazil chile colombia mexico peru and venezuela for this purpose we apply the harvey et al 2008 linearity test and the non linear unit root test kruse 2011 the results show that the series with linear characteristics are argentina brazil chile colombia and peru and those with non linear characteristics are mexico and venezuela the linear unit root tests indicate that the real effective exchange rate is stationary for chile and peru and the non linear unit root tests evidence that mexico is stationary in the period analyzed the results show support for the validity of ppp in only three of the seven countries

testing for threshold cointegration and error correction evidence in the petroleum futures market this article examines the existence of threshold cointegration between futures and spot prices for the brent petroleum market we then estimate the asymmetric error correction specification utilizing the momentum threshold autoregressive consistent m tar c approach particularly proposed by enders and siklos 2001 we find that for the daily data over 2 january 2001 through 15 october 2006 the petroleum futures prices are cointegrated with the spot prices this effectively confirms the expectations hypothesis and that asymmetric adjustments for the futures basis towards the long run value display a negative basis from the long run equilibrium level more persistently than a positive basis from that level the empirical result suggests that short run arbitrages manipulating buy long sell short futures contracts be profitable when a positive basis is weakening a negative basis is strengthening

searching for nonlinearities in real exchange rates a recent innovation in modeling exchange rates has been the use of nonlinear techniques such as threshold autoregressive models and its smooth transition variants this paper investigates the smooth transition autoregressive star modeling strategy in an application to real exchange rates the key findings are as follows first using the methodology advocated by terasvirta 1994 we find evidence of nonlinear dynamics for several of the spot dollar real exchange rates using monthly data on five of the g7 countries however once estimated we find that the star specification is appropriate for only one of the three exchange rate series indicated to be an estar process moreover using simulations we show that the underlying methodology used to detect nonlinearities in the data exhibit substantial size biases which we attribute to influential observations we also investigate an alternative nonlinear specification and find that we can model the dollar sterling and the dollar lira real exchange rates better as an open loop tar process instead of a setar process

is there trend reversion in purchasing power parity abstract this study presents some empirical evidence on purchasing power parity ppp using residualbased co integration tests engle and granger s 1987 tests and the ratio of the variance of higher order differences to the variance of the first difference of the residuals of the cointegrating regression are used monthly data over a span of 30 years do not provide any empirical support to the theory conversely in the annual data long run equilibrium tendencies are evident since ppp has been widely used to provide an anchor for the equilibrium exchange rate our results indicate that such an assumption is not completely inadequate

purchasing power parity yet again evidence from spatially separated commodity markets abstract this paper examines the empirical validity of the law of one price by exploiting the non stationarity of prices set in us dollars of varieties of wheat that are traded simultaneously in the usa rotterdam and japan we demonstrate the crucial role of transport costs in achieving cointegration long run ppp although systematic short run deviations from ppp occur we show that this does not imply profitable arbitrage opportunities jel c5 f3 g1

