dollar depreciation and us industry performance abstract this study analyzes the effects of the real exchange rate and the real interest rate on domestic sales exports and imports for 19 manufacturing industries and selected non merchandise sectors in the usa the estimates are combined with a simulation of an exogenous dollar depreciation to infer net industry effects of a non policy induced drop in the value of the dollar the results indicate that the direct impacts of the depreciation are concentrated in net exports with only limited effects on home sales hoewver the indirect effects of the depreciation which work through the domestic interest rate and foreign and domestic income and prices have a significant impact on domestic sales as well as net trade in both merchandise and non merchandise sectors

dynamic scoring alternative financing schemes abstract neoclassical growth models predict that reductions in capital or labor income tax rates are expansionary when lump sum transfers are used to balance the government budget this paper explores the consequences of bond financed tax reductions that bring forth a range of possible offsetting policies including future government consumption capital tax rates or labor tax rates through the resulting intertemporal distortions current tax cuts can be expansionary or contractionary the paper also finds that more aggressive responses of offsetting policies to debt engender less debt accumulation and less costly tax cuts

option profit and loss attribution and pricing a new framework this paper develops a new top down valuation framework that links the pricing of an option investment to its daily profit and loss attribution the framework uses the black merton scholes option pricing formula to attribute the short term option investment risk to variation in the underlying security price and the option s implied volatility taking risk neutral expectation and demanding no dynamic arbitrage result in a pricing relation that links an option s fair implied volatility level to the underlying volatility level with corrections for the implied volatility s own expected direction of movement its variance and its covariance with the underlying security return

devaluation and the j curve some evidence from ldcs within the international trade literature it is not uncommon to find arguments about whether devaluation will improve the trade balance it is argued that the flows of goods respond only with time lags to changes in the exchange rate the j curve terrn is used to describe the movement over time of the trade balance it may deteriorate at first and improvement may come later this paper presents a method by which one could detect the existence of the j curve the method is applied to four developing countries the empirical evidence supports the pattern of movemnent described by the j curve a major policy option for a country facing a persistent balance of payments deficit is said to be devaluation of its currency within the international trade literature it is not uncommon to find arguments about whether devaluation will improve the trade balance or the balance of payments for example proponents of the elasticities approach describe the necessary and sufficient conditions for an improvement in the trade balance in terms of elasticities of demand and supply referred to as the marshall lerner condition while there is abundant empirical evidence to suggest that these conditions are indeed met at least for industrial countries there have been circumstances under which 2 devaluation has not been successful for example one might wonder why the u s trade balance deteriorated so much in 1972 despite the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 this unfavorable effect of devaluation on the trade balance is termed the j curve phenomenon received for publication august 23 1984 revision accepted for publication november 26 1984 the university of wisconsin milwaukee i would like to thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments on the initial draft of this paper 1 proponents of the absorption approach e g alexander 1952 describe how devaluation may change the terms of trade increase production and switch expenditures from foreign to domestic goods thus improving the trade balance international monetarists argue that devaluation reduces the real value of cash balances and or changes the relative price of traded and nontraded goods thus improving both the trade balance and the balance of payments 2 for an cstimate of the elasticities see houthakker and magee 1969 and warner and kreinin 1983 the former study provides the elasticities estimates under fixed exchange rates and the latter under floating rates this content downloaded from 157 55 39 17 on wed 31 aug 2016 04 39 37 utc all use subject to http about jstor org terms

empirical investigation of one opec country s successful non oil export performance abstract this study examines indonesian non oil export success between 1975 and 1994 with a focus on the role of exchange rate management and trade policy in export performance across sectors to examine the link between export quantity and changes in policy i estimate structural export supply functions that are derived from utility and profit maximization behavior the results indicate that non oil exporters respond positively to improved price incentives including exchange rate devaluation with the strongest impact in textiles garments and sawnwood the study offers a richer description than previous work of the relationship between price incentives and export performance

