exchange rates and the fiscal theory of the price level abstract this paper addresses exchange rate determination under a nominal interest peg in a two country cash in advance model under two types of cash in advance constraints if both governments peg the nominal interest rate on domestic bonds there is a continuum of equilibria each consistent with different nominal exchange rates and real resource allocations the well known finding of equilibrium uniqueness under a nominal interest rate peg in a closed economy does not survive in a multi country multi currency setting

sunspots currency substitution and inflationary finance abstract this paper explores some issues surrounding inflationary finance of government deficits in a two country world with currency substitution each country s monetary policy is assumed to be subordinate to fiscal policy private agents knowing that the monetary authorities cannot commit themselves to fixed policy rules substitute among the two monies each monetary authority is then forced to accomodate the actions of the fiscal authorities and private agents by setting monetary growth rates consistent with their decisions this framework offers some interesting insights into the behavior of nominal exchange rates and their co movements with relative money supplies and government deficits

nash solution and timing of bargaining abstract we analyze bargaining problems with unknown feasible sets and known disagreement points two characterizations of the nash solution are presented by formulating axioms specifying how bargaining solutions should respond under such circumstances

can currency competition work abstract can competition among privately issued fiat currencies work only sometimes and partially to show this we build a model of competition among privately issued fiat currencies a purely private arrangement fails to implement an efficient allocation even though it can deliver price stability under certain technological conditions although currency competition creates problems for monetary policy it is possible to design a policy rule that uniquely implements an efficient allocation

financial crises and liquidity shocks a bank run perspective abstract in contrast with the financial multiplier literature this note explores a case in which the shock triggering a financial crisis stems from the financial sector itself it is not a shock stemming from the real sector which gets amplified by say agency problems the basic intuition is provided by the bank run literature of the diamond and dybvig 1983 variety financial development is modeled as a mechanism that endows real assets e g land and capital with liquidity however liquidity can be impaired by shocks that are equivalent to a bank run liquidity creation enhances real asset prices while a liquidity crunch generates asset price collapse this bubble looking episode is not driven by standard fundamentals although it is fully in line with rationality in this context devoid of other frictions like price stickiness the note examines the effect of monetary policy in the absence of nominal rigidities it shows that preventing price deflation is not enough to offset relative to output asset price meltdown but lower policy interest rates increase relative asset prices and steady state output moreover in the neighborhood of a first best capital allocation an increase in the liquidity of capital may lower the welfare of the representative individual even if the higher liquidity of capital is sustainable and hence not destroyed by future crash illustrating the possibility of excessive financial innovation an extension of the basic model supports the conjecture that low policy interest rates may have given further incentives to the development of shadow banking

turn on the lights macroeconomic factors affecting renewable energy in pakistan the objective of the study is to examine the relationship between macroeconomic factors i e population growth urbanization industrialization exchange rate price level food production index and live stock production index and renewable energy in pakistan over a period of 1975 2012 in addition this study uses oil rent as an intervening variable to overcome the biasness of the single equation model the results indicate that macroeconomic factors positively contributed to renewable energy consumption in pakistan the causality test indicate that there is a unidirectional causality running towards macroeconomic factors to renewable energy in pakistan however renewable energy granger cause oil rent but not via other route in addition there is bidirectional causality between exchange rate and live stock production in pakistan variance decomposition analysis shows that economic growth has a major contribution to increase renewable energy in pakistan

bargaining foundations of shapley value1 a transferable utility economy in which each agent holds a resource which can be used in combination with the resources of other agents to generate value according to the characteristic function v is studied using a dynamic model of bargaining the main theorem establishes that the payoffs associated with efficient equilibria converge to the agents shapley values as the time between periods of the dynamic game goes to zero in addition it is demonstrated that an efficient equilibrium exists and is unique when an additivity condition is satisfied to demonstrate the sensitivity of the solution to the institutional detail we modify the model to allow for partnerships and show that the shapley value is no longer achieved

international financial intermediation and aggregate fluctuations under alternative exchange rate regimes this paper presents a two country overlapping generations model in which financial intermediation arises endogenously as an incentive compatible means of economizing on monitoring costs because of the existence of transactions costs money markets in the two countries are segmented and investors have differential access to international credit markets the model is used to generate predictions about the role of international intermediation in determining the nature of business cycle phenomena across alternative exchange rate regimes disturbances are propagated by a credit allocation mechanism which also lends a novel flavor to the model s long run properties

bubbles and self enforcing debt we characterize equilibria with endogenous debt constraints for a general equilibrium economy with limited commitment in which the only consequence of default is losing the ability to borrow in future periods first we show that equilibrium debt limits must satisfy a simple condition that allows agents to exactly roll over existing debt period by period second we provide an equivalence result whereby the resulting set of equilibrium allocations with self enforcing private debt is equivalent to the allocations that are sustained with unbacked public debt or rational bubbles in contrast to the classic result by bulow and rogoff 1989a positive levels of debt are sustainable in our environment because the interest rate is sufficiently low to provide repayment incentives

the nash bargaining solution is optimal abstract we consider the problem faced by players in a two person bargaining game who have different opinions about what is the appropriate solution concept to use a procedure is proposed to resolve such a conflict and it is shown that the nash bargaining solution constitutes the unique equilibrium of the game induced by the procedure as a by product we obtain that in the axiomatic characterization of the nash solution the controversial independence of irrelevant alternatives axiom can be replaced by a much weaker recursivity axiom which amounts to requiring independence of alternatives that cannot be obtained as an outcome of a risk sensitive solution

