to float or to fix evidence on the impact of exchange rate regimes on growth we study the relationship between exchange rate regimes and economic growth for a sample of 183 countries over the post bretton woods period using a new de facto classification of regimes based on the actual behavior of the relevant macroeconomic variables in contrast with previous studies we find that for developing countries less flexible exchange rate regimes are associated with slower growth as well as with greater output volatility for industrial countries regimes do not appear to have any significant impact on growth the results are robust to endogeneity corrections and a number of alternative specifications borrowed from the growth literature

causes of the forward bias non rational expectations versus risk premia the sources of the systematic forward bias in the foreign exchange market are sought a theoretical framework based on some well known international parity conditions is developed in order to derive testable hypotheses these are a only risk premia account for the observed deviations between forward and future sport rate c anticipated real exchange rate changes explain part of the bias the provided evidence is not consistent with any of these hypotheses which in turn implies that part of the bias may be due to non rational expectations

exchange rate policy for developing countries according to the imf in the mid 1970 s approximately 85 percent of developing countries had pegged exchange rate arrangements since then the situation has changed drastically today most developing countries have either managed floats or flexible exchange rates argentina hong kong and a few others may persevere with their currency boards additional nations may well imitate them and movements toward common currencies a la the european union may gain strength here and there nonetheless it seems clear that the political and financial prerequisites to adopt such hard pegs are extremely stringent new attempts are the exception not the rule the question for most emerging market economies is no longer to float or not to float but how to float in this note we review some key issues in defining the right answer to this question

testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in the forward foreign exchange market a specification analysis abstract this paper evaluates two popular regression methods of testing the unbiasedness hypothesis in the forward foreign exchange market for the 30 day canada united states forward foreign exchange market the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that it is inappropriate to treat the structure of the systematic and stochastic components of the test relations as constant over time hence conclusions inferred from parameter significance testing based upon full sample estimation can be very misleading accordingly we argue for a specification analysis of the test relations and more explicit modelling of market fundamentals

the choice between market failures and corruption because government intervention transfers resources from one party to another it creates room for corruption as corruption often undermines the purpose of the intervention governments will try to prevent it they may create rents for bureaucrats induce a misallocation of resources and increase the size of the bureaucracy since preventing all corruption is excessively costly second best intervention may involve a certain fraction of bureaucrats accepting bribes when corruption is harder to prevent there may be both more bureaucrats and higher public sector wages also the optimal degree of government intervention may be nonmonotonic in the level of income

u s bilateral trade flows and exchange risk during the floating period abstract this paper tests for real exchange rate risk effects on u s bilateral trade flows during the floating period using several new as well as previously used risk measures significant negative effects occur in five of six u s import flows and in two of six u s export flows with one export flow showing a significant positive effect these results are consistent with several previous findings for aggregate u s trade two risk measures using the forward exchange rate and assuming a time varying risk premium provide marginally more significant results than the others

dynamic reform of public institutions a model of motivated agents and collective reputation abstract state capacity is optimized when public institutions are staffed by individuals with public service motivation however when motivated agents value the collective reputation of their place of employment steady state equilibria with both high and low aggregate motivation reputation in the mission oriented sector exist reforming a low motivation institution requires a non monotonic wage path since the effect of higher wages on motivation is negative for a high reputation institution but positive for a low reputation institution a transition to a high reputation steady state requires an initial wage increase to crowd motivated workers in followed by a wage decrease to crowd non motivated workers out

optimal monetary policy in a small open economy with home bias we analyze optimal monetary policy in a small open economy characterized by home bias in consumption peculiar to our framework is the application of a ramseytype analysis to a model of the recent open economy new keynesian literature we show that home bias in consumption is a su cient condition for inducing the monetary policy maker of an open economy to deviate from a strategy of strict markup stabilization and contemplate some optimal degree of exchange rate stabilization we focus on the optimal setting of policy both in the case of rms setting prices one period in advance and in a gradual fashion subject to adjustment costs while the rst setup allows us to analytically highlight home bias as an independent source of equilibrium

social norms and the law an economic approach by social norm norm for short i shall mean a rule that is neither promulgated by an official source such as a court or a legislature nor enforced by the threat of legal sanctions yet is regularly complied with otherwise it wouldn t be a rule the rules of etiquette including norms of proper dress and table manners the rules of grammar and customary law in prepolitical societies and private associations are all examples of norms in my sense a full understanding of law requires consideration of norms law is older than political society which means that it originates as a set of norms as it remains in the case of public international law because there is no world government even in societies that have strong governments norms are both a source of law and often a cheap and effective substitute for law and sometimes they are an antagonist to law the incentives for obeying law are clear enough but what about the incentives for obeying norms the answer to this question will help toward an understanding of the relation between law and norms there are four incentives for obeying norms i some norms are self enforcing the incentive to obey comes from the fact that obedience confers private benefits because they are constitutive of advantageous transactions if you don t speak the language you can t make yourself understood if you don t play chess by the rules you re not playing it at all so if you enjoy playing chess you will not cheat unless the net expected gain is great 2 this point bears on the norms governing judicial behavior of judges not those norms backed by law such as the rule against taking bribes but those subtler norms that adjure the judge to lay aside personal or partisan sympathies disregard public blame or praise follow precedent rather than his own values in short adhere to the traditional rule of law virtues compliance with these norms is far from uniform because there are incentives to deviate and the costs of deviation are small but why is there any compliance the answer is that the private costs of compliance are low because the law backed rules of judicial behavior make it difficult for the judge to profit from partiality while the private benefits are substantial because the rule of law norms are the constitutive rules of the practice of judging if you don t obey them you re not playing the judicial game law school and the judiciary teach the game to new lawyers while judicial selection procedures select for persons who want to play the judicial game rather than some other game such as partisan politics even when judicial appointments are elective rather than appointive or when appointments are based on patronage or ideology rather than merit self selection is present in the decision to seek or accept appointment ii some norms are enforced by the emotions a point vital to understanding the emergence of law the honor code of the old south see jack k williams 1980 will illustrate the code which required a man to challenge to a duel any man who infringed his dignity was a survival of a revenge based system of law more precisely pre law before there were governments what is now called law was u s court of appeals for the seventh circuit and university of chicago law school 1111 e 60th st chicago il 60637 i thank gary becker dan kahan lawrence lessig martha nussbaum eric posner eric rasmusen cass sunstein and yuval tal for many helpful comments on a previous draft i do not require however that it be internalized as a preference as in the definition of norm in gary becker 1996 p 225 2 these are examples of compensated norm imposed constraints becker 1996 p 228 not only must the judge not take bribes but he must not sit in cases in which he or his relatives might derive a pecuniary benefit from his decision

