the indian gaming regulatory act and its effects on american indian economic development the indian gaming regulatory act igra passed by the us congress in 1988 was a watershed in the history of policymaking directed toward reservation resident american indians igra set the stage for tribal government owned gaming facilities it also shaped how this new industry would develop and how tribal governments would invest gaming revenues since then indian gaming has approached commercial state licensed gaming in total revenues gaming operations have had a far reaching and transformative effect on american indian reservations and their economies specifically indian gaming has allowed marked improvements in several important dimensions of reservation life for the first time some tribal governments have moved to fiscal independence native nations have invested gaming revenues in their economies and societies often with dramatic effect

inflation nominal interest rates and the variability of output abstract this paper examines the distribution of output around capacity when money demand is a nonlinear function of the nominal interest rate such that nominal interest rates cannot become negative when fluctuations in output result primarily from disturbances to the money market the variance of output is shown to be an increasing function of the trend inflation rate when they result from disturbances to the goods market the variance of output is a decreasing function of the trend inflation rate when both disturbances are significant there exists in general a critical non zero trend inflation rate that minimizes the variance of output

the secular inflation term in open economy phillips curves abstract robert flood has compared three alternative specifications for the secular inflation term in an open economy phillips curve attributed respectively to buiter miller and frankel and mussa we point out 1 an arithmetic error 2 the equivalence of the frankel and mussa versions and 3 some arguments against the buiter miller version

activist monetary policy and exchange rate overshooting the deutsche mark dollar rate abstract after a decade of generalized floating it is clear that bilateral exchange rates exhibit more variability than the economic aggregates relative prices incomes and money supplies which generally comprise the fundamentals of theories of exchange rate determination dornbusch s overshooting hypothesis is the best known explanation of this phenomenon this paper shows that accommodative monetary policy with respect to prices has the potential to cause the economy to switch from exchange rate overshooting to undershooting using constrained maximum likelihood methods the model is estimated for germany and the united states the results provide strong evidence in support of the overshooting hypothesis for the deutsche mark dollar exchange rate

food processor price behavior firm level evidence of sticky prices firms in imperfectly competitive markets face direct and indirect costs when changing product prices the latter costs reflect uncertain changes in revenue and market share resulting from the actions of rival firms rosett s friction model is applied to firm level data to provide estimates of the indirect costs of changing prices for a major processor of frozen concentrated orange juice results indicate that indirect costs cause significant price rigidity additionally the hypothesis that prices are equally rigid for upward and downward changes could not be rejected

real and nominal shocks in a two country price setting world abstract this paper develops a two country model in which the law of one price does not hold in the short run and which is consistent with the stylized fact that exchange rates respond more quickly to news than prices this is done by assuming that firms face lumpy information costs in determining what price to charge both domestic and imported goods prices are therefore sticky with respect to news and deviations from the law of one price ppp are due to exchange rate surprises the model is used to analyze the domestic and international impact of real and nominal disturbances

the near optimality of mark up pricing mark up pricing policies result in a loss of profits compared to marginal pricing behavior these losses however are often very small even for large changes in the money supply but by adopting a simple pricing rule the firm does not have to forecast the future and avoids the informational and computational costs required to determine the profit maximizing price each period thus even if these costs are small mark up pricing policies may be optimal or approximately so at least for some firms in a macro model this is likely to imply large monetary non neutralities

rentierism energy and economic growth the case of algeria and egypt 1965 2010 abstract the algerian economy is an example of a high level of rentierism while the egyptian economy shows a low moderate level of rentierism the ardl bounds test approach was used upon annual time series data from 1965 to 2010 the results suggest cointegration for both countries bi causality between energy consumption and growth in the long run was found for algeria there is a reversed negative energy growth nexus adding a new relationship to the traditional four causal hypotheses on the energy growth nexus for egypt we found positive elasticity both of oil price and energy which is in line with the mainstream

exchange rate hysteresis large versus small policy misalignments abstract using a monetary model in the spirit of dornbusch 1976 and a sunk cost model of trade hysteresis we show that a sufficiently large policy misalignment can induce hysteresis in the trade balance and thereby alter the steady state real exchange rate hence exchange rate dynamics are path dependent since hysteresis in our model can entail industrial dislocation and the scrapping of sunk assets we suggest that these factors constitute a welfare cost of large policy misalignments that have not been considered formally additionally since the long run exchange rate is path dependent standard empirical tests of exchange rate models may involve a misspecification