long run purchasing power parity with asymmetric adjustment 1 introduction despite its intuitive appeal there is inconclusive evidence supporting purchasing power parity ppp between countries with low inflation rates during the post bretton woods period for example enders 1988 taylor 1988 and macdonald 1993 use various forms of cointegration tests called stage three tests and find that real exchange rates exhibit large fluctuations with slow rates of decay toward a long run mean froot and rogoff s 1995 literature review presents a consensus estimate that deviations from long run ppp have a half life of about three years this is somewhat disappointing since stage three tests seem to be well suited to the task they require no assumptions concerning exogeneity and they imply a sensible dynamic relationship among price levels and the exchange rate the vast literature on ppp is indicative of the importance of the issue and the ambiguity of the findings it is well recognized that standard cointegration tests have low power to reject the null hypothesis of no cointegration this observation is especially relevant for ppp since any mean reversion in real rates is very gradual and the length of the post bretton woods period sample period is relatively short efforts to increase the power of unit root and stage three tests have had mixed success for example lothian and taylor 1996 and mark 1990 have tried to circumvent the low power of stage three tests by using long spans of time series data unfortunately the use of long time spans raises the possibility of structural changes occurring during the period being examined panel unit root tests are generally more supportive of ppp than are bilateral tests of real exchange rate behavior for example oh 1996 wei and parsley 1995 and wu 1996 have used panel data in order to enhance the power of standard unit root tests although these particular articles are supportive of ppp panel studies must deal with the thorny issues of cross sectional correlation and the choice of the nations to include in the panel papell 1997 finds that allowing for serial correlation substantially weakens the evidence in favor of long run ppp o connell 1998 applies generalized least squares to panel data to eliminate any contemporaneous correlation in the error structure and finds no evidence supporting ppp the second problem with the standard unit root and cointegration tests is that they implicitly assume symmetric adjustment however official intervention in the foreign exchange market means that nominal exchange rate adjustment may be asymmetric under a managed float for example one of the monetary authorities might be more willing to tolerate currency appreciation than depreciation similarly a currency band mitigates exchange rate movements until the level of the band is altered furthermore the slow adjustment of real exchange rates is often explained by the stickiness of national price levels for example in the well known dornbusch 1976 overshooting model prices and the exchange rate move in the same proportion as the money supply in the very long run however in the short run prices are sticky and monetary shocks cause ppp deviations since the exchange rate moves proportionately more than prices rhee and rich 1995 and madsen and yang 1998 provide empirical evidence corroborating the implications of the asymmetric price adjustment models the key point to note is that if prices are primarily sticky in the downward direction there is no reason to presuppose that real exchange rate adjustment is symmetric in spite of the evidence supportive of asymmetric exchange rate and price adjustments there are only a few nonlinear tests of ppp although they do not explicitly test for ppp michael nobay and peel 1997 and taylor and sarno 1998 estimate real exchange rates as smooth transition threshold adjustment processes enders and falk 1998 formally apply various nonlinear unit root tests to real exchange rates and find little evidence of ppp

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

sources of fluctuations in real and nominal exchange rates this paper attempts to distinguish empirically real versus nominal sources of fluctuations in real and nominal exchange rates the distinction is obtained by imposing the following restriction on the bivariate vector autoregression of real and nominal exchange rates over the current flexible rate period nominal shocks are required to have no permanent effect on the level of the real exchange rate given this identification scheme the author analyzes the dynamic effects and relative importance of real and nominal shocks with regards to exchange rates the findings indicate that real shocks dominate nominal shocks for both exchange rate series over short and long frequencies copyright 1992 by mit press

the term structure of currency carry trade risk premia we nd that average returns to currency carry trades decrease signicantly as the maturity of the foreign bonds increases because investment currencies tend to have small local bond term premia the downward term structure of carry trade risk premia is informative about the temporal nature of risks that investors face in currency markets we show that long maturity currency risk premia only depend on the domestic and foreign permanent components of the pricing kernels since transitory currency risk is automatically hedged by interest rate risk for long maturity bonds our

aggregate price indexes cointegration and tests of the purchasing power parity hypothesis abstract in this paper i show that cointegration tests of ppp using aggregate price indexes are not always robust to changes in relative prices i offer a method of gauging the importance of these effects and find them to be unimportant in recent rejections of ppp

cointegration tests of purchasing power parity the case of swiss exchange rates abstract this paper tests purchasing power parity ppp as a long run equilibrium condition by examining the long run relationshiop between exchange rates and wholesale price indices using cointegration tests this paper avoids some of the problems of previous cointegration tests of ppp by using more precise data pretests and by not imposing a priori restrictions upon the cointegrating vector of the nine combinations of swiss exchange rates and price indices examined cointegration is detected in seven cases thus supporting ppp as a long run equilibrium jel f31 c32

