financial intermediation reserve requirements and inside money a general equilibrium analysis abstract reserve requirements are examined in a general equilibrium context the paper develops a simple general equilibrium model that includes diverse opportunities for investment and a role for financial intermediaries two versions of the model are considered one is a thought experiment in which currency serves purely to satisfy legal reserve requirements the other is more realistic the model is used to analyze the comparative static effects of changes in reserve requirements the effects of changes in other parameters of the economy in the presence of reserve requirements and some qualitative issues raised by reserve requirements

the federal funds rate and the channels of monetary transmission the authors show that the interest rate on federal funds is extremely informative about future movements of real macroeconomic variables then they argue that the reason for this forecasting success is that the funds rate sensitively records shocks to the supply of bank reserves that is the funds rate is a good indicator of monetary policy actions finally using innovations to the funds rate as a measure of changes in policy the authors present evidence consistent with the view that monetary policy works at least in part through credit i e bank loans as well as through money i e bank deposits copyright 1992 by american economic association

responding to financial crisis the case of jamaica abstract the adverse economic and social effects of the financial crises that have afflicted many developing countries in recent years have highlighted the need to develop a policy response which addresses the vulnerability of financial systems to systemic instability and crisis the article examines the experience of jamaica a country which managed a financial sector crisis during the 1990s without the assistance or involvement of the international monetary fund lessons are drawn from the jamaica case study for the domestic management of banking sector failures in lower income countries

welfare maximizing inflation rates under fractional reserve banking with and without deposit rate ceilings note 1 lntroduction friedman 1971 in his paper on the revenue maximizing rate of inflation notes three possible monetary regimes 1 the government as sole issuer of non interest bearing money 2 a model with competitive banking and fractional reserve requirements and 3 a fractional reserve system with an effective restriction on interest payments calvo and fernandez 1983 show that maximal government revenues are not different between the first two classes but the revenue maximizing rate of inflation increases without bound as the reserve ratio falls 1 section 2 will argue that under a deposit rate ceiling friedman s third case the revenue maximizing rate of inflation is unaltered or even lowered by fractional reserve banking while the maximal revenues fall bailey 1956 tower 1971 and several other papers have focused on the welfare maximizing rate of inflation unless the marginal cost of explicit tax finance and the marginal benefit of government expenditures are infinite a welfaremaximizing government would not pursue inflationary finance to the revenuemaximizing rate section 3 will extend an analysis similar to tower s to explore the implications of fractional reserve banking with deposit ceilings recent banking deregulation has tended towards removing the restrictions on competitive banking section 4 will argue that in a competitive banking model the welfare maximizing rate of inflation may rise or fall

liquidity effects and the monetary transmission mechanism several recent papers provide strong empirical support for the view that an expansionary monetary policy disturbance generates a persistent decrease in interest rates and a persistent increase in output and employment existing quantitative general equilibrium models which allow for capital accumulation are inconsistent with this view there does exist a recently developed class of general equilibrium models which can rationalize the contemporaneous response of interest rates output and employment to a money supply shock however a key shortcoming of these models is that they cannot rationalize persistent liquidity effects this paper discusses the basic frictions and mechanisms underlying this new class of models and investigates one avenue for generating persistence we argue that once a simplified version of the model in christiano and eichenbaum 1991 is modified to allow for extremely small costs of adjusting sectoral flow of funds positive money shocks generate long lasting quantitatively significant liquidity effects as well as persistent increases in aggregate economic activity

aid and the public sector in pakistan evidence with endogenous aid summary aid has been the principal source of development finance for the majority of developing countries over the past few decades this has spawned a large literature on the effectiveness of aid which remains essentially inconclusive the empirical literature has tended to evaluate the impact of aid by including it as a variable in a regression for the determinants of some economic performance indicator this paper follows a different strand of the literature and examines the impact of aid on public sector fiscal behavior aid is in general given to the public sector thus any effect of aid is mediated by that sector we specifically address this behavioral feature by analyzing how aid revenue affects government fiscal behavior with respect to tax borrowing and expenditure decisions unlike previous contributions aid is endogenous in our model which has a number of important implications we estimate an econometric model that differs from previous studies not only in this respect but also by allowing domestic borrowing in addition to aid and tax revenue to finance both capital and recurrent expenditure structural and reduced form equations are derived and estimated using 1956 95 time series data for pakistan results indicate contrary to much of the literature that only half of aid has gone to government consumption that it has had a slightly positive impact on public investment and negative impact on tax effort