exchange rate determination and inflation in southeast asian countries abstract we estimate structural open economy models consistent with rational re and theories consistent tce expectations which incorporate cointegration to examine exchange rate determination and inflation in three southeast asian countries the re model is rejected in favor of the tce model our results show that while inflation in all three countries is affected by different external factors malaysia and singapore avoided high inflation despite high levels of economic growth through tight monetary policy in contrast the philippines had high inflation even with a stagnant economy due to loose monetary policy and the monetization of government debt

mission improbable does petroleum related aid address the resource curse petroleum related aid programmes and projects are a key part of donor activities in oil rich developing countries this paper critically assesses petroleum related aid activities using the norwegian oil for development programme as a main case recent research suggests that institutions or governance are essential in averting a resource curse while governance issues are beginning to receive more attention in these types of programmes they still form a minor part of programme activities the narrow sector focus that characterizes petroleum related aid makes it unlikely that it will produce the higher order institutional changes needed to lift the resource curse petroleum related aid activities address the issue of corruption only to a limited extent given the commercial and political interests of donor countries questions about the integrity and credibility of these types of programmes can be raised

resource curse an analysis of causes experiences and possible ways forward abstract higher prices for oil gas and mineral resources have again raised questions about how exporting countries can counter the challenges of resource curse international experience managing the risks of resource curse has varied summarising the continuing discussion on meeting the challenges of the resource curse this paper addresses four questions what are the positive and negative effects of high oil gas and mineral prices on exporters what have been the experiences with managing natural resource revenues can good institutions ensure that natural resource revenues have a positive impact on development and what is the direction for the way forward we argue that the current emphasis on institutions as a potential solution has largely ignored under what conditions institutions are formed and changed

axe the tax taxes are disliked more than equivalent costs abstract tax collection is critical for the proper functioning of society however many people strongly dislike paying taxes although this distaste could be rational on economic grounds the authors show that this attitude extends beyond simply disliking the costs incurred and affects behavior in counternormative ways they demonstrate the phenomenon of tax aversion a desire to avoid taxes per se that exceeds the rational economic motivation to avoid a monetary cost across five experiments the authors provide evidence that people have a stronger preference to avoid tax related costs than to avoid equal sized or larger monetary costs unrelated to taxes tax aversion affects consumer preferences in a variety of domains including standard store purchases financial investments and job selection furthermore this tendency is most prevalent among people who identify with political parties that generally favor less taxation finally encouraging participants who identify with antitax parties to cons

if diversification is good why don t countries diversify more the political economy of diversification in resource rich countries abstract for resource rich countries diversification is claimed to represent a strategy for reducing resource curse problems this however depends on whether diversification has a positive effect on the country s institutions while there is a lot of evidence that exports of oil have a negative impact on institutions we know much less about the extent to which diversification leads to better institutions this article applies recent political economy theory to the phenomenon of diversification theoretical arguments suggest that it is the pattern of industrial activity rather than diversification per se which affects institutions like democracy in other words not all forms of diversification lead to better institutions furthermore where diversification has a positive impact on institutions diversification may be difficult to attain when it threatens the power base of the ruling elite a possible implication of these arguments is that policies for diversification should focus on international regulation affecting elite incentives rather than domestic industrial policy

the effects of governance modes on the energy matrix of andean countries this article addresses the consequences of different modes of energy governance on the energy matrix energy governance is understood as a regulation system of the energy related interplays between the state the society and the economy the energy matrix is a useful instrument for comparative policy analysis since it informs us about production and consumption trends by sources and sectors our central argument is that energy governance follows two different patterns one hierarchical and the other cooperative that are not necessarily determined by the initial factors allocation and produce different effects on the energy matrix hierarchical governance is based on centralized decision making and state centered development while co governance is based on decentralized decision making and market oriented development to develop this argument we compare the energy matrix from the five andean countries venezuela colombia ecuador peru and bolivia

exchange rates interest rates and money stock announcements a theoretical exposition abstract when the federal reserve announce a larger than anticipated weekly level of the us money stock m1 the dollar appreciates and short term interest rates increase because of an expected liquidity effect but long term interest rates and particularly long run forward interest rates increase because of an expected inflation effect the two effects are not mutually exclusive but coexist when market participants are not completely sure of the fed s policy rule and thus react in a weighted average manner with weights that reflect subjective probabilities about different federal reserve money growth policies