post keynesian stock flow consistent modelling a survey the aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the current stock ow consistent sfc literature indeed we feel the sfc approach has recently led to a blossoming literature requiring a new summary after the work of dos santos and above all after the publication of the main reference work on the methodology godley and lavoie s monetary economics an integrated approach to credit money income production and wealth the paper is developed along the following lines first a brief historical analysis investigates the roots of this class of models that can be traced as far back as 1949 and the work of copeland second the competing points of view regarding some of its main controversial aspects are underlined and used to classify the different methodological approaches followed in using these models namely we discuss i how the models are solved ii the treatment of time and its implication and ii the need or not for microfoundations these results are then used in the third section of the paper to develop a bifocal perspective which allows us to divide the literature reviewed according to both its subject and the methodology we explore various topics such as financialisation exchange rate modelling policy implication the need for a common framework within the post keynesian literature and the empirical use of sfc models finally the conclusions present some hypotheses and wishes for the possible lines of development of sfc models

the effects of oil price shocks on the iranian economy abstract the iranian economy is highly vulnerable to oil price fluctuations this paper analyzes the dynamic relationship between oil price shocks and major macroeconomic variables in iran by applying a var approach the study points out the asymmetric effects of oil price shocks for instance positive as well as negative oil price shocks significantly increase inflation we find a strong positive relationship between positive oil price changes and industrial output growth unexpectedly we can only identify a marginal impact of oil price fluctuations on real government expenditures furthermore we observe the dutch disease syndrome through significant real effective exchange rate appreciation

the inflation discipline of currency substitution abstract we examine the argument that currency substitution should be encouraged since it provides an inflation discipline in highly stylized games of national welfare maximization we find that as currency substitution increases currency survival comes to dominate all other considerations and inflation rates do indeed come down however we find no reason to think that these competitive inflation rates will be optimal the discipline embodied in currency substitution may be too weak or too strong it may be a poor substitute for direct coordination of monetary and fiscal policies we try to relate our analysis to recent u k proposals

the behavior of the exchange rate in the genetic algorithm and experimental economies this paper studies the behavior of the exchange rate in the kareken wallace overlapping generations economy with two currencies in which decision rules are updated using the genetic algorithm the analysis shows that a stationary monetary equilibrium of the kareken wallace model is not stable under the genetic algorithm dynamics the fluctuations in the genetic algorithm exchange rate are driven by fluctuations in the portfolio fractions which change over time in response to the inequality between the rates of return on two currencies further both the genetic algorithm simulations and the experiments with human subjects were characterized by continuing fluctuations of the exchange rate with first period consumption values close to a stationary value

exchange rate volatility and international trade a general equilibrium analysis abstract we analyze the relation between exchange rate volatility and the volume of international trade in a general equilibrium stochastic endowment economy with imperfect international commodity markets and treating both variables as endogenous even in the simplest model the sign of the relation depends on the source for the change in volatility for instance more volatility of the endowments and higher costs to international trade both boost exchange risk and lower welfare but the first increases the expected volume of trade while the second decreases trade note that even the inter equilibria relation between trade and welfare is ambiguous

an econometric study on china s economy energy and environment to the year 2030 abstract an integrated econometric model consisting of macroeconomic sub model energy sub model and environment sub model was developed and used to perform a long term simulation study for china in the coming 30 years the potential of gdp growth will be around 7 annually and the continuation of rapid economic growth could result in insurmountable difficulties for energy security air protection and co2 emission reductions for the sustainable development more comprehensive measures should be adopted including improvements in energy efficiency more rapid energy switching from coal to natural gas and renewable energy sources imposing carbon tax development of clean coal technology establishment of strategic petroleum stockpiling enforcement of air protection etc

an empirical analysis of energy demand in namibia abstract using a unique database of end user local energy data and the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag ardl bounds testing approach to cointegration we estimate the long run elasticities of the namibian energy demand function at both aggregated level and by type of energy electricity petrol and diesel for the period 1980 2002 our main results show that energy consumption responds positively to changes in gdp and negatively to changes in energy price and air temperature the differences in price elasticities across fuels uncovered by this study have significant implications for energy taxation by namibian policy makers we do not find any significant cross price elasticities between different fuel types

currency fluctuations in the post bretton woods era the international monetary landscape that has emerged since the felling of bretton woods is characterized by a hybrid exchange rate system that lies somewhere between the textbook polar cases of a gold standard and a pure float this system has relatively flexible exchange rates between major countries active central bank intervention in the market for the major currencies and predominantly fixed exchange rates relative to the dollar or to some basket of currencies for less developed countries and newly industrializing nations the majority of research on currency markets since the early 1970s has focused on the characteristics of flexible exchange rates under this hybrid regime my thesis is that this research has been unsuccessful the proportion of monthly or quarterly exchange rate changes that current models can explain is essentially zero even after the fact forecasts that use actual values instead of forecasted values of the explanatory variables cannot explain major currency movements over the post bretton woods era this result is quite surprising since exchange rate changes would be entirely unpredictable only in very special cases of the theoretical models discussed as the discussion below will argue it is not a general implication of market efficiency that exchange rates follow a random walk process 1

bargaining with an agenda gradual bargaining is represented by an agenda a family of increasing sets of joint utilities parameterized by time a solution for gradual bargaining specifies an agreement at each time we axiomatize an ordinal solution i e one that is covariant with order preserving transformations of utility it can be viewed as the limit of step by step bargaining in which the agreement of the last negotiation becomes the disagreement point for the next the stepwise agreements may follow the nash solution the kalai smorodinsky solution or many others and still yield the ordinal solution in the limit

on the value of virtual currencies nous construisons un modele d analyse pour cerner les facteurs qui influent sur le taux de change des monnaies virtuelles trois elements importent tout d abord l utilisation actuelle d une monnaie virtuelle comme moyen de paiement ensuite la decision d investisseurs prospectifs d acheter de la monnaie virtuelle et de controler ainsi l offre de ce type de monnaie enfin les facteurs qui determineront ensemble l adoption d une monnaie virtuelle par les consommateurs et son acceptation par les commercants

exchange rate indeterminacy in portfolio balance mundell fleming and uncovered interest rate parity models with full stock flow accounting respected the two country open economy portfolio balance model has just two independent equations for asset market clearing it can determine home and foreign interest rates but not the exchange rate if asset market equilibria vary smoothly over time the balance of payments equation in the mundell fleming model is not independent and cannot set the exchange rate either the familiar fixed reserves floating rate vs endogenous reserves fixed rate dichotomy does not exist and fundamentals based econometric models of the exchange rate are bound to fail an alternative is a two country is lm model with exchange rate dynamics added its dynamic properties under uncovered interest rate parity are briefly explored copyright 2004 oxford university press