optimal seigniorage and financial liberalization abstract this paper analyzes the effect of financial integration for countries relying on the taxation of their domestic financial system a two country model with overlapping generations and explicit financial intermediation is used goverments derive revenues from seigniorage and set optimally but non cooperatively the rate of inflation and the level of required reserves on bank deposits a financial liberalizations leads to lower reserve ratios higher inflation rates and larger stocks of government debt when the liberalization is anticipated governments may temporarily increase the reserve ratios before the liberalization occurs jel f30 e60

what happened to the washington consensus the phrase the washington consensus was so the story goes coined by john williamson at a conference in response to the suggestion that during the 1980s countries in latin america were being confronted with conflicting and therefore confusing advice from the international monetary fund and the world bank williamson s response was that there was in fact a strong consensus about policy across the washington based institutions around the need for macroeconomic stability microeconomic liberalisation and openness their advice was therefore not conflicting but reinforcing

job creation process in a transition economy in many european countries sme policy is close to being a synonym for job creation most empirical research on the job generation potential of small firms over the last decade has been done in the stable and favorable economic conditions of market economies the paper investigates the role of small firms in more difficult circumstances on an empirical data set for slovenia the paper tries to show that small firms have been the most important employer during the transition period a finding that very likely can be extrapolated for other european transition economies over the last decade slovenia has transformed from a labor managed economic system to a market oriented economy if we compare the firm size structure in a socialist like economy to the firm size structure in a mature market economy close to equilibrium we notice a typical absence of small and medium sized firms with the exception of craft shops that was how slovenia appeared in the early nineties charac terized by the removal of administrative barriers transition encouraged a spontaneous entrepreneurial wave through an expanding small business sector the ensuing changes in employment distribution changed the firm size structure

empirical exercises in estimating the effects of different types of financial institutions functioning on economic growth while recent studies of the finance growth nexus have focused on the use of proxies which more accurately capture the theorized functioning of the financial sector they have tended to focus either on the functioning of the financial sector as a whole or on the dominant institutions within the sector little attention has been paid to a comparison of the relative effects of different types of financial institutions on economic growth this article attempts to get a deeper understanding of the finance growth process by disaggregating the total financial sector impact and examining the individual and relative effects of each type of institution in the financial sector we explore the empirical properties of alternative specifications of models of the impact of financial institutions functioning on economic growth by conducting a number of exercises these exercises experiment with various model specifications to represent the long and short run impacts of the financial institutions functioning on econo

principles of fiscal and monetary policy abstract this paper describes a complete and internally consistent set of principles for the conduct of a welfare maximizing fiscal and monetary policy issues of time consistency that arise in applying these principles to actual economics are also discussed

entry barriers exit and sunk costs an analysis the relationship between entry rates entry barriers and sunk costs are examined across a set of four digit industry data results indicate that product differentiation barriers reduce entry rates and sunk capital costs reduce exit rates whether entry and exit are truly simultaneous however is not clear

james tobin an appreciation of his contribution to economics jim tobin who died on march 11 2002 at the age of 84 was one of giants of economics of the second half of the twentieth century and the greatest macroeconomist of his generation tobin s influence on macroeconomic theory is so pervasive so much part of our professional acquis that many younger economists often are not even aware that it is his ideas they are elaborating testing criticising refuting or re inventing in this appreciation i consider tobin s scholarly contributions made over a period of more than 50 years tobin received the 1981 nobel memorial prize for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions employment production and prices i consider his contributions to mean variance portfolio demand and asset pricing theory especially the portfolio separation theorem pitfalls in financial model building portfolio balance and flow of funds models and the credit channel the life cycle model and social security econometric methodology including the tobit estimator and his pioneering work using both time series and cross sectional data to estimate food demand functions economic growth tobin s q the tobin tax the monetary and fiscal policy effectiveness debate first with milton friedman and then with the new classical macroeconomics and real business cycle schools and tobin s approach to methodological questions including microfoundations and aggregation

liquidity effects monetary policy and the business cycle this paper presents a flexible price quantitative general equilibrium model with the property that a positive money supply shock drives the nominal interest rate down and aggregate employment output and the real wage up these implications are broadly consistent with postwar u s data the two key features of the model that are responsible for its properties are 1 money shocks have a heterogeneous impact on agents and 2 ex post inflexibilities in production give rise to a very low short run interest elasticity of money demand in our model the extent of the drop in the interest rate after a positive money supply shock depends on the degree to which production is ex post inflexible given sufficient ex post inflexibility the model conforms well with the view widely held within the u s federal system that the short run interest rate elasticity for total reserves is very close to zero copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

why are prices sticky preliminary results from an interview study this paper reports preliminary results from a large research project on business pricing which is currently underway the idea is to use interviews with actual price setters to assess the validity of a dozen theories of price stickiness the rather unorthodox for economists methodology is defended the research design is described briefly and a few results based on the first 72 interviews out of a projected 200 are presented this sample suggests that the median firm changes its price annually and that price adjustments typically lag 3 4 months behind shocks to demand or cost this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