interest rates and currency prices in a two country world abstract this paper is a theoretical study of the determination of prices interest rates and currency exchange rates set in an infinitely lived two country world which is subject both to stochastic endowment shocks and to monetary instability formulas are obtained for pricing all equity claims nominally denominated bonds and currencies and these formulas are related to earlier closely related results in the theories of money finance international trade

do central banks respond to exchange rate movements a structural investigation abstract we estimate a small scale structural general equilibrium model of a small open economy using bayesian methods our main focus is the conduct of monetary policy in australia canada new zealand and the uk we consider generic taylor type rules where the monetary authority reacts in response to output inflation and exchange rate movements we perform posterior odds tests to investigate the hypothesis whether central banks do target exchange rates the main result of this paper is that the central banks of australia and new zealand do not whereas the bank of canada and the bank of england do include the nominal exchange rate in its policy rule this result is robust for various specification of the policy rule we also find that terms of trade movements do not contribute significantly to domestic business cycles

monetary policy and exchange rate volatility in a small open economy we lay out a small open economy version of the calvo sticky price model and show how the equilibrium dynamics can be reduced to a simple representation in domestic inflation and the output gap we use the resulting framework to analyse the macroeconomic implications of three alternative rulebased policy regimes for the small open economy domestic inflation and cpi based taylor rules and an exchange rate peg we show that a key difference among these regimes lies in the relative amount of exchange rate volatility that they entail we also discuss a special case for which domestic inflation targeting constitutes the optimal policy and where a simple second order approximation to the utility of the representative consumer can be derived and used to evaluate the welfare losses associated with the suboptimal rules

reward structures and the allocation of talent as relative rewards that different professions receive are a key factor in the allocation of talent what determines the reward structure of a society is an important question this paper develops an equilibrium model of the allocation of talent between productive and unproductive activities such as rent seeking the existence of rent seeking creates a negative externality on productive agents and implies that relative rewards are endogenously determined the same externality can also lead to the existence of multiple equilibria each with different reward structures in a dynamic setting allocations of past generations as well as expectations of future allocations influence current rewards and the society may get trapped in a rent seeking steady state equilibrium the paper also discusses how the non pecuniary reward structure can be influenced by equilibrium selection and a historical example that suggests the presence of a causal link from the allocation of talent to non pecuniary rewards

in search of the exchange risk premium a six currency test assuming mean variance optimization abstract a number of authors examining deviations of actual rates of currency depreciation from forward discounts have claimed to find evidence of risk premiums if these deviations are indeed partly due to risk premiums rather than being entirely due to expectational errors then they should be systematically related to those variables on which risk premiums are thought to depend finance theory tells us that if investors optimize with respect to mean and variance the risk premium depends in a specific way on 1 the supplies of assets denominated in the various currencies 2 the variance covariance matrix of the rates of return and 3 the coefficient of risk aversion the null hypothesis of this paper is that the coefficient of risk aversion is zero countries assets are perfect substitutes and risk premiums are nonexistent the alternative hypothesis is that rates of return are systematically related to asset supplies by a macroeconomic portfolio balance function the maximum likelihood technique used dominates previous attempts to find such a relationship in that the parameters of the portfolio balance function are constrained to depend on the variance covariance matrix as the finance theory says they should on the other hand the technique also dominates previous applications of the finance theory in that the expected returns are allowed to vary over time as the macroeconomic portfolio balance theory says they should the paper s finding is a statistical inability to reject the null hypothesis for a portfolio of six currencies although this could be due to low power in the test

misperceived social norms women working outside the home in saudi arabia we show that the vast majority of young married men in saudi arabia privately support women working outside the home wwoh and substantially underestimate support by other similar men correcting these beliefs increases men s costly willingness to help their wives search for jobs months later wives of men whose beliefs were corrected are more likely to have applied and interviewed for a job outside the home in a recruitment experiment with a local company randomly informing women about actual support for wwoh leads them to switch from an at home temporary enumerator job to a higher paying outside the home version of the job

endogenous risk in a portfolio balance rational expectations model of the deutschemark dollar rate abstract a portfolio balance model of the dm s rate under rational expectations is specified in which systematic risk induced deviations from uncovered interest parity are allowed this leads to a reduced from containing a potentially time varying risk premium which we approximate and estimate using an arch in mean approach the maximum likelihood estimator and a lagrande multiplier test for arch in mean are developed the estimation results indicate a small but non negligible time varying risk premium

central bank interventions and exchange rate band regimes abstract this paper presents an endogenous switching regression model for the exchange rate process where the switch is defined by the central bank criteria functions for intervening we study the signal effect of interventions on the exchange rate using norwegian daily data on official interventions we first find that interventions seemed to have been more effective in moving the exchange rate in the expected desired direction in the regime when the exchange rate was kept away from the edges of the band this type of intervention regime also reduces significantly the conditional volatility of the exchange rate thus when the exchange rate was near the weakest edge of the currency band its conditional variance was significantly larger than when it was moving around its central parity finally we show that in order to obtain consistent estimates intervention variables cannot enter as exogenous variables in the conditional mean or conditional variance of the exchange rate