contagious speculation and a cure for cancer a nonevent that made stock prices soar a sunday new york times article on a potential development of new cancer curing drugs caused entremed s stock price to rise from 12 063 at the friday close to open at 85 and close near 52 on monday it closed above 30 in the three following weeks the enthusiasm spilled over to other biotechnology stocks the potential breakthrough in cancer research already had been reported however in the journal nature and in various popular newspapers including the times more than five months earlier thus enthusiastic public attention induced a permanent rise in share prices even though no genuinely new information had been presented a central tenet of f inancial economics is that an asset should trade at the risk adjusted present value of its expected future cash f lows these expected future cash f lows exist in people s minds and do not normally lend themselves to direct observation an equilibrium price in a frictionless market does not tolerate disagreements among market participants if some people deem the price too low they will buy the asset if others think it is too high they will sell it short if necessary although the efficient markets hypothesis predicts that price changes are unpredictable it associates them with changes in traders beliefs about future cash f lows or the appropriate discount rate beliefs change with the arrival of new information thus in hindsight at least we should be able to ascribe price changes to the arrival of specific new information we examine this view in the context of a series of news reports in the media pertaining to entremed enmd a biotechnology company and other members of its sector the sunday may 3 1998 edition of the new york times reports on a recent breakthrough in cancer research and mentions enmd a company with licensing rights to the breakthrough kolata 1998 the story s impact on the stock prices was immediate huge and to a large extent permanent the new news content of the times story was nil though the substance of the story had been published as a scientific piece in nature boehm et al 1997 and in the popular press including the times itself wade 1997 more than five months earlier in november 1997

the importance of the agenda in bargaining abstract this paper discusses a multi issue bargaining game in which the players set up an agenda and negotiate on the issues sequentially according to this agenda we demonstrate that the agenda might play an important role in the bargaining and discuss the relationship between the agenda and the final outcome of the bargaining game assuming that players have conflicting evaluations regarding the importance of the issues under negotiation we identify the type of agenda each player prefers we also show that in such cases the outcome of the bargaining game need not to be efficient by demonstrating the strategic use of the agenda the paper explains the phenomenon of bargaining on the agenda

some simple bitcoin economics abstract we provide a model of an endowment economy with two competing but intrinsically worthless currencies dollar bitcoin dollars are supplied by a central bank to achieve its inflation target while the bitcoin supply grows deterministically our fundamental pricing equation implies in its simplest form that bitcoin prices form a martingale mutual impatience implies absence of speculation price volatility therefore does not invalidate the medium of exchange function bitcoin block rewards are not a tax on bitcoin holders they are financed with a dollar tax we discuss monetary policy implications bitcoin production taxation welfare and entry and characterize the range of equilibria

atheoretical macroeconometrics a critique abstract the spurious nature of the restrictions used to identify many macroeconometric models has led some researchers to advocate a style of econometric inquiry that is less dependent on prior theoretical restrictions of the sort that were central to the approach of the cowles commission this development which we call atheoretical macroeconometrics is summarized and evaluated in the current paper it is contrasted with an updated version of the cowles commission approach we conclude that while some of the exercises of atheoretical macroeconometrics are valid those that have attracted the most attention and appear the most innovative exogeneity testing impulse response analysis and policy analysis using estimated vector autoregressions are based on incorrect analysis

noncooperative foundations of the area monotonic solution given a finite set of alternatives players alternate making offers player 1 offers some alternative that 2 can accept or veto if 2 accepts it is enforced and the game ends otherwise 2 makes a counteroffer among the remaining alternatives and so on if all alternatives are vetoed a disagreement alternative is enforced first we characterize the unique outcome of any subgame perfect equilibrium of this game then we show that this outcome converges to the area monotonic solution if the alternatives are uniformly distributed over the bargaining set and as the number of alternatives tends to infinity

indeterminacy and volatility of exchange rates under imperfect currency substitution i introduction this paper presents a model of exchange rate determination under currency substitution its primary objective is to examine the implications of currency substitution for the behavior of exchange rates in a general equilibrium model under uncertainty the basic framework used here is the cash in advance model of lucas 1982 which is extended to allow for substitution among currencies it is well known that under perfect currency substitution foreign exchange rates may become indeterminate and behave independently of fundamental economic variables the reason is that the objects traded in foreign exchange markets are fiat currencies which unless supported by binding legal tender laws have no fundamental economic value when agents have unrestricted access to currency markets and are free to use any currency as the means of payment currency demands are entirely determined by speculation and consequently equilibrium exchange rates become indeterminate e g see kareken and wallace 1981 increased integration of financial markets reduces the costs and the risks of holding balances in multiple currencies 4 this creates more opportunities for currency substitution and it is reasonable to assume that agents are free to use any currency as the means of the payment in some of their international transactions for example suppose some percentage of transactions involving the u s exports to germany can be paid with either u s dollars or german marks agents will look at the opportunity costs i e u s and german nominal interest rates and expected exchange rate changes to decide what combination of the two currencies to use in these transactions if the potential costs and benefits of holding the two currencies are similar then agents will be indifferent between the two currencies we show that this could lead to exchange rate indeterminacy and nonfundamental volatility and change the effectiveness of monetary policies in our cash in advance framework agents are allowed to use any currency in some of their transactions called unrestricted transactions to make different currencies attractive at different times we allow the governments to follow timevarying monetary policies as a result agents will change their currency holdings to maximize the risk adjusted return on their portfolio subject to the constraint that specific currencies must be used as the means of payment in their restricted transactions 2 to answer specific questions about the behavior of exchange rates we obtain closed form solutions for agents demand functions equilibrium interest rates and the equilibrium exchange rate it turns out that two types of equilibrium exist in the first type the two currencies have different risk return profiles such that agents will prefer to use only one of them in unrestricted transactions in this case the exchange rate will be determined by fundamentals however as a large percentage of transactions become unrestricted the equilibrium exchange rate becomes more volatile under this type of equilibrium the effectiveness of monetary policies are changed currencies of countries that have high nominal interest rates will not be in demand for use in unrestricted transactions 3 this lack of demand means that any increase in the money supply of a high nominal rate country will lead to a larger increase in its rate of inflation and thus a larger reduction in the value of its currency in other words increased currency substitution increases the sensitivity of the currency values to changes in the money supply of high nominal rate countries also we show that as national economies become more integrated and more opportunities for currency substitution arise currencies of countries with high nominal interest rates would decline substantially the reason is that higher opportunity costs are associated with holding these currencies and thus agents will fully take advantage of currency substitution to reduce their holdings of these currencies reducing the value of these currencies

