comparative estimates of a macroeconomic disequilibrium model france germany the u k and the u s a the paper gives comparative estimates of a macroeconomic disequilibrium model for four countries first a theoretical mini disequilibrium model close to the barro grossman formulation is presented the productivity cycle is linked with the changes in regimes a new technique allows to compute comparative estimates of the model for france germany the u k and the u s a on the sample period 65 iv to 85 iv the results are used to assess the wage gap doctrine according to which the difference in the unemployment rates of europe and the u s a can be explained by a larger discrepancy between the real wage and the marginal productivity of labor on the eastern side of the atlantic

human capital family planning and their effects on population growth statistical evidence at the household level suggests that fertility and child mortality are related to factors specified by economic models of family resource allocation and behavior several of these factors such as women s education and family planning appear to decrease both fertility and child mortality leaving in doubt what net effects these human capital and social welfare programs have had on the recent slowing of world population growth the specific factors considered here include family planning programs human capital endowments of women and men natural resource wealth other economic structural determinants of the costs and benefits of children and the availability of nutritional inputs cross sectional relationships are reported and changes within countries are analyzed with fixed effect methods using data for 68 lowincome countries for the last two decades

a disequilibrium model with smooth regime transitions and a keynesian spillover for switzerland s labor market abstract this paper presents a disequilibrium labor market model in which aggregation over a continuum of micro markets with different demand supply ratios produces smooth macro relationships mapping aggregate demand and supply onto actual employment and regime proportions aggregate labor demand consists of a classical part derived on a putty clay assumption and a keynesian spillover from the goods market the specification of labor supply incorporates intertemporal substitution the degree of aggregate imbalances on labor and goods markets is measured by business survey data the estimated model indicates a growing mismatch between the micro structures of demand and supply of labor the short run fluctuations of employment are primarily traced back to the keynesian spillover classical determinants of labor demand are relevant as well but only in the medium term labor supply is rather inert and thus absorbs the swings of labor demand only partly

monetary policy and stagflation in the uk the volatile behavior of inflation output and interest rates in the united kingdom prior to the 1990s helps discriminate between rival explanations for the outbreak of stagflation we examine alternative hypotheses with a new keynesian model of aggregate demand and inflation determination estimated on quarterly uk data for 1959 2000 our model features is and phillips curves based on optimizing behavior and fully incorporates the distinction between detrended output and the output gap stressed by optimizing analysis using simulations of our model as well as information on the real time views of policymakers we test alternative explanations for the outbreak of inflation in the united kingdom in the 1960s and 1970s we find that inaccurate estimates of the degree of excess demand in the economy contributed significantly to the outbreak but we also find a major role for the failure at the time to recognize the importance of monetary policy as opposed to nonmonetary devices in controlling inflation

marginalization revisited women s market work and pay and economic development abstract a substantial literature argues that women have been left out of economic development but evidence from labor force surveys in middle income developing countries suggests otherwise women s participation rates in the market labor force have been increasing women have shifted into white collar occupations and certain previously male dominated occupations have become female dominated clerical work in asia for example women s relative pay has risen somewhat faster in asia and latin america than occurred during industrialization in the united states although inequalities remain there is no evidence that women on average are being marginalized

a meta analysis of the international gender wage gap abstract since the early 1970s a number of authors have calculated gender wage differentials between women and men of equal productivity this meta study provides a new quantitative review of this vast amount of empirical literature on gender wage differentials as it concerns not only differences in methodology data and time periods but also different countries we place particular emphasis on a proper consideration of the quality of the underlying study which is done by a weighting with quality indicators the results show that data restrictions i e the limitation of the analysis to new entrants never marrieds or one narrow occupation only have the biggest impact on the resulting gender wage gap moreover we are able to show what effect a misspecification of the underlying wage equation like the frequent use of potential experience has on the calculated gender wage gap over time raw wage differentials worldwide have fallen substantially however most of this decrease is due to better labor market endowments of females

effective demand and spillovers when individuals face rationing on a particular market they will seek to amend their trade offer on this and other markets to account for the extra constraint on their behaviour empirical researchers must attempt to mimic this behaviour by specifying effective demand functions there is no consensus however about how this should be done the development of applied multi market disequilibrium modelling has given this problem an immediate practical relevance moreover aggregation and computational considerations further complicate the problem of specifying theoretically consistent yet tractable effective demands this paper explores theoretical aspects of empirical effective demand functions and in this light reviews the existing empirical literature we stress the practical nature of the problems encountered in applied work and the limited guidance that theory provides the initial systematic discussion of the problems involved in specifying empirical effective demand functions in portes 1977 has been supplemented by gourieroux laffont and monfort 1980 ito 1980 sneessens 1981 and lee 1986 our paper is partly an update of this work there are three main candidates differing according to both the measurement of excess demand on other markets and how individuals are assumed to respond to this using linear forms for the effective demands portes showed how the three candidates are observationally equivalent in that they all imply the same level of trade perhaps because of this we find a wide range of effective demand concepts used in existing empirical applications we then consider the implications for empirical effective demand functions of allowing rationing to operate at a disaggregated level these smoothing by aggregation models have been the most significant