official exchange rate arrangements and real exchange rate behavior we study the behavior of real exchange rates under various official designations of exchange rate arrangements examining many currencies we find important differences across the designations most notably real exchange rate mean reversion is fastest when nominal exchange rates are officially pegged we also find a large nonlinear effect adjustment is fastest when the real exchange rate deviates greatly from its mean this nonlinear effect is also most striking among officially pegged currencies finally we find that nominal exchange rates rather than prices do most of the adjusting

threshold cointegration and purchasing power parity in the pacific nations the paper uses a threshold cointegration methodology to explore the properties of long run purchasing power parity ppp in the pacific nations using japan and the usa as base countries it is shown that long run ppp holds for most asian countries but that the adjustment mechanism is asymmetric in contrast to symmetric error correction models it is found that asymmetric adjustments of nominal exchange rates play an important role in eliminating deviations from long run ppp

higher and higher performance pay and wage inequality in germany performance pay is of growing importance to the wage structure as it applies to a rising share of employees at the same time wage dispersion is growing continuously this leads to the question of how is the growing use of performance pay schemes related to the increase in wage inequality german socio economic panel soep data for the years 1984 2009 confirm the large increase in the application of performance pay schemes this in turn led to an upward shift of the wage distribution by about one log point however it did not contribute to the growth in wage inequality even though wage inequality grew within the group of employees who receive performance pay it grew even more so within the group who do not still the wage difference between both wage schemes remained flat over the distribution the empirical analysis employs sequential decompositions in a quantile regression framework

searching for stationarity purchasing power parity under the current float abstract using panel data methods we investigate long run purchasing power parity by testing for unit roots in real exchange rates of industrial countries under the current float the evidence against the unit root hypothesis is stronger for larger than for smaller panels for monthly than for quarterly data and when the german mark rather than the united states dollar is used as the base currency while we find that accounting for serial correlation considerably weakens the evidence against the unit root null the results as a whole are consistent with long run purchasing power parity

testing long run ppp with infinite variance returns this paper investigates the long run purchasing power parity hypothesis when exchange rate returns and inflation rates are assumed to be heavy tailed stochastic processes more specifically residual based and likelihood ratio based cointegration tests of ppp that explicitly allow for infinite variance innovations are applied to monthly data 1973 1 1999 12 for belgium canada denmark france germany italy japan the netherlands norway spain sweden and the united kingdom our test results are marginally less supportive of ppp when the innovations are assumed to be infinite variance stable processes copyright 2003 john wiley sons ltd

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

turkish budget deficit sustainability and the revenue expenditure nexus the sustainability of the turkish budget deficits as well as the dynamics of government revenues and expenditures in controlling the size of the deficit is examined using annual data from 1968 to 2004 the findings support the existence of a long run relation between government revenues and expenditures once allowance is made for an unknown structural break however the size of the slope parameter is significantly less than one suggesting that the government might face difficulties in financing its future debt with respect to the revenue expenditure nexus the empirical evidence is favourable to the tax spend hypothesis through the error correction term in the expenditures equation finally there is no evidence of asymmetries in the adjustment process in either the threshhold autoregressive or momentum threshold autoregressive specifications of the budgetary adjustment process

maximum likelihood estimation of cointegration in exchange rate models for seven inflationary oecd countries abstract we apply the johansen technique to estimate cointegration in a monetary exchange rate model modified for real exchange rate fluctuations and applied to seven inflationary oecd countries we generally find one or more cointegrating vectors and the signs of their coefficients are broadly consistent with the modified monetary model the adjustment coefficients are also examined our statistical testing is based on bootstrapping and generates much more conservative rejection criteria than the use of asymptotic critical values even after a substantial degree of freedom correction power estimates are also presented finally we conclude that the monetary model unmodified for real exchange rate fluctuations would be inadequate