limited information and advertising in the u s personal computer industry traditional discrete choice models assume buyers are aware of all products for sale in markets where products change rapidly the full information assumption is untenable i present a discrete choice model of limited consumer information where advertising influences the set of products from which consumers choose to purchase i apply the model to the u s personal computer market where top firms spend over 2 billion annually on advertising i find estimated markups of 19 over production costs where top firms advertise more than average and earn higher than average markups high markups are explained to a large extent by informational asymmetries across consumers where full information models predict markups of one fourth the magnitude i find that estimated product demand curves are biased toward being too elastic under traditional models i show how to use data on media exposure to improve estimated price elasticities in the absence of micro ad data

game theoretic analysis of a bankruptcy problem from the talmud abstract for three different bankruptcy problems the 2000 year old babylonian talmud prescribes solutions that equal precisely the nucleoli of the corresponding coalitional games a rationale for these solutions that is independent of game theory is given in terms of the talmudic principle of equal division of the contested amount this rationale leads to a unique solution for all bankruptcy problems which always coincides with the nucleolus two other rationales for the same rule are suggested in terms of other talmudic principles needless to say the rule in question is not proportional division

a model of bimetallism bimetallism has been the subject of considerable debate was it a viable monetary system was it desirable in our model the amounts of each metal are split between coined metal satisfying a cash in advance constraint and uncoined metal yielding utility the ratio of the monies in the cash in advance constraint is endogenous bimetallism is feasible we find a continuum of steady states indexed by the constant exchange rate of the monies bimetallism is not desirable among steady states welfare under monometallism is higher than under any bimetallic equilibrium long run trends in gold and silver production placed limits on the maintenance of bimetallism at any given ratio but its sudden collapse in 1873 remains a puzzle

a strategy for launching the euro abstract this paper analyzes the constraints european union law places on the 1 january 1999 choices of irrevocably fixed conversion rates between the euro and the currencies of emu members states current eu legislation notably the maastricht treaty requires that the bilateral currency conversion factors implied by the 1 january 1999 choices equal closing market exchange rates on 31 december 1998 given that legal constraint there still exist several strategies for choosing the relative prices of emu member currencies against the euro unfortunately most of these have potentially damaging side effects one approach based on official stage 2 offers of contingent euro forward contracts with value dates at the start of stage 3 allows a highly credible preannouncement of the bilateral currency conversion factors to be set at the start of emu that approach assumes however that no prospective emu members can withdraw between their selection in may 1998 and the start of stage 3

ordinal cost sharing abstract we ask how the best known mechanisms for solving cost sharing problems with homogeneous cost functions the value proportional and serial mechanisms should be extended to arbitrary problems we propose the ordinality axiom which requires that cost shares should be invariant under essentially all increasing transformations of the measuring scales following thevalueapproach first we present an axiomatization of the shapley shubik rule based on ordinality next we define and axiomatize two extensions of theserialmechanism which contrary to the friedman moulin rule are ordinal finally we note that the aumann shapley extension of theproportionalmechanism is not ordinal we propose and defend an alternative proportional extension which does satisfy ordinality journal of economic literatureclassification numbers d63 c71

short and long run asymmetric effect of oil prices and oil and gas revenues on the real gdp and economic diversification in oil dependent economy abstract the aim of this paper is to explore the short and long run asymmetric impact of oil prices shocks and oil and gas revenues changes on the total real gdp and the level of economic diversification of the qatar economy to this end two econometric approaches have been used 1 the a b structural vector autoregressive ab svarx model with exogenous variables where four different asymmetric oil prices and oil and gas revenues measures have been employed and 2 the nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag nardl model the results show that in the short run the responses of both total real gdp and non oil real gdp to negative shocks on real oil prices and real oil and gas revenues are higher than the impact of positive shocks indicating evidence for the existence of asymmetric impact of shocks in the short run however the results suggest that the impact of shocks do not last more than three quarters this evidence for the existence of asymmetric behavior is also confirmed by the nardl analysis which shows that in the long run positive oil prices shocks and oil and gas revenues changes have higher impact on the two proxies of economic activity than negative changes do a result that confirms the resilience of the qatar economy to negative shocks and the positive role played by the energy sector in improving the qatar economic diversification degree finally the results show that the non oil sector is completely resilient to negative shocks in the long run as the impact of negative shocks are insignificant on the non oil real gdp several policies aimed to improve the level of economic diversification of the country and delink the government revenues from oil and gas revenues are proposed and discussed

inflation targeting monetary and fiscal policies in a two country stock flow consistent model this paper develops a simple two country stock flow consistent model based on that of godley and lavoie in order to motivate the use of stabilisation policies persistent inflationary pressure and endogenous economic cycles are introduced into the model three scenarios are then simulated a step decrease in real exports from country b increased wage pressure in country b and an income tax cut in country a in all cases monetary and fiscal policies in isolation enjoy little success but a combined monetary and fiscal approach to stabilisation proves highly effective moreover the model suggests that the pursuit of autonomous inflation targeting in each country introduces excessive exchange rate volatility relative to an alternative rule in which one central bank takes a leading role in interest rate setting