gender inequality and economic growth a reply to schober and winter ebmer summary using data from a meta wage analysis schober and winter ebmer fail to confirm my earlier finding that gender wage inequality stimulates growth in semi industrialized economies sies the authors contend their wage data based on micro level studies with heterogeneous coverage are superior to the education adjusted manufacturing wages on which my paper relied in response i elucidate why wage data should be restricted to the manufacturing sector i explore possible measurement errors their data introduce and note concerns with the meta regression approach that limit the applicability of these data to the specific task of understanding the growth effect of gender inequality in sies finally i discuss advances made over the last decade in the methodology used to evaluate gender effects on growth identifying directions for new research on this important topic

haddad lawrence john hoddinott and harold alderman eds intrahousehold resource allocation in developing countries models methods and policy baltimore md johns hopkins university press 1997 384 pp 55 00 in this volume economists demographers sociologists and anthropologists collaborate in the study of how resources are allocated within households in developing countries and why it matters from a policy perspective surveying a broad range of theory and evidence the contributors examine the many social and cultural factors that influence decisions about the family and household level about the allocation of time income assets and other resources ths contributors show that a more complete understanding of intrahousehold behaviour can increase the likelihood that policies will reach the people they are intended to affect

a disequilibrium model of rational expectations for the u k so far the new classical model and the policy ineffectiveness proposition have been tested essentially within an equilibrium framework and disequilibrium methods of estimation have been used to estimate the labor market models in this paper the authors develop an aggregate goods market model for the united kingdom in which the new classical rational expectations hypothesis and the disequilibrium approach are integrated their estimates of the model show that the structural parameters are well determined and price adjustment in the united kingdom is very sluggish therefore the new classical policy ineffectiveness proposition is not valid for the united kingdom copyright 1991 by royal economic society

var analysis and the great moderation post world war ii us macroeconomic history is usually divided into two distinct subperiods the former period which extends up to the end of the volcker disinflation is characterized by a significant extent of macroeconomic turbulence with highly volatile inflation and output growth the latter period from the end of the volcker disinflation up to the present day is marked in contrast by significantly smaller volatilities for both inflation and output growth these dramatic changes in the reduced form properties of the us economy over the last several decades char acterize a phenomenon known as the great moderation see in particular chang jin kim and charles nelson 1999 margaret mcconnell and gabriel perez quiros 2000 a vast empirical literature has investigated the source s of the great moderation in an attempt to disentangle the relative contributions of two main explanations good policy and good luck based on time varying or markov switching structural var methods the good luck hypoth esis has been advocated by a number of authors including james h stock and mark w watson 2003 giorgio e primiceri 2005 christopher sims and tao zha 2006 and luca gambetti evi pappa and fabio canova 2008

low schooling for girls slower growth for all cross country evidence on the effect of gender inequality in education on economic development using cross country and panel regressions this article investigates how gender inequality in education affects long term economic growth such inequality is found to have an effect on economic growth that is robust to changes in specifications and controls for potential endogeneities the results suggest that gender inequality in education directly affects economic growth by lowering the average level of human capital in addition growth is indirectly affected through the impact of gender inequality on investment and population growth some 0 4 0 9 percentage points of differences in annual per capita growth rates between east asia and sub saharan africa south asia and the middle east can be accounted for by differences in gender gaps in education between these regions

gender inequality and economic growth a cross country analysis abstract this paper investigates empirically the determinants of economic growth for a set of semi industrialized export oriented economies in which women provide the bulk of labor in the export sector the primary hypothesis tested is that gender inequality which contributes to women s relatively lower wages was a stimulus to growth via the effect on exports during 1975 95 empirical analysis shows that gdp growth is positively related to gender wage inequality in contrast to recent work which suggests that income inequality slows growth evidence also indicates that part of the impact of gender wage inequality on growth is transmitted through its positive effect on investment as a share of gdp

wealthier is healthier we estimate the effect of income on health using cross country timeseries data on health infant and child mortality and life expectancy and income per capita we use instrumental variables estimates using exogenous determinants of income growth to identify the pure income effect on health isolated from reverse causation or incidental association the long run income elasticity of infant and child mortality in developing countries lies between 0 2 and 0 4 using these estimates we calculate that over a half a million child deaths in the developing world in 1990 alone can be attributed to the poor economic performance in the 1980s