information and incentives the agency information problem this paper considers the use of imperfect information for risk sharing and incentive purposes when perfect observation of actions and outcomes is impossible making complete contracting infeasible the incentive insurance problem is defined to consist of two parts the choice of an information system and the design of a sharing rule based on the information system a generalized agency model is formulated to analyse this problem the agency models of ross 1973a b wilson 1968 stiglitz 1974 mirrlees 1976 harris and raviv 1979 holmstrom 1979 a o appear as special cases of the generalized model the analysis focuses on the value of information in the agency information problem the set of information systems which are valuable i e improve risk sharing and incentives in a pareto sense is characterized a problem independent ranking of information systems for the agency information problem is then characterized under the assumption that the agent s preferences are additive in money and actions the ranking may be viewed as a generalization of blackwell s ranking of information systems for decision problems to this particular game when the agent s risk preferences depend on his choice of action on the other hand it is shown that the blackwell ranking may be invalid randomized incentive schemes are shown to be efficient when the incentive effect of risk is positive and sufficiently large relative to the absolute risk aversion of the partners

structural break nonlinearity and asymmetry a re examination of ppp proposition in this study we examine the validity of the ppp proposition for 28 european countries for this purpose we propose a new unit root test procedure that allows for both gradual structural breaks a

long run relations and short run dynamics among coal natural gas and oil prices we examine the long run relations and short run dynamics among the three primary energy prices coal natural gas and crude oil using the annual and monthly us data for the post 1970 period the results are consistent with the view that oil prices are determined globally natural gas prices are determined regionally and coal prices are set by long term contracts

real exchange rate behavior abstract using random simulations with artificial data with identical sample characteristics to the long sample exchange rate data employed by lothian and taylor lothian j r and taylor m p 1996 the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries journal of political economy 104 488 509 we show that standard unit root tests have extremely low power over sample sizes corresponding to the recent float the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis when it is false is extremely low with 20 years or even 50 years of data and only reaches an acceptable level over much longer spans

long run purchasing power parity with asymmetric adjustment further evidence from african countries this study applies threshold cointegration test advanced by enders and siklos 2001 to investigate the properties of asymmetric adjustment in long run purchasing power parity ppp in 22 selected african countries during the period of january 1980 to december 2003 although there is evidence of long run ppp for most african countries the adjustment mechanism is asymmetric these results have particularly important policy implications for african countries

the determination of performance standards and participation the purpose of this paper is to study the usefulness of performance standards it is often recommended that subordinates should participate in determining their own standards of performance the main reason being of a behavioral nature i shall demonstrate that there is also an economic rationale for this participation when the participation is used to convey information from a better informed subordinate to a lessinformed manager given that this information will be used for the subordinate s performance evaluation the subordinate has an obvious incentive to cheat in this reporting i construct an agency model which includes these reporting incentive problems and use it to study the effects of participation on the agency and the value of information systems to the agency throughout the analysis the agent will be kept at a constant level of utility so that the principal s utility becomes a measure of the agency s preferences thus reflecting pareto optimality the methodology in this paper is closely related to that of demski and feltham 1978 magee 1980 and baiman and demski 1980 magee 1980 in particular studied issues related to participation but he did not confine his study to pareto optimal contracts as will be the case in this paper in order to maintain a tractable problem many behavioral factors will be left outside the formal analysis despite the fact these have played a major role in the behavioral literature on participation cf argyris 1952 becker and green 1962 stedry 1960 and swieringa and moncur 1975

contracts without memory in multiperiod agency models abstract settings are considered in which optimal multiperiod contracts can have no memory i e where second period payments do not need to depend on first period outcomes if contracts have no memory a repeated agency game can be played myopically there are no gains to long term relationships conditions on preferences for a no memory contract are presented in an agency game with moral hazard on the act selection preference separability and domain additivity imply the existence of a no memory contract in a setting without moral hazard but with asymmetric information on the outcome domain additivity implies no memory