uncertainty in sales and inventory behaviour in the u s trade sectors this paper investigates uncertainty in sales and inventory behavior for the u s wholesale and retail trade sectors first using a vector error correction model with garch m the authors find that the uncertainty measured by forecast error variance in sales does not affect inventory behavior in both trade sectors second using forecast error variance decomposition and estimated permanent components they observe that the uncertainty may be attributed more to demand shocks than to cost shocks

a class of nonlinear arch models a class of nonlinear arch models is suggested the proposed class encompasses several functional forms for arch which have been put forth in the literature a lagrange multiplier test is developed to test engle s arch specification against the wider class of models this test provides an easily computed diagnostic check of the adequacy of an arch model after it has been estimated the theory is applied to a number of weekly exchange rate series and we find strong evidence of nonlinear arch

theoretical relations between risk premiums and conditional variances many statistical models of time varying risk premiums including the autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity arch in mean attempt to exploit a relation between risk premiums and conditional variances or covariances of asset returns we examine this relation in numerical versions of a dynamic asset pricing theory and show that it can be increasing decreasing flat or nonmonotonic its shape depends on both the preferences of the representative agent and the stochastic structure of the economy without additional structure the theory does not provide either a general foundation for arch in mean specifications or a simple interpretation of their parameters

corporate culture societal culture and institutions according to north 1991 institutions foster cooperation in settings without full information and repeated interaction north classifies institutions as informal sanctions taboos customs traditions and codes of conduct and formal constitutions laws property rights informal institutions which we will refer to as culture comprise societal values which affects intrinsic motivations and social norms in primitive and simple societies where personal ties and ostracism are enough to enforce cooperation culture is the only mechanism intrinsic motivation and social norms work well when the rules they prescribe are simple to apply when they are widely shared and when social sanction ostracism or exclusion is a powerful threat while these conditions hold in small primitive societies in most modern societies they do not to function modern economies need rules that take into account many contingencies these complex rules make the verification process difficult requiring specialized and dedicated agents also the development of long distance trade requires more impersonal contract enforcement mechanisms that are formalized through political and legal institutions when economies evolve formal institutions replace many informal mechanisms of enforcement indeed a dominant thesis argues that the economic success of nations is not driven by culture or value systems but rather by inclusive political institutions acemoglu et al 2001 or by effective legal institutions la porta et al 1998 i culture matters

fundamentals and exchange rate prediction revisited this paper measures latent fundamental exchange rates with independent component based rates constructed from a cross section of exchange rates and then uses their deviations from exchange rates to forecast empirical results indicate that the independent component based model and its taylor rule and purchasing power parity augmented models are superior to the random walk in predicting exchange rates these results are robust to several scenarios and are likely to be observed if the us sources and the recursive scheme are applied our results reveal that information regarding the third moment of exchange rate changes is helpful to explain exchange rate movements

learning under fear of floating in recent years a large fraction of economies overcame the fear of floating we study a model that describes the policy of a central bank uncertain about whether currency depreciations cause output to expand textbook model or contract balance sheet model we conclude that the movement away from fear of floating may not be explained by bayesian or robust policies when the private sector anticipates the central bank s policy and endogenously determines the model central banks may fall in a learning trap an increase in financial volatility provides an escape to such trap that replicates patterns in the data

optimal monetary policy in open versus closed economies an integrated approach in clarida et al 1999 hereafter cgg we presented a normative analysis of monetary policy within a simple optimization based closedeconomy framework we derived the optimal policy rule and among other things characterized the gains from commitment also we made precise the implications for the kind of instrument feedback rule that a central bank should follow in practice in this paper we show how our analysis extends to the case of a small open economy openness complicates the problem of monetary management to the extent the central bank must take into account the impact of the exchange rate on real activity and inflation how to factor the exchange rate into the overall design of monetary policy accordingly becomes a central consideration here we show that under certain conditions the monetary policy design problem for the small open economy is isomorphic to the problem of the closed economy that we considered earlier hence all our qualitative results for the closed economy carry over to this case openness does affect the parameters of the model suggesting quantitative implications though the general form of the optimal interest rate feedback rule remains the same as in the closedeconomy case for example how aggressively a central bank should adjust the interest rate in response to inflationary pressures depends on the degree of openness in addition openness gives rise to an important distinction between domestic inflation and consumer price inflation as defined by the cpi to the extent that there is perfect exchange rate pass through we find that the central bank should target domestic inflation and allow the exchange rate to float despite the impact of the resulting exchangerate variability on the cpi kosuki aoki 1999 gali and tommaso monacelli 2000

rational expectations risk and efficiency in the london metal exchange an empirical analysis there now exists a number of studies which reject efficiency of the london metal exchange as a joint null hypothesis of rational expectations and risk neutrality in this paper we investigate the presence of time varying risk premia in a number of metal price series conditional on the assumption of rationality our findings include evidence to suggest that forward prices contain information on future spot prices over and above the information contained in current spot prices that there is some evidence of time varying premia in the forward prices for tin and zinc and that the behaviour of these premia are intuitively plausible in particular there appears to be significant covariation between risk premia and the expected spot price change

breaking the law when others do a model of law enforcement with neighborhood externalities abstract a standard assumption in the economics of law enforcement is that the probability of a violator being punished depends only on the resources devoted to enforcement however it is often true that the productivity of enforcement resources decreases with the number of violators in this paper an individual who violates the law provides a positive externality for other offenders because the probability of being punished decreases with the number of individuals violating the law this externality explains the existence of correlation between individuals decisions to break a law the model evaluates the implications when determining the socially optimal enforcement expenditure focusing specifically on the case of neighborhood crime in particular using a parametrized functional form i show that neighborhood externalities will enhance or impede enforcement depending on the crime rate