monetary disturbances inventory fluctations and the level of sales a theoretical and empirical analysis there has in the past several years been a revival of interest in the topic of inventory fluctuation and its relationship to the short run dynamics of output one important reason for this interest can be traced to the pioneering work on aggregate supply begun by lucas 11 12 and extended among many others by barro 3 4 in their models the behavior of output is driven by intertemporal considerations it is a natural extension of such models if output is storable to consider the implication of producers whose current output can either be sold immediately or held in stock for future sales current sales by the same token may be either current production or goods from inventory in a recent paper blinder and fischet 6 develop such a model using it they demonstrate that inventory dynamics can be an explanation for an empirical weakness of simple versions of the lucas type models real world business cycles are characterized by considerable persistence simple equilibrium business cycle models do not exhibit such persistence or in some cases it is present only through the ad hoc presence of a lagged output term in the aggregate supply function except for the influence of inventories producers in the blinder fischer analysis behave as do producers in most new classical macro models they are price takers and quantity setters in a model where inventories exert an influence on output decisions such neoclassical behavior cannot be ascribed to perfectly competitive conditions if firms are perfect competitors output decisions will not reflect the state of current inventories

public health investments and the infant mortality gap evidence from federal sanitation interventions on u s indian reservations abstract to what extent do differential levels of investment in public health inputs explain observed differences in health outcomes across socioeconomic and racial groups this study investigates the impact of 3700 projects that were part of a widespread federal initiative to improve sanitation infrastructure on u s indian reservations starting in 1960 sanitation investment substantially reduced the cost of clean water for households leading to sharp reductions in both waterborne gastrointestinal disease and infectious respiratory disease among native american infants the sanitation program was quite cost effective in part because improvements in the overall disease environment also reduced infectious respiratory disease among nearby white infants despite the health externalities federal sanitation interventions explain almost forty percent of the convergence in native american and white infant mortality rates in reservation counties since 1970

the optimality of partial price adjustment policies this paper studies the optimal price adjustment policies of a monopolistically competitive firm whose profit maximizing price is subject to a serially correlated random disturbance the firm chooses its price by comparing the expected cost of present and future price changes with the expected losses occurring when price deviates from its instantaneous profit maximizing value partial price adjustment often is the best way to minimize the sum of these losses prices tend to be more flexible both in response to large shocks to the firm s profit maximizing price and when much uncertainty exists about the future

biased effects of taxes and subsidies on portfolio choices we study how taxes and subsidies affect portfolio choices in a laboratory experiment we find highly significant differences after intervention even though the net income is identical in all our treatments and thus the decision pattern of investors should be constant in particular we observe that the willingness to invest in the risky asset decreases markedly when an income tax has to be paid or when a subsidy is paid we investigate this result further in a range of variations of the baseline experiment and find our main result to be largely robust however as we reduce the number of states of nature the bias weakens considerably

investment behavior and the biased perception of limited loss deduction in income taxation abstract we use a laboratory experiment to study the extent to which investors choices are affected by limited loss deduction in income taxation we first compare investment behavior in the no tax baseline to a tax control setting in which the income from investments is taxed we find that investors significantly reduce their risk taking as predicted by theory next we compare the baseline investment choices to choices under three different types of income taxation we observe that risk taking is significantly increased with partial and with capped loss deduction but is unaffected by a tax system that allows no loss deduction since in all these treatments the after tax outcomes of the prospects were identical we conjecture that investors have a positively biased perception of partial and capped loss deduction that promotes their willingness to take risks

savings growth and the resource curse hypothesis an important connection between recent attempts to understand the determinants of economic growth and the measurement of sustainability is the finding of a negative and significant relationship between natural resource abundance and economic growth this is the so called resource curse hypothesis using cross country regressions we offer evidence that the curse may itself be a manifestation of the inability of governments to manage large resource revenues sustainably in particular these results offer another perspective on the resource curse hypothesis the countries where growth has lagged are those where the combination of natural resource macroeconomic and public expenditure policies have led to a low rate of genuine saving net saving adjusted for resource depletion