exploring long run relationship and error correction of thai output and price as the thai economy has integrated into the world system it increasingly endures not only internal circumstances but also external turmoils stabilizing the country s growth and inflation from macroeconomic shocks has then become a challenge to policymakers this study thus concentrates on investigating the long run relationship and the adjustment process towards the equilibrium of output and price of thailand from 2001 to 2014 for this purpose the dynamic relationship cointegration property and error correction term are explored by dols various cointegration tests and ecm the cointegration test also remarks the possibility of monetary policymakers to surprise the market in order to expect the increase in output it also reconfirms that the interest rate tends to be a passive monetary instrument in curbing inflationary moreover the adjustment process to the long run of both output and price is found to have a symmetric cointegration property which implies the systematic ecm the symmetric error correction test presents the significantly negative elimination in the next quarter towards long term equilibrium the monetary policymakers thus seem to react to the rise in inflation uncertainty by keeping down inflation meanwhile the output level tends to have faster adjustment speed than that of the price level

real exchange rate behavior the recent float from the perspective of the past two centuries using annual data spanning two centuries for dollar sterling and franc sterling real exchange rates we find strong evidence of mean reverting real exchange rate behavior using simple stationary autoregressive models estimated on prefloat data we easily outperform nonstationary real exchange rate models in dynamic forecasting exercises over the recent float such stationary univariate equations explain 60 80 percent of the in sample variation in real exchange rates although the degree of short run persistence may be high the econometric estimates imply a half life of shocks to the real exchange rate of about 6 years for dollar sterling and a little under 3 years for franc sterling

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

policy convergence the exchange rate mechanism and the misalignment of exchange rates some tests of purchasing power parity and generalized purchasing power parity the paper focuses on the convergence issues and the long run credibility of the european monetary system ems and more specifically on the evaluation of the effectiveness of the exchange rate mechanism erm in generating a stabilizing effect on real exchange rates across member countries for this purpose we execute some tests of long run purchasing power parity ppp for an erm group and a non erm group of countries using both the engle and granger procedure and the more powerful johansen cointegration technique we also execute a test of generalized ppp exploiting an idea developed by enders and hurn testing for ppp in a multicountry setting may be a useful methodology to identify the optimal currency area suggested by the data generation process on the basis of the reported homogeneity of real exchange rate behaviour of the countries considered

salaries and piece rates compensation can take many forms remuneration can come as pecuniary payments as fringes such as health and pension benefits or as a nonpecuniary reward such as plush office furniture that costs the firm less than it benefits the worker a significant literature has examined the trade offs between pecuniary and nonpecuniary compensation the modern work having been pioneered by rosen 1974 more recently another body of literature has examined the selection of method of total compensation ignoring the distinction between pecuniary and nonpecuniary payment this work has focused on risk and incentive factors it has resulted in comparisons of compensation based on absolute output levels to that based on relative performance it has also led to explorations of the relation of compensation to experience over the work life 2 little attention has been paid to what may be among the most important and obvious distinction in methods of compensation namely the choice between a fixed salary for some period of time that is paying on the basis of input and some workers receive compensation that is specified in advance and not directly contingent on performance instead it depends on an input measure such as hours worked for others compensation is directly related to output this essay is an attempt to predict a firm s choice of compensation method piece rates are defined more rigorously among the more important factors discussed are worker heterogeneity incentives sorting considerations monitoring costs and asymmetric information one result is that salary workers tend to be of lower quality and more homogeneous than are their piece rate counterparts numerous additional results are provided helpful comments by victoria lazear and yoram weiss are gratefully acknowledged support was provided by the department of labor and the national science foundation 1 see lazear and rosen 1981 stiglitz 1981 holmstrom 1982 green and stokey 1983 2 see lazear 1979 1981 and harris and holmstrom in press