price flexibility and output stability an old keynesian view in this symposium i shall play the role in which i was cast the unreconstructed old keynesian considering the alternatives i do not mind being billed as a keynesian an old keynesian at that but old keynesians come in several varieties and i speak for no one but myself nor do i defend the literal text of the general theory several generations of economists have criticized amended and elaborated that seminal work i shall argue for the validity of the major propositions that distinguish keynesian macroeconomics from old or new classical macroeconomics

on the welfare macroeconomics of government financial policy is welfare as indicated by per capita private and collective consumption lower in longrun steady states with higher inflation rates on the one hand inflation diverts resources from production to economizing of cash holdings on the other those same economies create extra room for capital in the portfolios of finite horizon savers and seignorage from inflationary money creation permits tax reductions favorable to accumulation of wealth and capital it is shown that the optimal inflation may be positive therefore contrary to feldstein sacrifices of current output and employment may not be justified by the disinflation they bring about

nominal wage rigidity and the rate of inflation using the accurate and extensive data available in the uk new earnings survey this paper investigates the extent to which nominal wages are downwardly rigid and whether such rigidity interferes with necessary real wage adjustments when inflation is low despite the substantial numbers of individuals whose nominal wages fall from one year to the next we find that if long run inflation is one percent higher the number of individuals with negative real pay growth increases by around 1 4 percent this is controlling for the median and dispersion of the real wage change distribution

the optimum quantity of money rule in the theory of public finance this paper examines optimal tax policy in a monetary economy in which money serves as an intermediate good that helps facilitate the conversion of scarce resources into tinal consumption goods by enabling consumers to economize on the costs of transacting it is shown that in such an environment even though distorting taxes must be levied for revenue purposes the optimal tax structure calls for abstaining from inflationary finance and adopting the optimum quantity of money rule

commodity price stabilization in imperfect or cartelized markets most studies of commodity price stabilization assume that all agents behave competitively however many commodities suitable for stockpiling are produced by countries with a significant share of the world market and commodity agreements themselves often result in cartelization of the market the paper explores the consequences of market power for the choice of storage rule and the degree of price stabilization it finds that with linear demand dominant producers choose more stable prices than under perfect competition and price stability increases with their market share with constant elastic demand the competitive degree of price stabilization is achieved

an intertemporal general equilibrium model of asset prices this paper develops a continuous time general equilibrium model of a simple but complete economy and uses it to examine the behavior of asset prices in this model asset prices and their stochastic properties are determined endogenously one principal result is a partial differential equation which asset prices must satisfy the solution of this equation gives the equilibrium price of any asset in terms of the underlying real variables in the economy in this paper we develop a general equilibrium asset pricing model for use in applied research an important feature of the model is its integration of real and financial markets among other things the model endogenously determines the stochastic process followed by the equilibrium price of any financial asset and shows how this process depends on the underlying real variables the model is fully consistent with rational expectations and maximizing behavior on the part of all agents our framework is general enough to include many of the fundamental forces affecting asset markets yet it is tractable enough to be specialized easily to produce specific testable results furthermore the model can be extended in a number of straightforward ways consequently it is well suited to a wide variety of applications for example in a companion paper cox ingersoll and ross 7 we use the model to develop a theory of the term structure of interest rates many studies have been concerned with various aspects of asset pricing under uncertainty the most relevant to our work are the important papers on intertemporal asset pricing by merton 19 and lucas 16 working in a continuous time framework merton derives a relationship among the equilibrium expected rates of return on assets he shows that when investment opportunities are changing randomly over time this relationship will include effects which have no analogue in a static one period model lucas considers an economy with homogeneous individuals and a single consumption good which is produced by a number of processes the random output of these processes is exogenously determined and perishable assets are defined as claims to all or a part of the output of a process and the equilibrium determines the asset prices our theory draws on some elements of both of these papers like merton we formulate our model in continuous time and make full use of the analytical tractability that this affords the economic structure of our model is somewhat similar to that of lucas however we include both endogenous production and

menu costs and the neutrality of money a model of endogenous price adjustment under money growth is presented firms follow s s pricing policies and price revisions are imperfectly synchronized in the aggregate price stickiness disappears and money is neutral the connection between firm price adjustment and relative price variability in the presence of monetary growth is also investigated the results contrast with those obtained in models with exogenous fixed timing of price adjustment

rules of thumb for social learning this paper studies agents who consider the experiences of their neighbors in deciding which of two technologies to use we analyze two learning environments one in which the same technology is optimal for all players and another in which each technology is better for some of them in both environments players use exogenously specified rules of thumb that ignore historical data but may incorporate a tendency to use the more popular technology in some cases these naive rules can lead to fairly efficient decisions in the long run but adjustment can be slow when a superior technology is first introduced