currency areas and monetary coordination we integrate a monetary search model into open economy macro to analyze the gains from coordinating on inflation search frictions and local congestion lead to a determinate exchange rate between two currencies relative prices deviate from the law of one price because the deviations depend on the cross country differential in money growth each country is tempted to inflate to exploit the deviations policy coordination reduces inflation and improves welfare for all countries in contrast to traditional models the gains from coordination continue to exist even after each country optimally sets a direct tax on the foreign use of the country s currency

nonfundamental uncertainty and exchange rates this paper shows that there can be equilibria in which exchange rates display randomness unrelated to fundamentals this is demonstrated in the context of a two currency one good model with three agent types and cash in advance constraints a crucial feature is that the type i agents for i 1 2 must satisfy a cash in advance constraint by holding currency i while type 3 agents can satisfy it by holding either currency it is shown that real allocations vary across the multiple equilibria if markets for hedging exchange risk do not exist and that the randomness is innocuous if complete markets exist

a fundamental theory of exchange rates and direct currency trades in this paper we construct a two country search model to determine the nominal exchange rate between two fiat monies our model allows agents to use any currency to trade for goods in all countries however search frictions restrict agents opportunities for instantaneous arbitrage and hence make the nominal exchange rate determinate the nominal exchange rate depends on the two countries economic fundamentals including the stocks and growth rates of the two monies direct exchanges between currencies are essential and they imply a nominal exchange rate that is different from the relative price between the two currencies in the goods markets there are persistent violations of the law of one price and purchasing power parity in equilibrium despite the fact that prices are perfectly flexible and all goods are tradeable between countries nominal and real exchange rates can move together in the steady state in response to money growth shocks

on the indeterminacy of equilibrium exchange rates in this paper we consider a particular international economic policy regime the laissez faire regime the distinguishing features of which are unrestricted portfolio choice and floating exchange rates and as we show this regime although favored by many economists is not economically feasible it does not have a determinate equilibrium that is an implication of an overlapping generations model more basically it is an implication of the notion that money is wanted only in order to accomplish trades

viewpoint a microfoundation of monetary economics in this lecture i explain what the microfoundations of money are about and why they are necessary for monetary economics then i review recent developments of a particular microfoundation of money commonly known as the search theory of money finally i outline some unresolved issues dans cette presentation l auteur explique ce que sont les microfondations de la monnaie et pourquoi elles sont necessaires a l economie monetaire ensuite il passe en revue certains developpements recents d une microfondation particuliere de la monnaie connue sous le nom de theorie de la recherche de la monnaie enfin l auteur fait le tour d un ensemble de problemes qui restent sans solution pour le moment

no profitable decompositions in quasi linear allocation problems abstract we study the problem of allocating a bundle of perfectly divisible private goods from an axiomatic point of view in situations where compensations can be made through monetary transfers the key property we impose on the allocation rule requires that no agent should be able to gain by decomposing the problem into sequences of subproblems combined with additional standard properties it leads to a characterization of the rule that shares the total surplus equally hence a traditional welfarist rule emerges as the unique consequence of our axioms phrased in a natural economic environment

international asset pricing with time varying risk premia abstract recent empirical evidence that forward exchange rates are biased predictors of future spot rates can also be interpreted as evidence against the hypothesis of a constant risk premium consequently reconciliation of this evidence with efficient international capital markets requires the existence of time varying risk premia this paper modifies kouri s 1977 asset pricing model to allow time varying exected returns on assets eliminates the assumption of a risk free real asset and derives the characteristics of the risk premia in the forward market as well as the equilibrium yield relationships among the equities and riskless nominal bonds of all countries

inflation expectations and qualitative government policy in ecuador 1970 1982 abstract a model of constrained money demand for a dominated domestic currency is specified it is found that the model traces the evolution of the course of inflation when applied to the experience of ecuador and provides an interpretation for the differing statistical relationship between money and prices during the estimation period

growth trade and international transfers abstract this paper analyzes the simplest neoclassical economy in which agents have finite lives and there is sustained per capita growth the growth rate of the world economy depends upon countries savings propensities and common technology trade can reverse an economy s autarkic growth trajectory and a country with a high savings rate runs a current account surplus if a surplus country expands aggregate demand while a deficit country contracts analogously world growth increases an appropriate international policy can change the path of the world economy from stagnation to growth

money time preference and external balance in monetary economies international differences in rates of time preference do not in general lead to long run trade imbalances in sharp contrast with butter s 119811 results on non monetary overlapping generation economies this claim is documented within the context of a simple two country framework in which new immortal families enter each economy over time with the two countries differing only in their subjective discount rates even if consumers are more impatient at home than abroad trade is balanced in the long run in the presence of valued fiat currencies in constant supply and the current account is indeterminate this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

comparing bargaining solutions in the shadow of conflict how norms against threats can have real effects abstract in many economic environments agents make costly and irreversible investments in guns that may enhance their respective threat payoffs but also shrink the utility possibilities set in such settings with variable threats and a variable utility possibilities set it becomes possible to rank different bargaining solutions in terms of efficiency we compare bargaining solutions within a class in which the influence of the threat point on the bargaining outcome varies across solutions under symmetry we find that the solution in which the threat point is least influential the equal sacrifice solution pareto dominates the other solutions since the equal sacrifice solution puts the least weight on the threat point norms against threats that can be seen in many seemingly rhetorical pronouncements in adversarial relations can mitigate some of the costs of conflict and therefore have efficiency enhancing effects journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c78 d30 d70 d72 k42

state currencies and the transition to the u s dollar clarifying some confusions farley w grubb s recent papers on the early u s monetary system would be important contributions to the common currency area literature were not most of their historical assertions questionable and their key assumption that the medium of exchange can be inferred from the unit of account dubious we contend that after 1781 most americans eschewed government paper money in favor of full bodied coins and convertible bank liabilities and that contrary to grubb s claim bankers did not foist the constitutional clause banning state emissions onto an unsuspecting public