effects of exchange rate risk on exports crosscountry analysis abstract in this paper we investigate the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on the aggregate exports of 19 developed and 67 developing countries using cross sectional data exchange rate uncertainty is found to be detrimental to the exports of both developing and developed countries developed countries exports however are found to be less sensitive to exchange risk than that of developing countries furthermore within the developing countries those who fixed their exchange rates to one major currency were found to be subject to less risk than the other developing countries

bond pricing and the term structure of interest rates a new methodology for contingent claims valuation this paper presents a unifying theory for valuing contingent claims under a stochastic term structure of interest rates the methodology based on the equivalent martingale measure technique takes as given an initial forward rate curve and a family of potential stochastic processee for its subsequent movements a no arbitrage condition restricts this family of processes yielding valuation formulae for interest rate sensitive contingent claims which do not explicitly depend on the market prices of risk examples are provided to illustrate the key results in relation to the term structure of interest rates arbitrage pricing theory has two purposes the first is to price all zero coupon default free bonds of varying maturities from a finite number of economic fundamentals called state variables the second is to price all interest rate sensitive contingent claims taking as given the prices of the zero coupon bonds this paper presents a general theory and a unifying framework for understanding arbitrage pricing theory in this context of which all existing arbitrage pricing models are special cases in particular vasicek 1977 brennan and schwartz 1979 langetieg 1980 ball and torous 1983 ho and lee 1986 schaefer and schwartz 1987 and artzner and delbaen 1988 the primary contribution of this paper however is a new methodology for solving the second problem i e the pricing of interest rate sensitive contingent claims given the prices of all zero coupon bonds the methodology is new because i it imposes its stochastic structure directly on the evolution of the forward rate curve ii it does not require an inversion of the term structure to eliminate the market prices of risk from contingent claim values and iii it has a stochastic spot rate process with multiple stochastic factors influencing the term structure the model can be used to consistently price and hedge all contingent claims american or european on the term structure and it is derived from necessary and more importantly sufficient conditions for the absence of arbitrage the arbitrage pricing models of vasicek 1977 brennan and schwartz 1979 langetieg 1980 and artzner and delbaen 1988 all require an iformerly titled bond pricing and the term structure of interest rates a new methodology

determinants of international trade flows this paper models and estimates import demand and demand for export functions for 19 industrial countries although primary emphasis is placed on the period of generalized floating exchange rates 1972 through 1980 estimates are also provided for the fixed exchange rate years 1957 1970 thus making possible a comparison between the two eras aside from the conventional income and price variables the paper assesses the effect of variations in the exchange rate and in the expected exchange rate on real trade flows additionally it estimates an unrestricted lag structure of the effect of price and exchange rate variations on imports

leverage effect volatility feedback and self exciting market disruptions equity index volatility variation and its interaction with the index return can come from three distinct channels first index volatility increases with the market s aggregate financial leverage second positive shocks to systematic risk increase the cost of capital and reduce the valuation of future cash flows generating a negative correlation between the index return and its volatility regardless of financial leverage finally large negative market disruptions show self exciting behaviors this article proposes a model that incorporates all three channels and examines their relative contribution to index option pricing and stock option pricing for different types of companies

long run price elasticities and the marshall lerner condition revisited abstract in estimating trade elasticities most previous researchers employed nonstationary data and ols or 2sls method with new developments in the literature this paper uses stationary data and johansen s cointegration analysis to provide new trade elasticities for almost 30 countries

monopolistic competition increasing returns to scale and the importance of productivity shocks abstract the neoclassical growth model is extended to incorporate monopolistic competition and increasing returns to scale implications for the measurement of productivity change through the solow residual are studied it is found that for this extension productivity fluctuations continue to account for a substantial fraction of output volatility the model cannot account for volatility of employment

spurious welfare reversals in international business cycle models several papers have documented spurious welfare reversals incompletemarkets economy produces a higher level of welfare than the completemarkets economy this paper first demonstrates how conventional linearization can generate approximation errors that can result in welfare reversals using a two country production economy we argue that spurious welfare reversals are not only possible but also plausible under reasonable values for model parameters this paper then proposes an approximation method that modifies the conventional linearization by a bias correction this method can be easily implemented and approximates welfare as accurately as a second order perturbation method