occupational choice and the spirit of capitalism the british industrial revolution triggered a socioeconomic transformation whereby the landowning aristocracy was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group we propose a theory of preference formation under financial market imperfections that can account for this pattern parents shape their children s preferences in response to economic incentives middle class families in occupations requiring effort skill and experience develop patience and a work ethic whereas upper class families relying on rental income cultivate a refined taste for leisure these class specific attitudes which are rooted in the nature of preindustrial professions become key determinants of success once industrialization transforms the economic landscape i introduction the industrial revolution was more than capital accumulation and growth it also set off a social and political transformation that redefined hierarchies in society and reshaped the distribution of income and wealth before the onset of industrialization in eighteenth century britain wealth and political power were associated with the possession of land over the course of the nineteenth century a new class of entrepreneurs and businessmen emerged as the economic elite for the most part the members of this class rose from humble beginnings and had their social origins in the urban middle classes the landed elite was left behind and eventually lost its political and economic predominance many observers of the time linked this reversal in economic fortunes to differences in values attitudes and ultimately preferences across social classes there are countless examples both in scholarly and in fictional writing of portrayals of members of the landowning class as averse to work unwilling to save ill disposed tocommercialactivity andunabletoconsidermoneyassomething

classifying exchange rate regimes deeds vs words abstract most of the empirical literature on exchange rate regimes uses the imf de jure classification based on the regime announced by the governments despite the recognized inconsistencies between reported and actual policies in many cases to address this problem we construct a de facto classification based on data on exchange rates and international reserves from all imf reporting countries over the period 1974 2000 which we believe provides a meaningful alternative for future empirical work on the topic the classification sheds new light on several stylized facts previously reported in the literature in particular we find that the de facto pegs have remained stable throughout the last decade although an increasing number of them shy away from an explicit commitment to a fixed regime hidden pegs we confirm the hollowing out hypothesis but show that it does not apply to countries with limited access to capital markets we also find that pure floats are associated with only relatively minor nominal exchange rate volatility and that the recent increase in the number of de jure floats goes hand in hand with an increase in the number of de facto dirty floats fear of floating

asset pricing and foreign exchange risk econometric evidence for the g 7 abstract this paper uses an error correction model ecm to examine the dynamic behavioural relationship between the excess returns of foreign exchange and the variables that measure the stock market risk factor the test results for the major currencies of the g 7 over the period january 1982 to january 1994 support the hypothesis that the excess foreign exchange returns are related to relative risks of the two national equity markets and hence supports the notion of a risk premium in foreign exchange markets in addition we find evidence of non monotonic adjustment in some of the equations with respect to the us dollar which suggests some short run exchange rate overshooting

central bank misperceptions and the role of money in interest rate rules research with keynesian style models has emphasized the importance of the output gap for policies aimed at controlling inflation while declaring monetary aggregates largely irrelevant critics however have argued that these models need to be modified to account for observed money growth and inflation trends and that monetary trends may serve as a useful cross check for monetary policy we identify an important source of monetary trends in form of persistent central bank misperceptions regarding potential output simulations with historical output gap estimates indicate that such misperceptions may induce persistent errors in monetary policy and sustained trends in money growth and inflation if interest rate prescriptions derived from keynesian style models are augmented with a cross check against money based estimates of trend inflation inflation control is improved substantially

testing the martingale hypothesis in deutsche mark futures with models specifying the form of heteroscedasticity summary we examine the form of heteroscedasticity in deutsche mark futures price data and compare different specifications of the particular way that the variance is changing over time the martingale hypothesis is tested with daily and weekly rates of change of futures prices for the deutsche mark and some evidence is found against this hypothesis in analyses of daily data from 1981 to 1985 this rejection of the martingale hypothesis may be attributed to trading day effects in foreign currency prices and the resulting day of the week patterns in futures prices when the martingale hypothesis is tested with weekly data the null hypothesis is retained

crime and social interactions the high variance of crime rates across time and space is one of the oldest puzzles in the social sciences this variance appears too high to be explained by changes in the exogenous costs and benefits of crime we present a model where social interactions create enough covariance across individuals to explain the high cross city variance of crime rates this model provides an index of social interactions which suggests that the amount of social interactions is highest in petty crimes moderate in more serious crimes and almost negligible in murder and rape

gender gaps in the labor market and economic growth this paper studies the effects of policies aimed at mitigating discrimination against women in the marketplace on the gender wage gap decisions to invest in skills the composition of employment and unemployment and long run growth the analysis uses a gender based overlapping generations model with labor market rigidities gender bias in the workplace varies inversely with the presence of skilled women as agents of change in the labor market and has a direct impact on their bargaining power in the family the model is calibrated for morocco experiments show that although the benefits of policies aimed at mitigating gender bias in the workplace can promote growth and be significantly magnified through a stronger presence of skilled women in the labor market a trade off may emerge with respect to female unemployment when anti discrimination policies are combined with policies aimed at subsidizing women s training to internalize this trade off anti discrimination policies in the marketplace may need to be complemented by measures aimed at reducing labor costs and raising productivity

multivariate nearest neighbour forecasts of ems exchange rates exchange rate modelling has been a persistent puzzle for international economists forecasts from popular models for the exchange rate generally fail to improve upon the random walk out of sample while a multivariate nonparametric approach provides useful information about exchange rates the model produces forecasts superior to the random walk for only one of the three ems currencies examined using a statistic developed in mizrach 1991 i find that the forecast improvement a 4 5 percent reduction in mean squared error for the lira in daily returns is not statistically significant a cross validation exercise suggests that the improvement is also not robust