long run purchasing power parity is it for real in this paper we re examine the purchasing power parity concept using data from the recent experience with floating exchange rates in particular we utilise the recently developed multivariate cointegration methodology to test for a long run relationship between exchange rates and relative prices and also to test for the proportionality of the exchange rate with respect to relative prices in contrast to much other research we demonstrate that there is a long run relationship between a number of bilateral u s dollar exchange rates and their corresponding relative prices the proportionality of the exchange rate to relative prices does not however receive support from the data this finding may be attributable to the use of measured price series rather than the true series

unions and cooperative behavior the effect of discounting using union contract and industry wage survey data this article examines the effect of discounting on cooperative bargaining behavior by unions and firms game theory predicts that higher discount rates raise the temptation to defect from cooperation measures of cooperative behavior included the presence of merit pay incentive pay wage employment guarantees or labor management study committees discount rates were proxied by the relevant industry s failure rate failure rates generally had negative effects on cooperation industry wage survey results showed larger effects for union than non union establishments providing support for the union bargaining framework

the law of one price revisited new evidence on the behavior of international prices i introduction the law of one price asserts that prices of identical goods should be equalized internationally when expressed in a common currency and adjusted for any contract differences transportation costs and trade distortions the intuition is that international arbitrage should work to eliminate any persistent price discrepancies due solely to differences in the country of origin or sale of goods thus stated the law of one price is frequently assumed to hold in theoretical and empirical models of international trade yet based on evidence from the 1950s 1960s and early 1970s the proposition does not appear to characterize the actual price behavior of many traded goods the evidence further indicates that deviations from absolute price equalization are often both large and protracted even during periods of comparative exchange rate stability 1 the relative version of the law of one price posits that rates of change in prices will be equalized meaning that exchange rate adjusted inflation rates should be the same for similar traded goods empirical support for this alternative has also been lacking 2 as isard 1977b indicates this evidence calls into question any appeal to microfoundations as a basis for macroeconomic price convergence in the form of purchasing power parity ppp it also casts doubt on the role of price linkages in both international market integration and the transmission of economic disturbances across national borders the prevailing view on international price equalization derives from evidence and analyses which are dated and need not apply to current economic conditions most published studies involve data from fixed rate periods very early episodes of floating rates or the first years of the present flexible rate system an analysis based on more contemporary data is warranted in view of the substantial exchange rate movements and the perceived increase in international integration that have occurred since these earlier studies 3 in addition a fresh look at the evidence can make use of both the longer time series data and new time series techniques that are now available accordingly this study updates the microeconomic evidence on international price equalization while investigating the existence and nature of the long run relationship between traded goods prices it analyzes the behavior of u s export prices relative to japanese and german dollar export prices for carefully matched identically weighted categories of manufactured goods over the current floating rate period stationarity and cointegration tests are used to assess the time series properties of these relative export prices and to determine the extent to which the common currency prices of similar exports are related internationally in the long run while these methods have been used in analyses of purchasing power parity they have not been extended to studies of traded goods prices at the microeconomic level ii data description this study is based on a set of quarterly relative dollar export price indexes constructed by the bureau of labor statistics bls the data represent ratios of u s export prices to german or japanese export prices expressed in dollars for highly comparable product groups conceptually the series measure the average price of a particular set of u s exports to all foreign markets relative to a dollar price index for a similar set of exports from germany or japan the indexes are weighted averages of transactions contract prices of individual exports reported on an f o b free on board or f a s free along side ship basis for the final month of each quarter and adjusted for quality changes the categories are fairly disaggregated e g valves trucks over 2000cc so that the comparison is between relatively narrow product categories two additional features in the bls s design of the series ensure a high degree of comparability between the pairs of export categories

price behaviour in the us sweetener market a cointegration approach the sweetener market in the united states is complicated because of the substitution possibilities between high fructose corn syrup hfcs and sugar this study focuses on the relationship between raw sugar prices and the prices for high fructose corn syrup sugar and hfcs are imperfect substitutes for several industrial uses sugar can be used for all industrial uses but hfcs has limited uses this study uses cointegration analysis to examine the relationship between sugar and hfcs prices as well as the relationship between raw and refined sugar prices over time the results indicate that sugar and hfcs prices move together for the 1983 1996 period however after this time period hfcs prices no longer follow sugar prices