tax disturbances and real economic activity in the postwar united states abstract this paper investigates the macroeconomic effects of cyclical fluctuations in marginal tax rates it finds that systematically including tax variables in a standard real business cycle model substantially improves the model s ability to reproduce basic facts about postwar u s business cycle fluctuations in particular modeling fluctuations in personal and corporate income tax rates increases the model s predicted relative variability of hours and decreases its predicted correlation between hours and average productivity fluctuations in tax rates produce large substitution effects that alter the leisure labor supply decision

marginal income tax rates in the united states a non parametric approach abstract the objective of this paper is to estimate both the u s federal marginal income tax rate and the state and local marginal income tax rates we use the non parametric regression method and data on income and tax extracted from u s individual tax model files for the period 1985 1995 the flexibility of the non parametric approach and the information at the individual level enable us to construct a more reliable time series of the average federal marginal income tax rates and that of the average state and local marginal income tax rates our results suggest that the average federal marginal income tax rate varies from 18 2 to 21 8 and the average state and local marginal income tax rate varies from 4 7 to 5 6 we also find that the state and local income tax accounts for roughly 18 of the total income taxes paid during 1985 1995 moreover our analysis shows that stephenson journal of monetary economics 41 1998 pp 389 409 provides the most consistent tax rate series for use in applications that require estimates of tax rates for years prior to 1985

brazil us commodity trade and the j curve currency devaluation or depreciation is said to temporarily worsen a country s trade balance and improve it later an effect that is called the j curve previous research that tested the j curve for brazil used the country s aggregate trade flows with the rest of the world and did not find support for the phenomenon in this article we consider the trade flows between brazil and a major trading partner the united states disaggregating their trade flows by commodity we then test the empirical validity of the j curve for each of the 92 industries that trade between the two countries we find support for the phenomenon in 31 industries therefore disaggregation by industry seems to yield some support for the phenomenon

determinants of international trade flows the case of developing countries abstract the question of magnitude and the time path of the trade flows to changes in the exchange rates and to changes in the price level is of emitent practical importance to assess the above proposition a distributed lag structure is imposed on the relative prices and on the effective exchange rate as the determinants of trade flows then import and export demand functions are estimated for a sample of developing countries using the almon procedure the empirical findings appeared to sustain orcutt s early conjecture that trade flows adjust differently to different price stimuli more precisely it was found that imports and exports reactions were quicker and the total response time was shorter when an exchange rate rather than relative prices caused a change in international prices

the empirical modelling of nie exports an evaluation of different approaches this article investigates the current debate regarding the robustness of estimates of export demand and supply elasticities for ldcs and nies obtained by recent empirical studies the empirical findings reported in the article suggest that price elasticities of demand are indeed low and that there are strong and significant income effects on export demand furthermore using a variety of modelling approaches we demonstrate that the choice of estimation method and normalisation need not lead to drastically different conclusions regarding the size of the price elasticity of demand for nie exports whilst this points against the small country assumption usually made regarding ldc nie exports we argue that the preferred development strategy for ldcs need not necessarily be an inward oriented one this is because the large estimated income market growth elasticities in the demand equations may be due to the presence of supply side influences which have been the focus of attention of the new theories of i

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

is there a j curve abstract if the response of the value of the trade balance to movements in the real exchange rate is described by a j curve then a real depreciation initially worsens a balance of trade deficit only improving it over time this paper investigates whether a j curve can be detected in the last twenty five years of american data no statistically reliable evidence of a stable j curve is detected the model is checked extensively to support this finding

trade liberalisation the peso and mexico s commodity trade flows with the united states abstract we assess the effects of real peso devaluations as well as the effects of gatt and nafta on mexico s in payments and out payments with the united states for 102 industries we find that relatively few trade flows are sensitive to changes in the real exchange rate probably due to production sharing and intra industry trade but devaluations affect mexican imports more than exports trade liberalisation has had a larger impact particularly on imports of intermediate goods and exports of certain manufactures many affected export industries are ones that have previously been shown to have economies of scale