seigniorage and the case for national money in countries with high rates of inflation there is typically movement away from the use of the local currency the paper analyzes the costs and benefits of using a local currency with emphasis on the seigniorage foregone by using a foreign money even if it should be desirable for a country to fix its exchange rate it still loses seigniorage if it does not use its own money the case for using a foreign money then turns largely on the superior discipline imposed on domestic policymakers by removing their control over the money supply alternative methods of imposing discipline are discussed estimates of the amount of seigniorage raised by different governments are presented seigniorage amounts in some cases to about 10 percent of government revenue estimates are also presented of both the annual flow and one time stock costs of giving up use of domestic currencies and instead using the dollar the flow cost is typically about 1 percent of gnp and the stock cost is around 10 percent of gnp

seigniorage old and new policy issues introduction abstract seigniorage is at the crossroad of many avenues of research a summary survey of older and more recent developments from the static allocative approach in the differential taxation framework to policy analyses of the effects of joining the ems for high deficit countries shows that there may be some disorderly traffic and that definite policy conclusions can hardly be drawn from models which so often neglect relevant markets and variables and in particular the financial sectors and financial assets

mean reversion of real exchange rates in high inflation countries we test for mean reversion in real exchange rates using data from five countries four of which have experienced episodes of high inflation using monthly data for argentina brazil chile colombia and israel we find that a stochastic unit root model is typically appropriate brazil is the exception kalman filter estimates of the stochastic unit roots show sharp deviations from unity associated with high inflation episodes this suggests that stochastic unit root models are a more appropriate way to model mean reversion in real exchange rates for high inflation countries than models with fixed rates of mean reversion

inflation and unemployment the world economy today is vastly different from the 1930s when seymour harris the chairman of this meeting infected me with his boundless enthusiasm for economics and his steadfast confidence in its capacity for good works economics is very different too both the science and its subject have changed and for the better since world war ii but there are some notable constants unemployment and inflation still preoccupy and perplex economists statesmen journalists housewives and everyone else the connection between them is the principal domestic economic burden of presidents and prime ministers and the major area of controversy and ignorance in macroeconomics i have chosen to review economic thought on this topic on this occasion partly because of its inevitable timeliness partly because of a personal interest reaching back to my first published work in 1941

many happy returns recidivism and the imf abstract imf programs are designed to provide a temporary source of finance for countries with balance of payments disequilibria consequently borrowing from the imf should occur infrequently and be widely distributed among member countries however some countries are recurrent users of fund resources this paper investigates which variables account for multiple borrowings from the imf we use models of count data to examine the impact of the need for financing domestic policies external shocks and structural and institutional factors on borrowings between 1980 and 1996 we find that recidivist borrowers have lower reserve holdings larger current account deficits and capital outflows lower but less volatile terms of trade larger debt service and external debt ratios lower investment rates and per capita income and weak governance

liquidity loanable funds and real activity abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model of two traditional explanations of the monetary black box linking money and real activity the liquidity effect and the loanable funds effect these effects are modeled with a monetary production economy in which central bank injections of cash are funnelled into the economy through the credit market since only borrowers have direct access to the newly injected cash monetary injections cause nominal interest rates to fall if firms are borrowers then monetary injections also increase current and future real activity

convergence of least squares learning in environments with hidden state variables and private information we study the convergence of recursive least squares learning schemes in economic environments in which there is private information the presence of private information leads to the presence of hidden state variables from the viewpoint of particular agents by applying theorems of ljung we extend some of our earlier results to characterize conditions under which a system governed by leastsquares learning will eventually converge to a rational expectations equilibrium we apply insights from the learning results to formulate and compute the equilibrium of a version of townsend s model

a near rational model of the business cycle with wage and price inertia this paper presents a model in which insignificantly suboptimal behavior causes aggregate demand shocks to have significant real effects the individual loss to agents with inertial price wage behavior is second order in terms of the parameter describing the shock while the effect on real economic variables is first order thus significant changes in business activity can be generated by anticipated money supply changes provided that some agents are willing to engage in nonmaximizing behavior which results in small losses

a general measure of inflation tax revenues abstract a general measure of the revenues from the inflation tax and seignorage is presented which is correct across models previous measures seemingly dependent on specific policy assumptions can be seen as special cases of this unified measure

on money as a medium of exchange we analyze economies in which individuals specialize in consumption and production and meet randomly over time in a way that implies that trade must be bilateral and quid pro quo nash equilibria in trading strategies are characterized certain goods emerge endogenously as media of exchange or commodity money depending both on their intrinsic properties and on extrinsic beliefs there are also equilibria with genuine fiat currency circulating as the general medium of exchange we find that equilibria are not generally pareto optimal and that introducing fiat currency into a commodity money economy may unambiguously improve welfare velocity acceptability and liquidity are discussed