a simple model of three economies with two currencies the eurozone and the usa this paper presents a keynesian model which describes three countries trading merchandise and financial assets with one another it is initially assumed that all three countries have independent fiscal policies but that two of the countries share a currency hence the model can be used to make a preliminary analysis of the conduct of economic policy in the eurozone vis a vis the rest of the world the usa the main conclusion will be that if all three countries do indeed operate independent fiscal policies the system will work under a floating currency regime but only so long as the european central bank is prepared to modify the structure of its assets by accumulating an ever rising proportion of bills issued by any weak euro country

nash demand game and the kalai smorodinsky solution we introduce two new variations on the nash demand game in one as in all past variants of nash demand games the nash bargaining solution is the equilibrium outcome the other demand game allows for probabilistic continuation in cases of infeasible joint demands specifically with probability 1 p the game terminates and the players receive their disagreement payoffs but with probability p the game continues to a second stage in which one of the two incompatible demands is randomly selected and implemented surprisingly the kalai smorodinsky solution is always the outcome of the most robust equilibrium of this game moreover ranking other solution concepts is impossible

limited commitment and the legal restrictions theory of the demand for money this paper addresses the rate of return puzzle of monetary theory similarly to the legal restrictions theory of the demand for money we assume that government bonds are subject to a minimum purchase requirement differently from this theory however we assume that intermediaries when issuing private notes cannot commit to always redeem them first we study an environment with legal restrictions to intermediation and show that cash and interest bearing bonds both circulate in the economy then we drop the legal restrictions and show that also with active intermediation under limited commitment there is an equilibrium with rate of return dominance a positive interest rate provides the intermediaries with the incentive to issue and redeem their notes

china on the move oil price explosion abstract rapid expansion of highway and jet traffic in china has created a surge of demand for oil products putting pressure on world energy markets and petroleum product prices this paper examines trends in freight and passenger traffic to assess how growth in china s transport demand relates to growth in china s economy as well as the energy intensity of transport based on assumptions about demand elasticity and energy intensity a range of scenarios is developed for china s oil demand through 2020 incremental oil demand from china s transport sector is then compared with world oil demand projections to assess the likely impact on world oil prices the finding is that new demand from china s transport sector would likely raise world oil prices in 2020 by 1 3 in reference scenarios or by 3 10 if oil supply investment is constrained

adverse incentives in the taxation of foreigners abstract sovereign policymakers will opt for too much of the public good if their tax falls partially on foreigners they myopically calculate that an increase in public spending is only partially financed by a decrease in home consumption the rest comes from foreign consumption which they do not care about this paper presents an example with seignorage taxes in a two country model with cash in advance constraints the inefficiency is characterized by an inflation bias too much public spending and large fiscal deficits curiously the countries most able to impose such taxes seem to have abstained from doing so

reference functions and balanced concessions in bargaining in bargaining agents expect their concessions to be reciprocated using the reference function concept of thomson 1981 this paper constructs a class of solutions the outcomes of which lead to balanced concessions by agents as prescribed by the reference function adopted the kalai smorodinsky solution arises as a special case another solution in this class which depends on the entire feasible set is generated by using the centre of gravity as the reference function

bargaining and the value of money abstract search models of monetary exchange have typically relied on nash 1950 the bargaining problem econometrica 18 155 162 bargaining or strategic games that yield an equivalent outcome to determine the terms of trade by considering alternative axiomatic bargaining solutions in a search model with divisible money we show that the properties of the bargaining solutions do matter both qualitatively and quantitatively for questions of first degree importance in monetary economics such as i the efficiency of monetary equilibrium ii the optimality of the friedman rule and iii the welfare cost of inflation

robustness of intermediate agreements and bargaining solutions abstract most real life bargaining is resolved gradually during this process parties reach intermediate agreements these intermediate agreements serve as disagreement points in subsequent rounds we identify robustness criteria which are satisfied by three prominent bargaining solutions the nash proportional and as a special case to the egalitarian solution and discrete raiffa solutions we show that the robustness of intermediate agreements plus additional well known and plausible axioms provide novel axiomatizations of the above mentioned solutions hence we provide a unified framework for comparing these solutions bargaining theories

oil revenue shocks and government spending behavior in iran abstract oil revenues play an important role in the political economy of iran on average 60 of the iranian government revenues and 90 of export revenues originate from oil and gas resources current international sanctions on iran have mainly targeted the oil production capacity of iran and its exports to the global markets in this study we analyze the dynamic effects of oil shocks on different categories of the iranian government expenditures from 1959 to 2007 using impulse response functions irf and variance decomposition analysis vdc techniques the main results show that iran s military and security expenditures significantly respond to a shock in oil revenues or oil prices while social spending components do not show significant reactions to such shocks

bargaining with uncertain disagreement points much of the uncertainty concerning the likely outcome of a typical management labor conflict pertains to the cost of possible conflict to the two sides in this paper we consider situations of this kind where the cost of conflict is not known with certainty however we will assume the benefits from cooperation to be known we place our analysis in the abstract framework formulated by nash 1950 nash described a bargaining problem as a pair consisting of a feasible set the amount to be divided among management and labor and a disagreement point giving the payoffs to both sides when they fail to reach agreement on a division that is the strike nash investigated the existence of solutions to such problems that would satisfy a certain list of appealing properties in his analysis both feasible set and disagreement point were assumed to be known here we assume only the feasible set to be known several studies have appeared of bargaining situations where the feasible set is unknown but the disagreement point is known while we are of course not denying the relevance of such studies we believe that an analysis of situations where it is the consequences of conflict that are unknown might be equally and perhaps even more relevant to industrial experience indeed consider a management labor conflict over wages and benefits in many industries the future profitability of the enterprise can be predicted with reasonable accuracy on the basis of its performance in the previous years whereas the impact of a strike might depend on a number of factors that are significantly harder to evaluate this is because strikes are infrequent and conjectures about these factors are often not put to the test a strike is a threat that is often not carried out and because they involve a number of parameters that are difficult to quantify such as the psychological readiness of the strikers the support they might receive from the population and the media and the likely response of competing and related industries we impose on solutions a new condition of disagreement point concavity guaranteeing that agents will agree on a compromise before the uncertainty concerning the disagreement point is resolved to illustrate this requirement somewhat more concretely suppose that bargaining takes place today without the precise location of the disagreement point being known this uncertainty being resolved tomorrow the bargainers have two options the first option is simply to wait until tomorrow and solve then whatever problem has come up unfortunately the resulting pair of contingent compromises evaluated today is in general strictly pareto dominated the other possibility is to solve today the problem obtained by replacing the uncertain disagreement point by its expected value this represents the cost of conflict evaluated today and to solve the resulting problem today this second option has the advantage of yielding paretoundominated compromises provided of course that agents would in the case of no uncertainty select such compromises but unfortunately it may make one of the agents worse off than under the first option in order to ensure that all agents agree to reaching a compromise today we require that the second option always pareto dominate the first one we show that disagreement point concavity when used in conjunction with three standard properties that are satisfied by virtually all of the solutions commonly discussed