counterinflationary policy in a unionised economy with nonsynchronised wage setting a model of the determination of wages and employment in a unionised economy with nonsynchronised wage setting is presented in this paper it is shown that a monetary deflation can lead to prolonged unemployment even though the unions act rationally and with full information about the change in policy the model generates a statistical phillips curve in which the rate of change of money wages depends on the anticipated growth rate of the money supply and on disequilibrium unemployment conventional incomes policies are shown to have desirable social effects but run counter to the perceived self interest of the trade unions and are therefore likely to be resisted taxes on wage increases have desirable long run effects but do not appear able to reduce the transitional unemployment costs of monetary deflation

formation of inflation expectations from the simple to the rational expectations hypothesis using quarterly survey expectational data for seven ec countries this paper tests how producers form their inflation expectations the results indicate that the simple expectational hypotheses do not give an adequate account of the variation in the price expectational data because they fail to allow for the information contained in forecast models of inflation however the producers generally do not incorporate disequilibrium inflation into their inflation expectations

the varieties of resource experience natural resource export structures and the political economy of economic growth many oil mineral and plantation crop based economies experienced a substantial deceleration in growth following the commodity boom and bust of the 1970s and early 1980s this article illustrates how countries dependent on point source natural resources those extracted from a narrow geographic or economic base such as oil and minerals and plantation crops are predisposed to heightened economic and social divisions and weakened institutional capacity this in turn impedes their ability to respond effectively to shocks which previous studies have shown to be essential for sustaining rising levels of prosperity analysis of data on classifications of export structure controlling for a wide array of other potential determinants of governance shows that point source and coffee and cocoa exporting countries do relatively poorly across an array of governance indicators these governance effects are not associated simply with being a natural resource exporter countries with natural resource exports that are diffuse relying primarily on livestock and agricultural produce from small family farms do not show the same strong effects and have had more robust growth recoveries

whence exchange rate overshooting money stock or flow abstract money stock innovations have two principal impact effects on the exchange rate one is the direct effect as captured by the overshooting hypothesis the second is the result of the change in money growth rate expectations induced by the stock innovation simulations using a stylized monetary process verify that the front end loading of the growth rate effect is potentially much more important that the direct effect additional simulations using a calibrated monetary process demonstrate that growth rate effects are on average about twice the magnitude of stock innovation effects

progressive taxation in a tournament economy abstract not enough is known about the responsiveness of individuals in particular those who work under different incentives to changes in marginal tax rates we ask whether changes in tax rates are less distortionary for workers engaged in a contest to examine this potential rationale for a more progressive tax code we first model the effort decisions of workers faced with progressive taxation under tournaments and piece rates because of the difficulty identifying any distortion that may be induced by the tax code in naturally occurring data we then report on the results of a real effort experiment based on this model consistent with a behavioral approach to public finance we find that competitive tournament workers are less sensitive and hint in our discussion at the possible welfare benefits of progressive taxation in tournament economies

price adjustment costs and the output inflation trade off when prices are costly to adjust there is a trade off between the rate of inflation and the firm s average level of output this trade off is the result of fully optimizing behaviour by the firm sufficient conditions are developed for inflation to have no effect on output however these conditions are unlikely to be met in practice this suggests that the superneutrality of money hypothesis is incompatible with the type of demand and cost curves normally encountered in economic theory if the discount rate is positive moderate rates of inflation will always lead to higher levels of output

where does economic development really come from constitutional rule among the contemporary sioux and apache governments are public goods that provide the organizational and legal structures by which societies arrange and enforce rules of the game that enable divisions of labor exchange and collective action we argue that shared pre constitutional cultural norms of political legitimacy among rational individuals provide the foundations of effective self government the performance of contemporary apache and sioux economies on indian reservations governed by common federally imposed constitutions is examined to test the framework unlike the impoverished sioux the relatively successful apaches are found to have pre existing political norms that serendipidously match the structure of their formal constitution

optimal price setting with observation and menu costs we study the price setting problem of a firm in the presence of both observation and menu costs in this problem the firm optimally decides when to collect costly information on the adequacy of its price an activity which we refer to as a price review upon each review the firm chooses whether to adjust its price subject to a menu cost and when to conduct the next price review this behavior is consistent with recent survey evidence documenting that firms revise prices infrequently and that only a few price revisions yield a price adjustment the goal of the paper is to study how the firm s choices map into several observable statistics depending on the level and relative magnitude of the observation vs the menu cost the observable statistics are the frequency of price reviews the frequency of price adjustments the size distribution of price adjustments and the shape of the hazard rate of price adjustments we provide an analytical characterization of the firm s decisions and a mapping from the structural parameters to the observable statistics we compare these statistics with the ones obtained for the models with only one type of cost the predictions of the model can with suitable data be used to quantify the importance of the menu cost vs the information cost we also consider a version of the model where several price adjustment are allowed between observations a form of price plans or indexation we find that no indexation is optimal for small inflation rates