why do we have nominal government debt abstract we study the choice between nominal and indexed debt in a stochastic macroeconomic model with discretionary monetary and fiscal policy with distortionary taxes nominal debt provides valuable insurance against the budgetary effects of economic fluctuations we show that a welfare maximizing government always issues some nominal debt even though nominal debt increases inflation along the time consistent path of the economy the result is fairly robust with respect to changes in assumptions about policy constraints and about the macroeconomic setting

did technology shocks cause the 1990 91 recession real business cycle theory has been used to determine the statistical properties of aggregate fluctuations induced by technology shocks the finding is that technology shocks have been an important contributor to fluctuations in the u s economy for example finn e kydland and prescott 1991 estimate that if the only impulses were technology shocks the u s economy would have been 70 percent as volatile as it has been over the postwar period in this paper we employ the theory to answer the question did technology shocks cause the 1990 1991 recession answering this question requires the determination of the effects of technology shocks on the path of the economy the procedure that we use to make this determination is as follows first we construct a model economy and calibrate it so that its steady state matches actual 1987 values data for other years are used to determine the realizations of the shocks and the nature of the stochastic processes generating these shocks given these stochastic processes the equilibrium decision rules for our calibrated economy are computed we then construct the path for the economy implied by the model for the period 1984 1 1992 3 we set 1984 1 model values of the state variables equal to actual 1984 1 values and use the decision rules and the realized shocks to construct this path finally we examine whether the model economy experiences a recession in 1991 as did the u s economy business cycles are variations in output per adult that are in large part accounted for by variation in the per adult time allocated to market production figure 1 plots the time path of the per adult labor input during the 1983 1 1989 1 period there was a remarkable 12 percent increase in the labor input per adult beginning in 1990 2 there has been a decline of nearly 6 percent in this per adult labor input an unusual feature of the recovery subsequent to the 1990 1991 recession is that this labor input variable has continued to decline well into the recovery this unusual behavior leads to a related question did technology shocks cause the slow recovery we found it necessary to modify the standard real business cycle model in four ways in order to answer the posed question first given the enormous changes in the relative prices of durables as depicted in figure 2 we could not treat technology change as being neutral with respect to different types of final goods following john b long and charles plosser 1983 and jeremy greenwood et al 1992 we consider multiple production sectors with technology change differing across sectors second we assume that there is a technology employed within the household sector that produces a consumption flow from the stock of consumer durables third we consider land to be a factor of production in addition to labor and capital our fourth modification is to introduce population growth

characterization of the optimal tax on money when it functions as a medium of exchange abstract this paper compares the relative efficiency of the implicit taxation of money and the explicit taxation of real commodities to finance a given amount of government expenditures in the model used money has the property of reducing transactions costs a sufficient condition for a tax on money to be welfare dominated by a linear tax on consumption expenditures is characterized in terms of a few parameters very familiar in macroeconomics this characterization is especially useful in the cases of heterogeneous consumers and increasing returns to scale in transactions since then the optimal tax on money may in principle be positive

adaptive learning and the transition to fiat money this article explores some implications of adaptive learning for monetary evolution using a search theoretic framework that allows for media of exchange network effects adaptive learning precludes any voluntary transition to a fiat standard from a non monetary state of nature and can account for the historically observed tendency for fiat monetary standards to emerge only following the prior appearance of commodity money and the widespread employment of redeemable banknotes adaptive learning can also account for governments frequent resort to coercive measures to force a switch to fiat money and for their ability to affect such a switch even when doing so is not pareto optimal exchange media fall into the general category of products for which the utility that a user of the good derives from use of the good increases with the number of other agents using the good katz and shapiro 1985 p 424 there are two reasons for these positive network effects 1 indirect the more agents who employ a particular medium of exchange the more likely it is that prices will be quoted in terms of that medium of exchange i e that the medium of exchange will also serve as the economy s principle medium of account the costs of exchange are less for a medium of exchange that trades at par this indirect external effect is analogous to one encountered in computer hardware the more purchasers of a particular kind of hardware the more likely manufacturers of software are to supply compatible products 2 direct the more persons who use a particular exchange medium the better its quality or performance this direct network effect is analogous to one encountered in communications technologies such as telephones the analogy is especially close for fiat money which is useless to an isolated individual this article examines some ways in which media of exchange network effects influence the evolution of monetary standards and especially their role in determining both when and how a transition may occur from barter or commodity money to fiat money the approach taken here emphasises the role of adaptive learning where agents select exchange strategies that reflect static expectations concerning other agents preferred strategies although the exchange game agents play generally has multiple nash equilibria including one in which all agents accept fiat money adaptive learning precludes a spontaneous transition from barter to a fiat monetary standard even where a fiat standard would be welfare enhancing yet such learning does not rule out the spontaneous evolution of a commodity money standard or the eventual substitution of redeemable banknotes for commodity money readers familiar with the literature on network effects will recognise this