decomposing the gender gap in cognitive skills in a poor rural economy girls lag markedly behind boys in education in many developing countries which may slow economic growth and increase inequity this paper uses indicators of the output of the education production process cognitive skills to characterize and to investigate the determinants of the large educational gender gap in rural pakistan local school availability accounts for about a third of the total cognitive achievement gender gap and over two fifths of that in numeracy which implies that policies that increased local school availability for girls could reduce substantially the gender gaps in cognitive skills to further reduce these gender gaps will require policies that focus on the demand side of the market where our results suggest the response to modest changes in incentives may be high

the great moderation in the united kingdom we use a bayesian time varying parameters structural var with stochastic volatility for gdp deflator inflation real gdp growth a 3 month nominal rate and the rate of growth of m4 to investigate the underlying causes of the great moderation in the united kingdom our evidence points toward a dominant role played by good luck in fostering the more stable macroeconomic environment of the last two decades results from counterfactual simulations in particular show that i bringing the monetary policy committee back in time would only have had a limited impact on the great inflation episode at the cost of lower output growth ii imposing the 1970s monetary rule over the entire sample period would have made almost no difference in terms of inflation and output growth outcomes and iii the great inflation was due to a dominant extent to large demand non policy shocks and to a lesser extent especially in 1973 and 1979 to supply shocks

an empirical two market disequilibrium model for dutch manufacturing abstract we develop an empirical version of the aggregate two market fixprice model due to barro and grossman maximum likelihood estimation of the model appears to be difficult as a large number of local maxima occurs the number of local maxima is considerably reduced by the introduction of prior information on some of the standard deviations of the disturbance terms in the model satisfactory estimation results are obtained this way the model closely reproduces the post war dutch trade cycle although some problems remain especially with the seventies

mind the gender wage gap the impact of trade and competition on sectoral wage differences this paper examines differences between women s and men s wages in 18 selected oecd countries in the period 1970 to 2005 the study is based on 12 manufacturing sector and skill specific sets of panel data on the gender wage gap we apply a system generalised method of moments gmm estimator to the extended version of the conditional gender wage gap convergence equation controlling for sector concentration and industry specific measures of openness using a difference in difference approach trade affected concentrated sectors versus trade affected competitive sectors the results indicate that i an increase in sector concentration is associated with wage gap growth ii both import and export penetration are associated with a reduction of the high skill gender wage gap growth in concentrated industries iii there is evidence of a widening impact of trade on the medium and low skill occupational gender wage gap growth in less competitive industries iv institutional regulations of the labour market have an impact on the development of the gender wage gap for highly skilled labour an increase in labour market regulation raises the growth of the gender wage gap while for medium and low skilled workers it lowers it

the structural dynamics of u s output and inflation what explains the changes we examine the dynamics of u s output and inflation using a structural time varying coefficients vector autoregression there are changes in the volatility of both variables and in the persistence of inflation but variations are statistically insignificant technology shocks explain changes in output volatility real demand disturbances variations in the persistence and volatility of inflation we detect important time variations in the transmission of technology shocks to output and demand shocks to inflation and significant changes in the variance of technology and of monetary policy shocks

testing for labor market equilibrium with an exact excess demand disequilibrium model a bstract the standard disequilibrium model is supplemented with outside information on the extent of market excess demand estimation of this supplemented model is considerably less involved than that of the standard model and certain desirable structural features such as improved dynamics are obtained in addition a simple nested test of the hypothesis of market equilibrium is available the model is estimated with aggregate u s post war labor market data and the econometric test rejects the hypothesis of labor market equilibrium

a discussion of belgian unemployment combining traditional concepts and disequilibrium econometrics with a gdp of less than 100 billion and exports of more than 60 billion belgium comes perhaps closer than any other country to being a small open economy consequently trends in world trade and export performance have a major impact on domestic activity whereas the impact of domestic fiscal policy is damped by import leakages table 1 presents a few figures confirming these observations

explaining african economic performance africa has had slow growth and a massive exodus of capital in many respects it has been the most capital hostile region we review and interpret the aggregate level and microeconomic literatures to identify the key explanations for this performance there is a reasonable correspondence of the two sets of evidence pointing to four factors as being important these are a lack of openness to international trade a high risk environment a low level of social capital and poor infrastructure these problems are to a substantial extent attributable to government behaviour and the paper includes a review of the political economy literature which addresses that behaviour