institutional assets for negotiating the terms of development indigenous collective action and oil in ecuador and alaska abstract case studies of two oil fields with superficial similarities same company same time period similar anticipated scale of production similar remote field design similarly situated in indigenous territory show radically different benefits for the adjacent indigenous communities this analysis finds that the major differences driving these results are institutional primarily differences in property rights regimes and secondarily in local institutional development in the alaska context the community was able to negotiate a direct share of the royalties while the ecuadorian community was entitled only to an indirect revenue share from the national government both communities also negotiated for various community assistance projects from the company the ecuadorian communities likely would have succeeded in instituting their sustainable development proposal if they had stronger local organization comparative analysis of the factors for local institutional development fit well in the conceptual

are we taxing ourselves how deliberation and experience shape voting on taxes abstract we let consumers vote on tax regimes in experimental markets we test if taxes on sellers are more popular than taxes on consumers i e on voters themselves even if taxes on sellers are inefficiently high taxes on sellers are more popular if voters underestimate the extent of tax shifting in the market we show that inexperienced voters are prone to such a tax shifting bias that experience is an effective de biasing mechanism but that pre vote deliberation about tax regimes makes initially held opinions more extreme rather than correct our results suggest that voting on taxes is prone to bias and that easy to interpret facts are needed to de bias voters

institutional analysis and the resource curse in developing countries abstract the present article examines the recent advances reported in the literature regarding the mechanisms underlying the resource curse in developing countries by analyzing the rule of law index we investigated how the institutions responsible for allocating hydrocarbon royalties can help minimize the effects of the resource curse we used a qualitative methodology based on case studies the results show that evidence of legal violations on the part of these institutions and the lack of tools in resource rich developing countries to uphold basic social and economic rights are associated with the resource curse our findings suggest that strengthening the institutions closer monitoring of oil revenue allocations and public participation can help to alleviate the resource curse

on the anatomy of inflation the variability of relative commodity prices in argentina there is substantial evidence indicating that the inflationary process is not neutral with respect to the structure of relative prices a1though real variables also affect the distribution of commodity prices the variability of relative prices appears to be largely increased by monetary phenomena the general picture emerging from the empirical literature links the cross sectional variability of commodity prices to the variability of the aggregate rate of inflation over time to the rate of unexpected inflation and to the rate of monetary expansion 1 most studies however have dealt with low inflation countries for which it is more difficult to isolate real from monetary effects on relative price changes the purpose of this paper is to analyze in detail the characteristics of relative price behavior within the context of very rapid and variable inflation using disaggregated monthly data for argentina a number of specific aspects of that country s

cross scalar dynamics of the resource curse constraints on local participation in the bolivian gas sector abstractcontributing to debate on the contextual underpinnings and varieties of the resource curse this article points to how political and economic dynamics of resource endowments operate in interrelated but potentially contradictory ways across spatial scales resource endowments insert a complex set of incentives and interests into the political arena in ways that both enable and constrain actors at different scales using a case study of gas governance in bolivia the article illustrates the interrelation of these dynamics across local national and international scales and in particular how they circumscribe the space for local participation

expectations and exchange rate dynamics after a decade of floating abstract dornbusch s model of expectations and exchange rate dynamics has been a theoretical success and an empirical failure the premise underlying this paper is that the price and exchange rate dynamics inherent in his model cannot be captured by single equation methods to capture these dynamics we estimate dornbusch s model using constrained maximum likelihood methods which incorporate cross equation restrictions derived from the structural equations and assumption of rational expectations our central result is that the estimation of dornbusch s model is much more successful than single equation methods have led us to believe