the origins of violence in rwanda this paper shows that the intensity of violence in rwanda s recent past can be traced back to the initial establishment of its precolonial state villages that were brought under centralized rule one century earlier experience a doubling of violence during the state organized 1994 genocide instrumental variable estimates exploiting differences in proximity to nyanza an early capital suggest these effects are causal in other periods when the state faced rebel attacks with longer state presence violence is lower using data from several sources including a lab in the field experiment across an abandoned historical boundary i show that the effect of the historical state is primarily sustained by culturally transmitted norms of obedience the persistent effect of the precolonial state interacts with government policy where the state developed earlier there is more violence when the rwandan government mobilized for mass killing and less violence when the government pursued peace

currency crises and monetary policy in an economy with credit constraints this paper presents a simple model of currency crises which is driven by the interplay between the credit constraints of private domestic firms and the existence of nominal price rigidities the possibility of multiple equilibria including a currency crisis equilibrium with low output and a depreciated domestic currency results from the following mechanism if nominal prices are sticky a currency depreciation leads to an increase in the foreign currency debt repayment obligations of firms and thus to a fall in their profits this reduces firms borrowing capacity and therefore investment and output in a credit constrained economy which in turn reduces the demand for the domestic currency and leads to a depreciation we examine the impact of various shocks including productivity fiscal or expectational shocks we then analyze the optimal monetary policy to prevent or solve currency crises we also argue that currency crises can occur both under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes as the primary source of crises is the deteriorating balance sheet of private firms

monetary policy and welfare in a small open economy this paper analyzes optimal monetary policy in a small open economy featuring monopolistic competition and nominal rigidities it shows that the utility based loss function for this economy can be written as a quadratic expression of domestic inflation output gap and real exchange rate the presence of an internal monopolistic distortion and a terms of trade externality drives optimal policy away from domestic inflation targeting and affects the optimal level of exchange rate volatility when domestic and foreign goods are close substitutes for each other the optimal policy rule implies lower real exchange rate volatility than a domestic inflation targeting regime the reverse is true when the elasticity of substitution between goods is low

escaping nash inflation an ordinary differential equation ode gives the mean dynamics that govern the convergence to self confirming equilibria of self referential systems under discounted least squares learning another ode governs escape dynamics that recurrently propel away from a self confirming equilibrium in a model with a unique self confirming equilibrium the escape dynamics make the government discover too strong a version of the natural rate hypothesis the escape route dynamics cause recurrent outcomes close to the ramsey commitment inflation rate in a model with an adaptive government

choosing how to choose self stable majority rules and constitutions constitutional arrangements affect the decisions made by a society we study how this effect leads to preferences of citizens over constitutions and ultimately how this has a feedback that determines which constitutions can survive in a given society constitutions are stylized here to consist of a voting rule for ordinary business and possibly a different voting rule for making changes to the constitution we define an equilibrium notion for constitutions called self stability whereby under the rules of a self stable constitution the society would not vote to change the constitution we argue that only self stable constitutions will endure we prove that self stable constitutions always exist but that most constitutions even very prominent ones may not be self stable for some societies we show that constitutions where the voting rule used to amend the constitution is the same as the voting rule used for ordinary business are dangerously simplistic and there are many societies for which no such constitution is self stable we conclude with a characterization of the set of self stable constitutions that use majority rule for ordinary business

the learning cost of interest rate reversals abstract many central banks in many time periods have sought to avoid interest rate reversals but at present there is no good explanation of this phenomenon our analysis identifies a new learning cost associated with reversing the interest rate in a standard monetary model with forward looking expectations data uncertainty and parameter uncertainty a policy that frequently reverses the interest rate makes learning the key parameters of the model more difficult optimal monetary policy internalises this learning cost and therefore has a lower number of interest rate reversals

using non linear methods to search for risk premia in currency futures abstract this paper uses currency futures prices to test the joint null hypotheses of rational expectations and absence of a time varying risk premium in the foreign exchange market we find no linear predictability in the logarithm of futures price changes either using its own past or past interest differentials also we establish that there is no non linear predictability in log price changes conditioning on its own past or past interest rate differentials thus if a time varying risk premium exists in currency futures market it is not related to its own past or past interest rate differentials

anarchy self governance and legal titling scholars and policymakers prescribe legal titling to improve prospects for economic development and political order however a public choice literature exists that has long recognized that self governance often works well and that the state may not be able to improve upon local economic institutions at reasonable cost although the implication that legal titling should proceed with caution is seemingly straightforward the literature on legal titling does not take anarchy seriously as a policy option in addition there is a public choice literature that presumes the state is the most important source of property rights this essay fills this gap in the property rights literature by applying the concept of efficient anarchy to legal titling in afghanistan original fieldwork evidence from rural afghanistan suggests that anarchy of land governance is a better option than legal titling the essay concludes by opening up the black box of state building by explaining why it often makes sense to sequence improvements in political capacity and political constraints prior to investing in legal titling

economic development legality and the transplant effect abstract we analyze the determinants of effective legal institutions legality using data from 49 countries we show that the way the law was initially transplanted and received is a more important determinant than the supply of law from a particular legal family countries that have developed legal orders internally adapted the transplanted law and or had a population that was already familiar with basic principles of the transplanted law have more effective legality than countries that received foreign law without any similar predispositions the transplanting process has a strong indirect effect on economic development via its impact on legality while the impact of particular legal families is weaker and not robust to alternative legality measures

when does coordination require centralization this paper compares centralized and decentralized coordination when manag ers are privately informed and communicate strategically we consider a multi divisional organization in which decisions must be adapted to local conditions but also coordinated with each other information about local conditions is dispersed and held by self interested division managers who communicate via cheap talk the only available formal mechanism is the allocation of decision rights we show that a higher need for coordination improves horizontal com