bargaining under liquidity constraints unified strategic foundations of the nash and kalai solutions abstract we provide unified strategic foundations for the nash 1950 and kalai 1977 solutions in the context of negotiations under liquidity constraints we propose an n round game where in each round a seller and a buyer with limited payment capacity negotiate a bundle of divisible goods where bundle sizes can vary across rounds according to rubinstein s 1982 alternating offer game the game implements the nash solution if n 1 and the kalai solution if n and bundle sizes are infinitesimal if n is set by one player ex ante the buyer chooses n 1 while the seller chooses n we endogenize liquidity constraints and show they bind for all n even when there is no cost in holding liquidity

energy consumption in china past trends and future directions abstract in 2003 china s energy consumption amounted to 1678 million tonnes coal equivalent mtce making china the world s second largest consumer behind only the united states china is now also one of the largest oil importers in the world with an economy that is expected to maintain a rate of growth of 7 8 for decades china s role in the world energy market becomes increasingly influential this makes it important to predict china s future demand for energy the objective of this paper is to apply the bayesian vector autoregressive methodology to forecast china s energy consumption and to discuss potential implications the results of this paper suggest that total energy consumption should increase to 2173 mtce in 2010 an annual growth rate of 3 8 which is slightly slower than the average rate in the past decade the slower growth reflects expected slower economic growth and a decline in energy consumption due to structural changes in the chinese economy

generalized raiffa solutions abstract we define a family of solutions for n person bargaining problems which generalizes the discrete raiffa solution and approaches the continuous raiffa solution each member of this family is a stepwise solution which is a pair of functions a step function that determines a new disagreement point for a given bargaining problem and a solution function that assigns the solution to the problem we axiomatically characterize stepwise solutions of the family of generalized raiffa solutions using standard axioms of bargaining theory

gmm estimates of currency substitution between the canadian dollar and the u s dollar this paper investigates the empirical strength of currency substitution between the canadian dollar and the u s dollar euler equations implied by a small open economy money in the utility function model are estimated and tested by hansen s generalized method of moments procedure the major empirical finding is that both the elasticity of currency substitution and the share of u s currency in the production of canadian liquidity services are economically small even though the combined domestic and u s real balances appear to provide statistically significant economizing on transactions costs copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

implementing the kalai smorodinsky bargaining solution the bargaining game is proposed where the agents bid fractions of dictatorship that are used by all non winners of the auction to threaten acceptance of the winner s proposal that procedure non cooperatively implements the kalai smorodinsky bargaining solution

moneyspots extraneous attributes and the coexistence of money and interest bearing nominal bonds it is folklore among monetary theorists that under laissez faire without ad hoc assumptions that favor money over bonds there do not exist equilibria in which government issued fiat money coexists with nominal default free interest bearing government bonds with similar physical characteristics this proposition is the basis for the strongest version of the rate of return dominance puzzle in this paper i show that if as has been the case throughout monetary history the physical object used as fiat money is heterogeneous in an extraneous attribute then there exist equilibria in which money coexists with interest bearing bonds

the equal loss principle for bargaining problems abstract we introduce a new bargaining solution which we call the equal loss solution this solution equalizes across agents the losses from the ideal point two characterizations of the solution are presented by formulating axioms specifying how bargaining solutions should respond to changes in the feasible set and the ideal point

shocks effects of macroeconomic variables on natural gas consumption in nigeria structural var with sign restrictions abstract this paper has examined the transmission of shocks from macroeconomic variables namely money supply inflation exchange rate and real gdp onto natural gas consumption using structural var svar model with sign restrictions the results revealed that both in the short run and long run natural gas consumption responds significantly to the shocks emanating from money supply and real gdp while its response to inflation shock is significant only in the short run but exchange rate shock is not significant however money supply has contributed greater proportion of the shocks followed by the real gdp inflation and exchange rate in the ordering of the variance decomposition the paper recommends that nigerian authorities adjust the monetary policy tools towards regulating the money supply and checking the inflation rate to ensure increased demand for natural gas and sustained economic growth on the response of natural gas consumption to the shock in the exchange rate since the shock is positive though insignificant it implies that depreciation of the exchange rate can discourage the demand for foreign exchange imports and boost the local production which would reciprocally lead to more natural gas consumption and improved growth in the country

bitcoin 1 bitcoin 2 an experiment in privately issued outside monies the value of bitcoin depends upon self fulfilling beliefs that are hard to pin down we demonstrate this for the case where bitcoin is the only form of money in the economy and then generalize the message to the case of multiple bitcoin clones and or a competing sovereign currency some aspects of the indeterminacy we describe would no longer hold if bitcoin were an interesting bearing object

on the relationship between the exchange regime and the portfolio rules of optimizing agents the paper utilizes the overlapping generations framework to derive demand functions for money and capital we show that many of the macroeconomic comparisons of alternative exchange regimes are not legitimate since changing the exchange regime alters the portfolio rules of rational agents one cannot simply postulate a set of asset demand equations and then hold various income interest rate and wealth elasticities constant when the exchange regime changes having derived the demands for money and capital from optimizing behavior we show how changing the exchange regime affects expected capital holdings and expected utility levels of optimizing agents