the evolution of u s monetary policy 2000 2007 abstract a vector autoregression with time varying parameters is used to characterize changes in federal reserve policy that occurred from 2000 through 2007 and describe how they affected the performance of the u s economy declining coefficients in the model s estimated policy rule point to a shift in the fed s emphasis away from stabilizing inflation over this period more importantly however the fed held the federal funds rate persistently below the values prescribed by this rule under this more discretionary policy inflation overshot its target and the funds rate followed a path reminiscent of the stop go pattern that characterized fed behavior prior to 1979

two alternative stochastic specifications and estimation methods for quantity rationing models a monte carlo comparison quantity rationing disequilibrium models can be characterized either by deterministic or by stochastic switching rules this paper reports on monte carlo experiments suggesting that the ml estimator associated with the deterministic switching rule one market model apparently has better small sample properties than its stochastic switching rule counterpart even when the latter is asymptotically superior this seems to be the result of a systematic residual variance underestimation in the stochastic switching rule model the feasibility of the deterministic switching rule estimator in a two market framework is next investigated

gender wage inequality and economic growth is there really a puzzle a comment seguino 2000 shows that gender wage discrimination in export oriented semi industrialized countries might be fostering investment and growth in general while the original analysis does not have internationally comparable wage discrimination data we replicate the analysis using data from a meta study on gender wage discrimination and do not find any evidence that more discrimination might further economic growth on the contrary if anything the impact of gender inequality is negative for growth standing up for more gender equality also in terms of wages is good for equity considerations and at least not negative for growth

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

estimation of a quarterly macroeconomic model with quantity rationing we specify and estimate a small fix price model with quantity rationing on both the goods and labor markets the side of the market which is rationed is random the model is able to generate a productivity cycle and the degree of capacity utilization is endogenous the rationing scheme allocating supply between the various components of demand is estimated the probabilities of being in the various regimes the intensity of the dispquilibrium on the markets and the results of policy exercises are discussed

structural changes in the us economy is there a role for monetary policy this paper investigates the contribution of monetary policy to the changes in output growth and inflation dynamics in the us we identify a policy shock and a policy rule in at ime varying coefficients var using robust sign restrictions the transmission of policy shocks has been relatively stable the variance of the policy shock has decreased over time but policy shocks account for a small fraction of the level and of the variations in inflation and output growth volatility and persistence we find little evidence of a significant increase in the long run response of the interest rate to inflation a more aggressive inflation policy in the 1970s would have produced large output growth costs

a macroeconomic rationing model of the belgian economy despite a wide recognition of the possible theoretical fruitfulness of the quantity rationing approach there prevails an equally wide suspicion as to the possibility of getting sensible econometric results out of this type of specification our aim in the following will be to show that sensible results can indeed be obtained we shall consider for that purpose the belgian goods and labor markets over the years 1953 1978 and specify the econometric model along the lines suggested in the previous chapter

new keynesian versus old keynesian government spending multipliers renewed interest in fiscal policy has increased the use of quantitative models to evaluate policy because of modelling uncertainty it is essential that policy evaluations be robust to alternative assumptions we find that models currently being used in practice to evaluate fiscal policy stimulus proposals are not robust government spending multipliers in an alternative empirically estimated and widely cited new keynesian model are much smaller than in these old keynesian models the estimated stimulus is extremely small with gdp and employment effects only one sixth as large and with private sector employment impacts likely to be even smaller we investigate the sensitivity of our findings with regard to the response of monetary policy the zero bound on nominal interest rates and the inclusion of an empirically relevant degree of rule of thumb behaviour in the new keynesian model in addition we relate our findings using estimated structural macroeconomic models to the recent literature using reduced form regression techniques

a macroeconometric disequilibrium model of product market and labour market for the netherlands 1985 a macroeconometric disequilibrium model of product market and labour market for the netherlands applied economics vol 17 no 4 pp 633 646

would the bundesbank have prevented the great inflation in the united states abstract policy counterfactuals based on estimated structural vars routinely suggest that bringing alan greenspan back in the 1970s united states would not have prevented the great inflation we show that a standard policy counterfactual suggests that the bundesbank which is near universally credited for sparing west germany the great inflation would also not have been able to prevent the great inflation in the united states the implausibility of this result sounds a cautionary note on taking the outcome of svar based policy counterfactuals at face value and raises questions on the reliability of such exercises

the effects of irregular markets on macroeconomic policy some estimates for belgium abstract the paper aims at evaluating the efficiency of traditional keynesian demand or neo classical income policies in the presence of an irregular sector the analysis is applied to the belgian economy for which it is shown that the objectives of increasing output and employment and reducing the importance of the irregular economy will often lead to conflicting policy prescriptions in addition keynesian multipliers may be lowered by as much as 40 though the irregular market only represents some 10 to 15 of total activity