the uruguay round agreements impact on developing countries abstract implementation of the results of uruguay round will bring about significant increases in trade investment income and welfare for developing countries this derives from increased market access to developed countries markets and from enhanced efficiency originating from their own liberalization commitments although the distribution of benefits will be uneven developing countries will also benefit from improved rules for trade and investment coupled with enhanced institutional enforcement of these rules and greater exposure to global competition within a more predictable secure and credible international trading environment to maximize the benefits however developing countries will need to continue with recent unilateral reforms to improve their supply response

the revenues expenditures nexus evidence from local government data this paper examines the intertemporal linkages between local government expenditures and revenues the main results that emerge from an analysis of fiscal data from 171 municipal governments over the period 1972 80 are that 1 one or two years are sufficient to summarize the relevant dynamic interrelationships 2 there are important intertemporal linkages between expenditures taxes and grants and 3 past revenues help predict current expenditures but past expenditures do not alter the future path of revenues this last finding is contrary to results that have emerged from previous analyses of federal fiscal data copyright 1989 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

comments by professor james tobin professor tobin was invited to reflect upon the experiment in applied econometrics at the workshop convened to discuss the experiment s results he discussed his education in econometrics and the contexts both economic and technical in which his paper of 1950 on the demand for food was written he outlined the concerns facing econometricians of that time to explain some aspects of his approach and compared these to the worries of the econometricians taking part in the experiment 1997 john wiley sons ltd

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

real business cycles a new keynesian perspective the debate over the source and propagation of economic fluctuations rages as fiercely today as it did 50 years ago in the aftermath of keynes s the general theory and in the midst of the great depression today as then there are two schools of thought the classical school emphasizes the optimization of private economic actors the adjustment of relative prices to equate supply and demand and the efficiency of unfettered markets the keynesian school believes that understanding economic fluctuations requires not just studying the intricacies of general equilibrium but also appreciating the possibility of market failure on a grand scale

social and economic determinants of english voter choice in the 1997 general election using a theoretical framework in which voters choices are the result of utility maximisation decisions and in which the variation of utility functions across individuals is partly deterministic depending on their socio economic characteristics and partly stochastic we estimate constituency level regression equations to explain how the electoral shares of each of the main parties depend on conditions in the constituency whilst social characteristics ap pear to have an impact similar to that predicted in the existing literature economic conditions appear to have played a very different role in 1997 from in previous elections

the role of the state in financial markets this paper reexamines the role of the state in financial markets and identifies seven major market failures that provide a potential rationale for government intervention in practice government interventions in capital markets even in industrial countries have been pervasive the paper provides a taxonomy of those interventions with respect to both the objectives they serve and the instruments they employ there is a role for the government in financial markets but the success of government interventions has been mixed it is important that interventions be well designed the paper sets out principles for government regulatory interventions and applies them to prudential regulation it then examines three other areas of intervention directed credit finanical repression and competition policy and identifies circumstances in which some amount of financial repression may actually be beneficial

competitive banks and the inflation tax abstract the purpose of this note is to show that the presence of a competitive banking sector has important quantitative implications for the revenue maximizing rate of inflation

the economics of rotating savings and credit associations evidence from the jamaican partner abstract using a unique sample of rotating savings and credit association rosca members from jamaica we provide the first econometric tests of the recent theoretical advances in the literature on roscas and find considerable support for an economic theory of roscas we find for example that payments to the rosca leader significantly enhance the sustainability of the rosca and that the contractual relationship between the leader and other rosca members is transaction cost minimizing when the degree of asset specificity is higher the contract is more flexible other theoretical predictions we validate are the inverse relationship between size of rosca and size of contribution and the use of rosca funds for durable goods purchase

restoring banking stability beyond supervised capital requirements emerging economies have been particularly prone to financial sector crises reflecting marked information asymmetries and political interference as well as the substantial volatility in underlying economic conditions and the vulnerability of banking and finance when structural economic changes create a new and uncharted operating environment the standard regulatory paradigm relies mainly on supervised capital adequacy but it may not be enough other measures to improve the incentive structure for bankers regulators and other market participants could effectively increase the number of concerned skilled and watchful eyes intermittent application of supplementary blunt instruments could also be useful