monetary policy as a process of search monetary policymakers are uncertain about the state of the economy and learn from the economy s reaction to policy private agents however anticipate any systematic attempt to incorporate this information into future policy the authors analyze this feedback in the context of a monetary authority s attempt to stimulate an economy in recession they show that modest stimuli may prove ineffectual if small reductions in interest rates are unlikely to promote a response then they may be followed by further cuts a vicious circle develops in which the expectation that the policy could fail leads investors to delay investment thereby promoting failure copyright 1996 by american economic association

history expectations and leadership in the evolution of social norms we study the evolution of a social norm of cooperation in a dynamic environment each agent lives for two periods and interacts with agents from the previous and next generations via a coordination game social norms emerge as patterns of behaviour that are stable in part due to agents interpretations of private information about the past influenced by occasional commonly observed past behaviours for sufficiently backward looking societies history completely drives equilibrium play leading to a social norm of high or low cooperation in more forward looking societies there is a pattern of reversion whereby play starting with high low cooperation reverts towards lower higher cooperation the impact of history can be countered by occasional prominent agents whose actions are visible by all future agents and who can leverage their greater visibility to influence expectations of future agents and overturn social norms of low cooperation

arch models properties estimation and testing abstract the aim of this survey paper is to provide an account of some of the important developments in the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity arch model since its inception in a seminal paper by engle 1982 this model takes account of many observed properties of asset prices and therefore various interpretations can be attributed to it we start with the basic arch models and discuss their different interpretations arch models have been generalized in different directions to accommodate more and more features of the real world we provide a comprehensive treatment of many of the extensions of the original arch model next we discuss estimation and testing for arch models and note that these models lead to some interesting and unique problems there have been numerous applications and we mention some of these as we present different models the paper includes a glossary of the acronyms for the models we describe

on jump processes in the foreign exchange and stock markets exchange rates exhibit systematic discontinuities even after allowingfor conditional heteroskedasticity in the diffusion process the results are much more significant in theforeign exchange market than in the stock market which suggests differences in the structure of these markets finally this jump component is shown to explain some of the empirically observed mispricings in the currency options market the objective of this article is to analyze and compare the empirical distribution of returns in the stock market and in the foreign exchange market there are a number of reasons why a better understanding of the stochastic processes driving prices in these markets would be useful many financial models rely heavily on the assumption of a particular stochastic process while relatively little attention is paid to the empirical fit of the postulated distribution as a result models like option pricing models are applied indiscriminately to various markets such as the stock market and the foreign exchange market when the underlying processes may be fundamentally different the foreign exchange market for instance is characterized by active exchange rate man

social capital and social quilts network patterns of favor exchange we examine the informal exchange of favors in societies such that any two individuals interact too infrequently to sustain exchange but such that the social pressure of the possible loss of multiple relationships can sustain exchange patterns of exchange that are locally enforceable and renegotiation proof necessitate that all links are supported any two individuals exchanging favors have a common friend in symmetric settings such robust networks are social quilts tree like unions of completely connected subnetworks examining favor exchange networks in 75 villages in rural india we find high levels of support and identify characteristics that correlate with support

cheat or perish a theory of scientific customs abstract performance incentives have become increasingly important in academia evidence suggest that they increase not only researchers effort but also their cheating we develop a principal agent framework in which a research institution principal aims to reward scientific productivity considering the social benefit of research and the remuneration costs researchers agents take into account what others are doing as a consequence the introduction of performance incentives not only leads to fraudulent behavior in the short run but may also deteriorate the scientific norm in the long run in the face of these dynamics the principal pursues two goals to increase productivity effort incentive policy and to deal with fraud anti fraud policy several factors determine the optimal mix of policies economic factors researchers cost of providing high or low effort the societal value of scientific knowledge and the societal costs of scientific misbehavior and psychological factors the evolution of norms over time an important insight of our theory is that when research institutions seek to encourage the production of high quality research they should also raise the salary for normal research to avoid misconduct

on biases in the measurement of foreign exchange risk premiums abstract the hypothesis that the forward rate is an unbiased predictor of the future spot rate has been consistently rejected in recent empirical studies this paper examines several sources of measurement error and misspecification that might induce biases in such studies although previous inferences are shown to be robust to a failure to construct true returns and to omitted variable bias arising from conditional heteroskedasticity in spot rates we show that the parameters were not stable over the 1975 89 sample period estimation that allows for endogenous regime shifts in the parameters demonstrates that deviations from unbiasedness were more severe in the 1980s jel f31

forward foreign exchange rates expected spot rates and premia a signal extraction approach in this paper we implement a methodology to identify and measure premia in the pricing of forward foreign exchange that involves application of signal extraction techniques from the engineering literature diagnostic tests indicate that these methods are quite successful in capturing the essence of the time series properties of premium terms the estimated premium models indicate that premia show a certain degree of persistence over time and that more than half the variance in the forecast error that results from the use of current forward rates as predictors of future spot rates is accounted for by variation in premium terms the methodology can be applied straightforwardly to the measurement of unobservables in other financial markets there exists a growing body of empirical research on premia in the pricing of forward foreign exchange conditional on the hypothesis that the foreign exchange market is efficient or rational the existence of time varying premia has been documented in the literature by fama 6 hansen and hodrick 10 11 hodrick and srivastava 15 16 hsieh 171 and korajczyk 20 frankel 9 fails to identify such premia and domowitz and hakkio 51 obtain different results for different currencies

short run fluctuations in foreign exchange rates evidence from the data 1973 1979 abstract the paper examines the statistical properties of daily changes in foreign exchange fx rates for nine currencies it finds that these changes are leptokurtotic i e have long tailed and sharp peaked histograms the evidence suggests that this leptokurtosis does not arise from an underlying paretian stable distribution nor from a stationary mixture of normal distributions but rather from normal processes with time varying parameters this finding casts doubt on the validity of many standard techniques t stats arima methods some moving statistics for estimating the time varying parameters are also presented