reassessing discretionary fiscal policy in 1992 president bush proposed legislation intended to speed up the recovery from the 1990 91 recession congress rejected this proposal for countercyclical fiscal policy stimulus in early 1993 president clinton proposed his own stimulus package but congress rejected this proposal too many reasons were given for deciding against these two discretionary fiscal policy proposals but perhaps the most common one was the large federal budget deficit in the early 1990s with the rapid disappearance of budget deficits in recent years this reason to vote against a discretionary fiscal stimulus is unlikely to be mentioned in the next economic cycle discretionary countercyclical fiscal policy again appears to be a politically feasible option but should america use it after so many years of disuse much has happened in macroeconomics since the 1960s and 1970s when discretionary countercyclical fiscal policy was last considered a serious option in the united states first monetary policy making has changed substantially over the last two decades the federal reserve s interest rate decisions have become more explicit more systematic and more reactive to changes in both inflation and output the fed has placed a greater emphasis on keeping inflation low the experience with this new policy has been very favorable inflation has been low since the early 1980s and the real economy has been more stable the 1980s and 1990s saw two lengthy expansions separated by a relatively short and mild recession in terms of the tradeoff between output variability and inflation

the finite moment log stable process and option pricing we document a surprising pattern in s p 500 option prices when implied volatilities are graphed against a standard measure of moneyness the implied volatility smirk does not flatten out as maturity increases up to the observable horizon of two years this behavior contrasts sharply with the implications of many pricing models and with the asymptotic behavior implied by the central limit theorem clt we develop a parsimonious model which deliberately violates the clt assumptions and thus captures the observed behavior of the volatility smirk over the maturity horizon calibration exercises demonstrate its superior performance against several widely used alternatives

a nonlinear factor analysis of s p 500 index option returns growing evidence suggests that extraordinary average returns may be obtained by trading equity index options and that at least part of this abnormal performance is attributable to volatility and jump risk premia this paper asks whether such priced risk factors are alone sufficient to explain these average returns to provide an answer in as general as possible a setting i estimate a flexible class of nonlinear models using all s p 500 index futures options traded between 1986 and 2000 the results show that priced factors contribute to these expected returns but are insufficient to explain their magnitudes particularly for short term out of the money puts in a recent paper c oval and shumway 2001 examine the returns on deltahedged option positions focusing on the at the money straddle and find average returns close to minus 3 per week since over short time horizons these positions are approximately invariant to movements in the underlying index coval and shumway argue that their capm betas should be near zero and their expected returns close to the risk free rate they conclude that large deviations from the capm are the norm which they suggest is evidence that some other systematic factor such as stochastic volatility might be priced by the market similar conclusions are made by jackwerth 2000 who finds risk adjusted profitability from selling puts and by bakshi and kapadia 2003 who find that the volatility risk premium contributes significantly to higher prices for calls and puts buraschi and jackwerth 2001 concur suggesting that more than one priced risk factor is necessary to explain option prices a less direct set of evidence is the now standard observation that the black scholes implied volatilities of equity index options are upward biased predictors of future realized volatility numerous studies such as fleming ostdiek and whaley 1995 and christensen and prabhala 1998 document that implied volatilities of short term at the money equity index options are on average several percentage points higher than the volatilities realized over the option s

effects of exchange rate variability on inflation variability abstract previous studies have postulated that there exists a positive relationship between the rate of inflation and its variability they have shown that a high inflation rate contributes to inflation variability in this paper we argue that with the current floating exchange rate system exchange rate variability is another factor contributing to inflation variability after incorporating a measure of exchange rate variability into a simple model used by previous authors we estimate our model using cross country data from 20 developed and 76 less developed countries the cross sectional regression results support our conjecture

prices activity and machinery exports an analysis based on new pricedata new data for the export prices of the united states germany and japan produced price elasticities for exports of machinery and transport equipment that were highest for the united states and lowest well below 1 for germany the effects of price changes on exports lasted at least two years in all three countries and possibly four years in the united states only in germany would most effects of price changes take place in the year of the change u s export income in foreign currency would not exceed its pre depreciation level until the third year after a depreciation