optimal financing of the government s budget taxes bonds or money financing of the government s budget in particular we consider taxation bond issuance and money creation as alternative means of financing these issues are not new some of them were extensively explored in the public finance literature some of them were explored in the monetary theory literature what we believe to be new however is that our work integrates the relevant elements from both strands of literature into a unified general equilibrium framework with this approach we are able to jointly determine the optimal combination of tax rates the rate of inflation and the interest rate on government bonds this type of analysis enables us to ask whether the rate of inflation should be positive or negative and to provide simple conditions on compensated demand elasticities which determine the answer it also enables us to reconsider milton friedman s optimum quantity of money rule in a public finance framework without lump sum taxes and to show how this rule should be modified in addition we provide insight into the desirability of a social security scheme by showing that such a program is undesirable when social security payments are financed

the fiscal theory of the price level a critique abstract this paper argues that the fiscal theory of the price level ftpl has feet of clay the source of the problem is a fundamental economic misspecification the ftplconfuses two key building blocks of a model of a market economy budgetconstraints which must be satisfied identically and market clearing or equilibriumconditions the ftpl asssumes that the government s intertemporal budgetconstraint needs to be satisfied only in equilibrium this economic misspecification has far reaching implications for the mathematicalproperties of the equilibria supported by models that impose the structure of theftpl it produces a rash of contradictions and anomalies jel classifications e31 e41 e51 e52 e62 e63 key words fiscal theory of the price level ricardian fiscal financial monetaryprogrammes government budget constraint price level indeterminacy author willem h buiter european bank for reconstruction and development oneexchange square london ec2a 2jn uktel 44 20 73386805fax 44 20 73386110 6111e mail buiterw ebrd comweb page http www nber org wbuiter index htm

why money growth determines inflation in the long run answering the woodford critique woodford 2007 argues that it is not appropriate to regard inflation in the steady state of new keynesian models as determined by steady state money growth woodford instead argues that the intercept term in the monetary authority s interest rate policy rule determines steady state inflation in this paper i offer an alternative interpretation of steady state behavior according to which it is appropriate to regard steady state inflation as determined by steady state money growth the argument relies on traditional interpretations of the central bank s power in the long run and appeals to model properties that are common to textbook and new keynesian analysis according to this argument the only way the central bank can control interest rates in the long run is via affecting inflation and its only means available for determining inflation is by determining the money growth rate

efficiency wage models of unemployment keynesian economists hold it to be self evident that business cycles are characterized by involuntary unemployment but construction of a model of the cycle with involuntary unemployment faces the obvious difficulty of explaining why the labor market does not clear involuntarily unemployed people by definition want to work at less than the going wage rate why don t firms cut wages thereby increasing profits

the superiority of contingent rules over fixed rules in models with rational expectations the paper investigates the robustness of the proposition that in stochastic models contingent or feddback rules dominate fiped or openloop rules four arguments in favour of fixed rules are considere 1 the presence of an incompetent op malevolent policy maker 2 a trade off between flexibility and simplicity or credibility 3 the new classical proposition that only unanticipated stabilization policy has real effects 4 the time inconsistency of optimal plans in non causal models that is models in which the current state of the economy depends on expectations of future states the main conclusion is that the rational expectations revolution represented by arguments 3 and 4 does not affect the potential superiority of time inconsistent closed loop policies over time inconsistent open loop policies the case against conditionality in the design of policy must therefore rest on argument 1 or 2 which predate the new classical macroeconomics

globalisation economic policy and convergence a number of recent contributions to the growth literature have emphasised the positive role played by the forces of globalisation in enabling poor countries to converge on the living standards of rich ones these include sachs and warner 1995 aziz and wescott 1997 imf 1997 world bank 1997 dollar and burnside 1997 edwards 1998 and collier and dollar 1999 and their general message is well captured by sachs and warner s claim 1995 p 3 that open economies converge and closed ones do not in other words if developing countries were to adopt a consistent policy package conducive to the preservation of an open economy that would according to all the authors cited above at least be a necessary condition for convergence there is some disagreement within the washington consensus concerning exactly what the ingredients of this consistent policy package are with sachs and warner laying primary emphasis on measures of trade policy openness collier and dollar 1999 examining a broader range of policy instruments including social policy measures and aziz and wescott 1997 p 18 arguing that what matters is complementarity with three separate elements needed in combination trade openness macro stability and a relatively low degree of government involvement in economic activity the imf s world economic outlook for may 1997 seeks to summarise the state of play by arguing that