long run dynamics of black and official exchange rates abstract this paper examines the relationships among black and official foreign exchange rates its primary purpose is to investigate the way in which black and official markets process information application of cointegration tests to the turkish markets for us dollars and west german marks in the mid 1980s indicates that the two black markets are efficient information processors for the black and official markets of each currency evidence is found suggesting the possibility of overshooting by the black exchange rate this inefficiency may not be able to be arbitraged away because of restrictions on capital flows through official channels

electricity prices and fuel costs long run relations and short run dynamics the paper examines the long run relation and short run dynamics between electricity prices and three fossil fuel prices coal natural gas and crude oil using annual data for the u s for 1960 2007 the results suggest 1 a stable long run relation between real prices for electricity and coal 2 bi directional long run causality between coal and electricity prices 3 insignificant long run relations between electricity and crude oil and or natural gas prices and 4 no evidence of asymmetries in the adjustment of electricity prices to deviations from equilibrium a number of implications are addressed

transactions costs and nonlinear adjustment in real exchange rates an empirical investigation eolquilibrium models of real exchange rate determination in the presence of transactions costs imply a nonlinear adjustment process toward purchasing power parity ppp conventional cointegration tests which ignore the effect of transactions costs may be biased against the long run ppp hypothesis our results using both monthly data for the interwar period and annual data spanning two centuries clearly reject the linear framework in favor of an exponential smooth transition autoregressive process the systematic pattern in the estimates of the nonlinear models provides strong evidence of mean reverting behavior for ppp deviations and helps explain the mixed results of previous studies

optimal incentives and asymmetric distribution of information abstract the problem of designing optimal incentive schemes arises if information is asymmetrically distributed among individuals the existence and the welfare properties of optimal incentive schemes are discussed for cases where the information asymmetry refers either to the quality of a product or to the behaviour of an individual

interest rate pass through and asymmetric adjustment evidence from the federal funds rate operating target period this study examines the long run interest rate pass through of the federal funds rate to the prime rate and whether there is asymmetric adjustment in the prime rate using the enders siklos 2001 momentum threshold autoregressive model over the period february 1987 to october 2005 once allowance is made for the endogenously determined structural break in the cointegrating relationship in april 1996 the adjustment of the prime rate to changes in the federal funds rate appears asymmetric with upward rigidity a result contrary to previous studies which found that the prime rate exhibits downward rigidity the finding of upward rigidity in the prime rate lends support for the customer reaction and adverse selection hypotheses moreover the empirical evidence seems to support the observation of increased pass through as a result of heightened competition in the banking industry as well as the federal reserve s enhanced transparency in monetary policy during the 1990s

moral hazard and risk spreading in partnerships partnerships provide a classic example of the tradeoff between risk spreading and moral hazard the degree to which firms choose to spread risk and sacrifice efficiency incentives depends upon risk preferences for which data are typically unavailable we use a unique dataset on medical group practice to investigate this tradeoff risk aversion leads to compensation arrangements which spread risk through greater sharing of revenues we find that compensation arrangements with greater degrees of revenue sharing significantly reduce physician effort the results imply that changing the method of physician payment from fee for service to capitation will dramatically reduce physician effort

the overvaluation of purchasing power parity abstract recent panel studies of purchasing power parity have reported strong evidence of mean reversion in real exchange rates however these studies fail to control for cross sectional dependence in the data this failure has dramatic consequences raising the significance level of tests with a nominal size of 5 percent to as much as 50 percent it is shown in this paper that controlling for cross sectional dependence no evidence against the random walk null can be found in panels of up to 64 real exchange rates this finding cannot be attributed to low power as there is ample power in panels of this size to reject the unit root null