quantifying tax effects under policy foresight abstract studies of tax effects make the conventional information assumption that changes in period t taxes become known at t legislative lags however imply that news arrives before tax changes take place under policy foreknowledge the conventional information structure is therefore misspecified simulations of a standard neoclassical growth model suggest that foresight of only one quarter can distort substantially the estimates of tax effects obtained under the no foresight assumption also it is crucial to model capital and labor taxes separately anticipated changes in these two tax policies have opposite effects on consumption investment labor and output before policy realization

countercyclical taxes in a monopolistically competitive environment in the context of a neoclassical growth model with monopolistic competition this paper studies the stabilizing effects of countercyclical tax policy when the income tax rate has an additional role of financing government budget deficits consistent with the conventional wisdom countercyclical taxes generally reduce aggregate volatility unless the fiscal response to debt accumulation is weak the presence of monopoly power enhances these effects even when automatic stabilizers successfully stabilize business cycle fluctuations countercyclical taxes are welfare inferior due to reduced precautionary saving motives while if the fiscal response to debt is weak and countercyclical tax policy destabilizing the increased precautionary saving motive is not welfare enhancing as the asset accumulated is government debt rather than capital these results are generally robust nominal inertia may however dominate the precautionary saving mechanism

optimal simple and implementable monetary and fiscal rules welfare maximizing monetary and fiscal policy rules are studied in a model with sticky prices money and distortionary taxation the ramsey optimal policy is used as a point of comparison the main findings are the size of the inflation coefficient in the interest rate rule plays a minor role for welfare it matters only insofar as it affects the determinacy of equilibrium optimal monetary policy features a muted response to output interest rate rules that feature a positive response to output can lead to significant welfare losses the welfare gains from interest rate smoothing are negligible optimal fiscal policy is passive the optimal monetary and fiscal rule combination attains virtually the same level of welfare as the ramsey optimal policy

determinants of bilateral trade flows what factors influence the level of trade flows that occur between nations past studies have answered this question primarily in terms of distance and economic size the present study considers additional variables as potential determinants of trade relations between nations also trade flows are analyzed by the type of products being exported and imported the findings show that several additional variables are significant determinants of the level of bilateral trade relations between nations in addition it is found that models of trade flows are more appropriate for manufactured goods than they are for basic commodities

automatic stabilizers fiscal rules and macroeconomic stability abstract this paper analyzes the effect of the fiscal structure upon the trade off between inflation and output stabilization induced by technological shocks in a dge model with nominal and real rigidities that also integrates a rich menu of fiscal variables as well as a target on the debt to output ratio the channels through which fiscal policy affects macroeconomic stability include supply side effects of distortionary taxes the procyclical behavior of public spending induced by fiscal rules and the conventional effect of automatic stabilizers operating through disposable permanent income the paper investigates these channels and concludes that contrary to what has been found in rbc models distortionary taxes tend to reduce output volatility relative to lump sum taxes when significant rigidities are present we also study the stabilization effect of alternative distortionary tax structures and find that these are only relevant if substantial rigidities are present

does exchange rate variability matter for welfare a quantitative investigation of stabilization policies abstract this paper studies what degree of exchange rate stabilization is optimal for several types of open economies this is accomplished through a quantitative evaluation of optimal monetary policy rules in a two country sticky price model first a calibrated benchmark model with incomplete asset markets supports past conclusions from simpler models emphasizing inflation stabilization rather than exchange rate stabilization it also highlights that the utility gains from optimal stabilization policy are small second while an economy extended to include consumer habits implies greater sensitivity by households to consumption variability it has only minor effects on the benchmark conclusions and benefits finally these conclusions are altered under an alternative environment where international asset markets exhibit asymmetry in the form of original sin such countries can benefit from policies that aggressively stabilize the exchange rate with utility gains larger than the previous cases