increasing returns and the foundations of unemployment theory current approaches to macroeconomic theory divide roughly into two basic schools of thought one approach typically associated with rational expectations views the economy as basically at or near walrasian market clearing equilibrium in which case it becomes very difficult to explain away convincingly the undeniable persistence at times of involuntary unemployment another approach views the underemployed economy as being in a state of temporary fixed price disequilibrium in which case aside from having to repress suspicions that the essence of effective demand failure might not have to do with prices fixed at wrong values there is a lot of rationalising to be done about why profitable adjustments are so slow this paper argues that something like an internally consistent theory of steady state involuntary unemployment is possible and even plausible the cornerstone of this third approach is increasing returns to scale which blocks unemployed agents from breaking out of a low level equilibrium trap unless there is overall coordination or stimulation a simple model is presented which contains the basic ideas

what explains the success or failure of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s development assistance shifted largely from financing investments such as roads and dams to promoting policy reform this change came because of a growing awareness that developing countries were held back more by poor policies than by a lack of finance for investment after nearly 20 years experience with policy based or conditional lending there have now been many studies of adjustment lending most of which take a case study approach many conclude that policy based lending works if countries have decided on their own to reform the authors examine a database of 220 world bank supported reform programs to identify why adjustment programs succeed or fail they find that a few political economy variables can successfully predict the outcome of an adjustment loan 75 percent of the time variables under the world bank s control resources devoted to preparation and supervision or number of conditions have no relationship with an adjustment program s success or failure what development agencies must do then is select promising candidates for adjustment support when the candidates is a poor selection devoting more administrative resources or imposing more conditions will not increase the likelihood of successful reform to improve its success rate with adjustment lending the world bank must become more selective and do a better job of understanding which environments are promising for reform and which are not that is likely to lead to fewer adjustment loans unless there is a significant change in the number of promising reformers to become more effective at supporting policy reform the agency must be willing to accept that this may lead to smaller volumes of lending

the optimal cash balance proposition maurice allais priority maurice allais well deserved nobel prize fortuitously brought to our attention an injustice inadvertently done him to which we were unknowing accessories for years the literature has ascribed to us the parentage of the transactions cost model of optimal cash balances with its notorious square rootformula derivedfrom inventory theory recently we found that its essence is contained in allais 1947 economie et interet pp 238 41 as jacob viner used to say no matter to what source the origin of an economic proposition is ascribed someone is sure to come up with an earlier one in any event here is a translation of the pertinent passages allais describes the model in footnotes 11 and 12 to the following text pp 238 41

understanding real business cycles he 1 960s were a time of great optimism for macroeconomists many economists viewed the business cycle as dead the keynesian model was the reigning paradigm and it provided all the necessary instructions for manipulating the levers of monetary and fiscal policy to control aggregate demand inflation occurred if aggregate demand was stimulated excessively and unemployment arose if demand was insufficient the only dilemma faced by policymakers was determining the most desirable location along this inflation unemployment tradeoff or phillips curve the remaining intellectual challenge was to establish coherent microeconomic foundations for the aggregate behavioral relations posited by the keynesian framework but this was broadly regarded as a detail that should not deter policymakers in their efforts to stabilize the economy the return of the business cycle in the 1970s after almost a decade of economic expansion and the accompanying high rates of inflation came as a rude awakening for many economists it became increasingly apparent that the basic keynesian framework was not the appropriate vehicle for understanding what happens during a business cycle nor did it seem capable of providing the empirically correct answers to questions involving changes in the economic environment or changes in monetary or fiscal policy the view that keynesian economics was an empirical success even if it lacked sound theoretical foundations could no longer be taken seriously the essential flaw in the keynesian interpretation of macroeconomic phenomenon was the absence of a consistent foundation based on the choice theoretic framework of microeconomics two important papers one by milton friedman 1968 and the other by robert lucas 1976 forcefully demonstrated examples of

rational choice the contrast between economics and psychology rational choice the published record of a conference on economics and psychology frames the issues as a contest between economic theory and the falsifying evidence from psychology according to a third perspective that of experimental economics most standard theory provides a correct first approximation in predicting motivated behavior in laboratory experimental markets but the theory is incomplete particularly in articulating convergence processes in time and in ignoring decision cost this view has roots in the work of herbert simon and sidney siegel but it is not plainly represented in contemporary research in economic pyschology

births deaths nexus of firms estimating var with panel data this paper investigates dynamic interrelationships between the births and deaths of firms at the level of the 88 finnish subregions during 1989 1993 the births deaths nexus of firms is analysed using vector autoregressions var and an instrumental variable estimator the main findings are first that the firm births equation has a two year lag structure which means that firm deaths cause firm births and firm births cause subsequent births following two year lags and second that according to the firm deaths equation which has a one year lag structure firm births do not cause firm deaths but firm deaths cause subsequent deaths a further finding is that the use of the ordinary least squares estimator produces inconsistent and clearly different results from those produced by the instrumental variable estimator