perspectives on positive political economy this volume serves as an introduction to the field of positive political economy and the economic and political processes with which it is concerned this new research tradition is distinct from both normative and historical approaches to political economy grounded in the rational actor methodology of microeconomics positive political economy is the study of rational decisions in a context of political and economic institutions more analytical than traditional approaches it is concerned with the derivation of principles and propositions against which real world experience may be compared its focus is on empirical regularities and its goal is theoretical explanation the field has focused on three main areas of research models of collective action constraints on competitive market processes and the analysis of transaction costs developments in all of these areas are covered in the book the first part of the volume surveys the field while the second part displays positive political economy at work examining a variety of subjects the final part contains essays by leading political economists on the theoretical foundations of the field

political foundations of the resource curse in this paper we argue that the political incentives that resource endowments generate are the key to understanding whether or not they are a curse we show 1 politicians tend to over extract natural resources relative to the efficient extraction path because they discount the future too much and 2 resource booms improve the efficiency of the extraction path however 3 resource booms by raising the value of being in power and by providing politicians with more resources which they can use to influence the outcome of elections increase resource misallocation in the rest of the economy 4 the overall impact of resource booms on the economy depends critically on institutions since these determine the extent to which political incentives map into policy outcomes countries with institutions that promote accountability and state competence will tend to benefit from resource booms since these institutions ameliorate the perverse political incentives that such booms create countries without such institutions however may suffer from a resource curse

a theorem on policy neutrality this paper offers a general condition which resolves the debate over the neutrality of systematic monetary policy in linear macroeconomic models with non equilibrium prices and rational expectations as expressed in papers by gordon 1976 gordon 1977 modigliani 1977 fischer 1977 phelps and taylor 1977 fethke and policano 1979 fethke and policano 1981 mccallum 1977 mccallum 1978 mccallum 1979a mccallum 1979b mccallum 1980 and green and honkapohja 1983 the policy neutrality theorem states that a non equilibrium price function will preserve the neutrality of monetary feedback with respect to exchange in a representative macroeconomic model if and only if the difference between the conditionally expected values of the equilibrium and non equilibrium prices is independent of monetary feedback in each period the policy neutrality results of mccallum 1977 mccallum 1978 mccallum 1979b and the policy effectiveness results of fischer 1977 phelps and taylor 1977 fethke and policano 1979 fethke and policano 1981 are analyzed in terms of the theorem

net wage illusion in a real effort experiment in a controlled laboratory experiment subjects had to fold letters in order to earn money while the net income per letter was the same in the three treatments the gross income varied and the tax rate was 0 25 and 50 percent although work incentives should be the same in all treatments subjects worked harder and longer when they were taxed we conclude that this is because of a net wage illusion effect the existence of this effect demonstrates that not only are the tax rate and the tax base of importance for work incentives but the perception of a tax is also important

entry and price dynamics in a perfect foresight model abstract this paper studies firms entry and price dynamics in a model that combines the assumptions of free entry and perfect foresight with the hypothesis of consumer s loyalty postulated by phelps and winter the analysis of the transition to long run equilibrium reveals that in such a model the entry of firms is related to the difference between current prices and costs in relation to the growth of the firms output it is shown that the model is consistent with gibrat s law finally it is shown that the size distribution of firms approaches asymptotically a pareto distribution

exploratory assessment of the economic gains of a pre salt oil field in brazil abstract in recent years brazil has made public several oil discoveries located in deep waters below the salt layer discoveries are steadily enhancing national reserves and have brought the country into a new role in the global oil industry this paper aims at investigating the economic gains that could be expected from a brazilian oil field in the pre salt region analyses were conducted based on the libra field the largest oil discovery in brazil until now with approximately 10 billion barrels the results were calculated for different scenarios of oil prices companies arrangements and regulatory regimes the findings suggest that economic gains could be higher for the brazilian government if the oil production were conducted under a service contract scheme however considering the current production sharing regime in force for pre salt areas economic gains could be higher if a bidding process was conducted ensuring for the brazilian government a higher participation in the oil to be produced additionally the results demonstrate that under the current rules applied for the production sharing regime the government quota of oil has decreased over time putting at risk economic results

price flexiblity and output volatility the case for flexible exchange rates abstract this paper uses descriptive statistics and regression analyses to examine the relationship between exchange rate variability and output volatility in developed countries based on 1961 to 1984 data the result indicate that a flexible exchange rate system is associated with less not more dispersion in output growth across industrialized countries despite a more turbulent global environment also countries which have more exchange rate volatility experience less output volatility the relationship appears not to be spurious the results are consistent with the idea that an increase in price flexibility does not destabilize output