the failure of stabilization policy balanced budget fiscal rules in the presence of incompressible public expenditures abstract we consider an infinite horizon neoclassical model with a government that i balances its budget at each point in time ii faces unavoidable incompressible public expenditures and iii further uses a fiscal rule for the share of variable government spending in output with the purpose of stabilizing the economy we show that insulating this economy from belief driven fluctuations is not possible if the government finances these two components of public spending using a distortionary proportional income tax in this case we always have steady state multiplicity two steady states and global indeterminacy while local indeterminacy is also possible more precisely even if a sufficiently procyclical share of the variable government spending component in output is still able to eliminate local indeterminacy two saddle steady states prevail so that depending on expectations the economy may either converge to the low steady state or to the high steady state this implies that a regime switching rational expectation equilibrium where the economy switches between paths converging to the two different steady states easily arises as expectations influence long run outcomes our model is able to generate large and sudden expansions and contractions in response to expectation shocks

monopolistic competition and the effects of aggregate demand how important is monopolistic competition to an understanding of the effects of aggregate demand on output we ask the question at three levels can monopolistic competition by itself explain why aggregate demand movements affect output can it together with other imperfections generate effects of aggregate demand in a way that perfect competition cannot if so can it give an accurate account of the response of the economy to aggregate demand movements the answers are no yes and yes

the significance of federal taxes as automatic stabilizers using the taxsim model for the period 1962 95 we consider the federal tax system s impact as an automatic stabilizer despite the many changes in the tax system there has been relatively little change in its role as an automatic stabilizer we estimate that individual federal taxes offset perhaps as much as 8 percent of initial shocks to gdp we also suggest that the progressive income tax may help to stabilize output via its effect on the supply of labor an additional effect that may even be of similar magnitude to the more traditional path of stabilization through aggregate demand

us bilateral trade equations forecasts and structural stability in this paper actual recent us trade values are compared with out of sample forecasts using a standard specification for real bilateral trade value equations though fairly accurate on average there are large bilateral errors a battery of coefficient stability tests indicates significant instability more often for imports over the forecast period and more often for exports over the latter part of the estimation period thus standard bilateral trade equations appear to violate the basic regression assumption of stability and may be of little use for forecasting

does trade still follow the flag t he economic ties between any two nations are frequently affected by a warming or cooling of bilateral diplomatic relations but there is little to be found in modern economics or political science that helps us understand the connections between international politics and commerce the notion that international economics could be studied in isolation from its political underpinnings or consequences would have been quite alien to mercantilist thinkers in the eighteenth century or to the critics or advocates of imperialism in the nineteenth that economics and politics were inextricably intertwined was taken as a matter of course indeed trade follows the flag was central to these people s understanding of world politics and international economics intellectual trends over the past century radically changed this worldview the ascendancy of liberalism in economic thought brought with it a compartmentalization of disciplines that may now be eroding but we are left with theories of international politics and economics that are very weakly bridged the objective of this study is to map one of the many connections between international politics and commercial ties specifically i seek to identify and measure the effect of changes in state to state diplomatic relations on trade flows between those nations theoretical underpinnings of my effort are in the tradition of public choice political economy frey 1984 because i treat importers as rational utility maximizers and their behavior as determined by preferences pursued within a context of specified constraints the model i put forward is wholly consistent with contemporary neoclassical trade theory but i extend the economists notion of welfare and contend that importers take account not only of the price and quantity of goods and services but of the place of origin of these products and the political relationship between the importing and the exporting nation they do so essentially for traditional security reasons that is importers are motivated to manage their trade relations in ways that minimize risks of disruption in supply or the possibility of hurting friends or

is there a long run relation between the trade balance and the real effective exchange rate of ldcs abstract using quarterly data over 1973 1988 period the cointegration analysis is used and it is shown that the trade balance and the real effective exchange rate of some ldcs are cointegrated in the long run this approach is argued to be a close substitute for testing the marshall lerner condition