robustness and u s monetary policy experimentation we study how a concern for robustness modifies a policy maker s incentive to experiment a policy maker has a prior over two submodels of inflationunemployment dynamics one submodel implies an exploitable trade off the other does not bayes law gives the policy maker an incentive to experiment the policy maker fears that both submodels and his prior probability distribution over them are misspecified we compute decision rules that are robust to misspecifications of each submodel and of the prior distribution over submodels we compare robust rules to ones that cogley colacito and sargent 2007 computed assuming that the models and the prior distribution are correctly specified we explain how the policy maker s desires to protect against misspecifications of the submodels on the one hand and misspecifications of the prior over them on the other have different effects on the decision rule

the efficiency of the forward exchange market in this note we test the efficiency of the forward market for foreign exchange for the uk pound us dollar exchange rate using residuals from the lus class we show that previous rejections of efficiency in the forward market have not been due to the use of residuals from the ols class

on the relation between robust and bayesian decision making abstract this paper compares bayesian decision theory with robust decision theory where the decision maker optimizes with respect to the worst state realization for a class of robust decision problems there exists a sequence of bayesian decision problems whose solution converges towards the robust solution it is shown that the limiting bayesian problem displays infinite risk aversion and that decisions are insensitive robust to the precise assignment of prior probabilities this holds independently of whether the preference for robustness is global or restricted to local perturbations around some reference model

international and domestic collateral constraints in a model of emerging market crises abstract we build a model of emerging markets crises which features two types of collateral constraints firms in a domestic economy have limited borrowing capacity from international investors they also have limited borrowing capacity with respect to each other we study how the presence and changes in these collateral constraints affect financial and real variables a binding international constraint in the aggregate leads to a sharp rise in interest rates and fire sales of domestic assets while limited domestic collateral can lead to wasted international collateral these two collateral constraints can interact in important ways the first is disintermediation a fire sale of domestic assets causes banks to fail in their function of reallocating resources across the economy leading to wasted international collateral the second is a dynamic effect we show that firms in an economy with limited domestic collateral and a binding international collateral constraint will not adequately precaution against adverse shocks increasing the severity of these shocks

currency mismatches and monetary policy a tale of two equilibria we develop a model of a small economy whose residents choose whether to borrow in domestic or foreign currency the central bank in turn chooses fixed or flexible exchange rates taking the currency denomination of debts as given we characterize the simultaneous determination of portfolios and exchange rate regime both floating and fixed rates can occur as equilibrium outcomes fear of floating may emerge endogenously and in association with a currency mismatch in assets and liabilities if equilibria with both fixed rates and floating rates coexist the latter is pareto superior lessons for current de dollarization proposals are discussed

benefits from u s monetary policy experimentation in the days of samuelson and solow and lucas a policy maker knows two models of ination unemplo yment dynamics one implies an exploitable trade o the other does not the policy maker s prior probability over the two models is part of his state vector bayes law converts the prior probability into a posterior probability at each date and gives the policy maker an incentive to experiment for two models calibrated to u s data through the early 1960s we isolate the component of government policy that is due to experimentation by comparing the outcomes from two bellman equations the rst of which experiments and learns the second of which learns but doesn t experiment we interpret the second as an anticipated utility model and study how well its outcomes approximate those from the experiment and learn bellman equation the approximation is good for our calibrations the benets from purposeful experimentation are small

from extreme to mainstream the erosion of social norms social norms usually persistent can change quickly when new public information arrives such as a surprising election outcome people may become more inclined to express views or take actions previously perceived as stigmatized and may judge others less negatively for doing so we examine this possibility using two experiments we first show via revealed preference experiments that donald trump s rise in popularity and eventual victory increased individuals willingness to publicly express xenophobic views we then show that individuals are sanctioned less negatively if they publicly expressed a xenophobic view in an environment where that view is more popular

monetary policy in a low pass through environment in a dynamic new keynesian optimizing model we introduce incomplete exchange rate pass through on import prices three results stand out first unlike canonical models with perfect pass through which emphasize a type of isomorphism incomplete pass through renders the analysis of monetary policy of an open economy fundamentally different from the one of a closed economy second productivity driven deviations from the law of one price assume the interpretation of endogenous cost push shocks third the optimal commitment policy relative to discretion entails a smoothing of the deviations from the law of one price and requires more stable nominal and real exchange rates

uncovered interest parity and policy behavior new evidence abstract mccallum j monet econ 33 1994 105 132 introduces policy behavior to resolve previous empirical rejections of the uncovered interest parity uip theory in this note we reexamine his policy behavior argument first we extend the data set used by mccallum to include the recent 8 years and contrary to the analysis provided by mccallum we make a thorough econometric analysis of his uip specification it is shown that in most cases his theory is supported by the data as well as it passes conventional econometric tests we then take a closer look at his policy behavioral relationship but unfortunately it turns out that this specification is inconsistent with the uip specification suggested by mccallum

risk premia carry trade dynamics and economic value of currency speculation in this paper we derive the dynamics and assess the economic value of currency speculation by formalizing the concept of a trader inaction range we show that exchange rate returns comprise a time varying risk premium and that uncovered interest parity uip holds in a speculative sense the often cited forward bias puzzle originates from the omission of the risk premium in standard uip tests consistent with its popularity among market professionals the carry trade strategy can be rationalized as it systematically collects risk premia and generates economic value when applied in multi currency portfolios