dampened power law reconciling the tail behavior of financial security returns this article proposes a stylized model that reconciles several seemingly conflicting findings on financial security returns and option prices the model is based on a pure jump levy process wherein the jump arrival rate obeys a power law dampened by an exponential function the model allows for different degrees of dampening for positive and negative jumps and also for different pricing for upside and downside market risks calibration of the model to the s p 500 index shows that the market charges only a moderate premium on upward index movements but the maximally allowable premium on downward index movements

determinants of export performance in east and southeast asia this paper examines the determinants of exports in eight east and southeast asian economies with an emphasis on the increasing importance of parts and components in total exports to see whether exports in parts and components are special and to allow comparisons export equations are estimated for three different export categories total merchandise exports manufacturing exports and exports of machinery and transport equipment sitc 7 the analysis is based on data for 1993 2008 a period over which parts and components trade burgeoned the estimations indicate that the growing importance in the export composition of parts and components within vertically integrated cross border production processes has tended to weaken the nexus of real exchange rate and export performance world demand and supply side factors including foreign direct investment tend to become more crucial in determining export performance

personal income tax progressivity and output volatility evidence from oecd countries this paper investigates empirically the effect of personal income tax progressivity on output volatility using macro data from a sample of oecd countries over the period 1982 2009 our measure of progressivity is based on the difference between the marginal and the average personal income tax rate for the average production worker we find supportive empirical evidence for the hypothesis that higher personal income tax progressivity leads to lower output volatility this effect comes in addition to the stabilizing impact of government size and it is equally important in economic terms all other factors constant countries with more progressive personal income tax systems seem to benefit from stronger automatic stabilizers

has fiscal policy helped stabilize the postwar u s economy abstract in this paper i consider whether postwar fiscal policy has helped stabilize the u s economy i do this by adding to the stochastic growth model fiscal policy feedback rules estimated from postwar data these rules allow fiscal policies to respond to current and lagged output and labor hours i use the estimated policy rules to see if postwar fiscal policy reduces output volatility and or lengthens expansions and shortens recessions i find that fiscal policy in general provides little stability on either count i also find that the endogenous feedback links by themselves can provide some stabilization

u s bilateral trade balances and the dollar abstract u s bilateral export and import values with seven large trading partners are tested for real exchange rate effects over 1975 1985 the results suggest that dollar devaluation would have the most favorable impact on the u s trade balance in the case of japan and the least favorable in the case of canada

does devaluation improve the current account this paper incorporates the link between devaluation foreign interest payments and the current acccount into a fairly general macroeconomic model in which exchange rate changes influence aggregate demand through exports imports and expenditures as well as aggregate supply via the cost of imported factors of production on the basis of avaliable statistical estimates of the behavioral and structural parameters of the model an attempt is mafe to assess the empirical importance of this link among others in a group of highly indebted industrial and developing countries by and large the empirical results indicate that high foreign debt and interest payments tend to reduce the short to medium run effect of devaluation on national income expecially in the ldcs but make little difference to its generally positive effect on the current account

exchange rate volatility and pakistan s exports to the developed world 1974 85 abstract the paper attempts to estimate the impact of exchange rate uncertainty on pakistan s exports to the developed world for 1974 85 discovering strong evidence to suggest that exports were adversely affected by the increased variability of its bilateral exchange rates unlike much of the recent evidence on developed countries however it is the variability in nominal rather than real exchange rates that is significant the computations also suggest the presence of strong third country effects

nominal and real effective exchange rates of middle eastern countries and their trade performance indexes of real and nominal effective exchange rates that are published by the imf are mostly for industrial countries none of the middle eastern countries have received any attention on this regard this paper tries to close the gap by constructing such indexes for 11 middle eastern countries over 1971 i 1994 iv period as an application long run response of their trade balance to devaluation is also investigated

monopolistic competition technology shocks and aggregate fluctuations abstract we analyze a real business cycle rbc model in which aggregate production exhibits increasing returns to specialization in conjunction with imperfect competition and free entry and exit of firms over the business cycle we show that the requirements of both high variance and high persistence in technology shocks that have been noted by critics of rbc theory may arise from the assumptions of perfect competition and constant returns to scale rather than from the general proposition that real productivity shocks can significantly account for the business cycle