dynamics and stability of constitutions coalitions and clubs a central feature of dynamic collective decision making is that the rules that govern the procedures for future decision making and the distribution of political power across players are determined by current decisions for example current constitutional change must take into account how the new constitution may pave the way for further changes in laws and regulations we develop a general framework for the analysis of this class of dynamic problems under relatively natural acyclicity assumptions we provide a complete characterization of dynamically stable states as functions of the initial state and determine conditions for their uniqueness we show how this framework can be applied in political economy coalition formation and the analysis of the dynamics of clubs the explicit characterization we provide highlights two intuitive features of dynamic collective decision making 1 a social arrangement is made stable by the instability of alternative arrangements that are preferred by sufficiently many members of the society 2 efficiency enhancing changes are often resisted because of further social changes that they will engender

robust permanent income and pricing i suppose there exists an extremely powerful and if i may so speak malignant being whose whole endeavours are directed toward deceiving me rene descartes meditations ii 1

an analysis of intertemporal pricing for forward foreign exchange contracts an asset pricing model with an unobservable time varying risk premium is used to price forward foreign exchange contracts specifically the term spectrum of forward foreign exchange contracts is examined in order to focus on country specific and maturityspecific information the testable restrictions imposed by the model are consistent with both cross country and cross maturity forward contracts except at the short end of the maturity spectrum for cross country forward exchange rates this indicates that the intertemporal model is relatively robust in valuing forward contracts of different maturities and for different exchange rates but that it may fail when there are significant short term country specific shocks theoretical and empirical studies have demonstrated that the forward exchange rate incorporates a time varying risk premium in addition to an expected future spot exchange rate recent works by fama 9 and hodrick and srivastava 21 reveal the importance of the risk premium by showing that the variability in risk premiums exceeds the variability in expected change in spot exchange rates these results are very general in that they are based on the definition that equates the forward exchange rate to the expected future spot exchange rate and a risk premium term a logical but more demanding next step is to model and conduct specification tests of the risk premium itself the purpose of this paper is to use an intertemporal latent variable assetpricing model ilvm to examine the risk return characteristics of the term structure of forward foreign exchange contracts more specifically the ilvm is used to price various bilateral dollar forward exchange contracts for each maturity as well as the different maturities for each bilateral forward exchange contract the ilvm was first utilized by hansen and hodrick 16 and hodrick and srivastava 20 to examine forward exchange risk premiums the two studies are however confined to just one month forward exchange contracts in addition the studies yield conflicting results the application of the ilvm to other

a note on intraday foreign exchange volatility and the informational role of quote arrivals abstract the conditional variance for five different hourly foreign exchange rates is modeled using a garch model with the number of incoming quotes as a regressor in the conditional variance equation we find that the number of quotes is positively and significantly related to the volatility of all rates examined the empirical findings support the conjecture of a time consuming information process

bilateral exchange rates and risk premia abstract the paper develops a theoretical model of the risk premium in a bilateral exchange rate representative agents in both countries are assumed to hold open positions in foreign exchange together with risky assets denominated in their own currencies also past surpluses in the current account of the balance of payments lead to net foreign asset positions which may partially be covered in the forward markets our two period mean variance model for optimizing investors is combined with standard assumption about the behavior of real exchange rates to give a reduced form equation for the discrepancies between spot rates and lagged forward rates the model is tested for the dollar dm dollar sterling and dollar yen exchange rates using monthly data for the period 1976 86 the null hypothesis of no risk premium is rejected for each of the currencies reported

learning by doing and the value of optimal experimentation abstract recent research on learning by doing has provided the limit properties of beliefs and actions for a class of learning problems in which experimentation is an important aspect of optimal decision making however under these conditions the optimal policy cannot be derived analytically because bayesian learning about unknown parameters introduces a nonlinearity in the dynamic optimization problem this paper utilizes numerical methods to characterize the optimal policy function for a learning by doing problem that is general enough for practical economic applications the optimal policy is found to incorporate a substantial degree of experimentation under a wide range of initial beliefs about the unknown parameters dynamic simulations indicate that optimal experimentation dramatically improves the speed of learning and the stream of future payoffs furthermore these simulations reveal that a policy which separates control and estimation and does not incorporate experimentation frequently induces a long lasting bias in the control and target variables while these sequences tend to converge steadily under the optimal policy they frequently exhibit non stationary behavior when estimation and control are treated separately

the forward premium puzzle in a model of imperfect information abstract this paper studies the forward premium puzzle in a model with imperfect information the model predicts fixed effects and conditional heteroskedasticity in the forward premium regression and provides a rationale for the evidence in mayfield and murphy mayfield e s murphy r g 1992 interest rate parity and the exchange risk premium economics letters 40 319 324

social norms and the enforcement of laws we examine the interplay between social norms and the enforcement of laws agents choose a behavior e g tax evasion production of low quality products corruption harassing behavior substance abuse etc and then are randomly matched with another agent there are complementarities in behaviors so that an agent s payoff decreases with the mismatch between her behavior and her partner s and with overall negative externalities created by the behavior of others a law is an upper bound cap on behavior a law breaker when detected pays a fine and has her behavior forced down to the level of the law equilibrium law breaking depends on social norms because detection relies at least in part on whistle blowing law abiding agents have an incentive to whistle blow on a law breaking partner because this reduces the mismatch with their partners behaviors as well as the negative externalities when laws are in conflict with norms and many agents are breaking the law each agent anticipates little whistle blowing and is more likely to also break the law tighter laws banning more behaviors greater fines and better public enforcement all have counteracting effects reducing behavior among law abiding individuals but increasing it among law breakers we show that laws that are in strong conflict with prevailing social norms may backfire whereas gradual tightening of laws can be more effective in influencing social norms and behavior

conditional variance and the risk premium in the foreign exchange market abstract we investigate the existence of a risk premium in the foreign exchange market based on the conditional variance of market forecast errors the forecast errors are assumed to follow the arch process introduced by engle 1982 estimation and diagnostic testing of the model are discussed and results are presented for the currencies of the united kingdom france germany japan and switzerland