optimal and time consistent exchange rate management in an overlapping generations economy abstract this paper analyzes exchange rate management in a simple overlapping generations model this framework is used to evaluate alternative policies in terms of their implications for the welfare of individuals in the economy and for generating seigniorage when the chief concern is to provide a desirable store of value a policy of fixing the exchange rate does better when shocks are primarily of domestic origin while floating becomes more desirable when foreign shocks predominate the same is true when the government is concerned with maximizing total expected seigniorage although more intervention is typically desirable when generating seigniorage is the major objective when seigniorage concerns are paramount and when the monetary authority cannot establish a reputation for conducting monetary policy in a way that makes the currency a desirable store of value a national currency may not be viable in the absence of exchange controls such controls may be justified in this situation

nominal prices and interest rates in general equilibrium endowment shocks the outstanding problem of neoclassical monetary theory has been to determine the effect of changes in the money stock on nominal prices and interest rates the classic result is that in the absence of money illusion contracts fixed in nominal terms and other such impedimenta money is neutral thus a doubling of the money stock results in a doubling of the nominal price level and in no change in nominal interest rates except at most for a temporary liquidity effect while the price level is rising to its new level during the adjustment period the nominal interest rate might temporarily drop this neutrality result has conventionally been proved in a static framework in intertemporal models it is necessary to distinguish between static neutrality and dynamic neutrality if a model displays dynamic neutrality fluctuations in the money stock immediately induce a proportional change in the nominal price level and no change in nominal interest rates or any real variable this property is different from and stronger than static neutrality which in dynamic models states only that if the money stock at all dates is doubled so will be the price level at all dates the effects of exogenous shocks in the monetary growth rate on nominal prices and interest rates are analyzed a representative individual rational expectations framework is adopted and a demand for money is generated by entering money in the utility function the effects of monetary shocks on inflation and interest rates are shown to depend on the autocorrelation of the monetary growth rate for example under serial independence the inflation rate equals the monetary growth rate and the nominal interest rate is nonrandom while under positive negative autocorrelation the nominal interest rate is affected positively negatively by positive growth rate shocks i am grateful to the staff of the federal reserve bank of philadelphia to the finance groups at the university of southem california and virginia polytechnic institute and to c j lacivita dan peled john seater and jon sonstelie for valuable comments on earlier drafts

negotiations in multi issue committees abstract we propose a non cooperative bargaining approach to the problem of collective decision making in committees by modelling this process as a sequential bargaining game the main objective of the paper is to discuss the formation of the agenda in multi issue committees and its relation to the importance of the issues we start by asserting that in the case of a single issue the set of all equilibrium outcomes of our game coincides with the set of coalitional stable outcomes we then consider multi issue committees to discuss the problem of forming agendas we argue that from the point of view of efficiency and stability the most important issues should be put first on the agenda we conclude with a sufficient condition on players preferences which guarantees the efficiency and stability of the bargaining outcomes for every possible agenda

self confirming price dispersion in monetary economies abstract in a monetary economy we show that price dispersion arises as an equilibrium outcome without the need for costly simultaneous search or any heterogeneity in preferences production costs or search technologies a distribution of money holdings among buyers makes sellers indifferent across a set of posted prices leading to a non degenerate price distribution this price distribution in turn makes buyers indifferent across a range of money balances rationalizing the non degenerate distribution of money holdings we completely characterize the distribution of posted prices and money holdings in any equilibrium equilibria with price dispersion admit higher maximum prices than observed in any single price equilibrium and feature an increasing density of prices in contrast to existing theories price dispersion reduces welfare by creating mismatch between posted prices and money balances inflation exacerbates this welfare loss by shifting the distribution towards higher prices

a theory of gradual coalition formation we study noncooperative multilateral bargaining games based on underlying tu games in which coalitions can renegotiate their agreements we distinguish between models in which players continue to bargain after implementing agreements reversible actions and models in which players who implement agreements must leave the game irreversible actions we show that renegotiation always results in formation of the grand coalition if actions are reversible but that the process may otherwise end with smaller coalitions on the other hand we show that the grand coalition cannot form in one step if the core of the game is empty irrespective of the reversibility of actions agreements between players form the basis of much that game theory seeks to explain there are obviously many useful ways to categorize such agreements in multilateral negotiations that is with more than two participants it seems natural to distinguish between cases in which the coalition forms in one step and those in which the coalition grows to its eventual size by attracting new members thus recipients of marshall aid collectively agreed to american terms at the ceec in 1947 whereas a strict subset of these countries agreed to the schuman plan in 1950 with the other current members joining the eu over time similarly negotiations on climate change culminated in universal agreement at rio in 1992 whereas india and china only agreed to reduce cfc emissions in london in 1990 after other countries had signed up to the montreal protocol finally un security council resolution 242 urged that a multilateral conference be set up to establish a comprehensive settlement in the middle east whereas the process initiated by the oslo agreements and arguably camp david has consisted of a sequence of agreements between israel and its neighbours we will refer to cases in which the grand coalition forms in one step as involving immediate coalition formation or icf for short and cases in which a coalition grows as involving gradual coalition formation

a meta allocation mechanism in cooperative bargaining abstract we analyze an iterative meta allocation mechanism the minimal agreement procedure which can be used to resolve bargaining conflicts generated by players proposal of differing solution concepts in two person cooperative bargaining at each stage of the iteration our procedure improves the disagreement point so that its limit is on the pareto frontier

stock flow consistent macroeconomic models a survey the stock flow consistent sfc modelling approach grounded in the pioneering work of wynne godley and james tobin in the 1970s has been adopted by a growing number of researchers in macroeconomics especially after the publication of monetary economics by godley and lavoie which provided a general framework for the analysis of whole economic systems and the recognition that macroeconomic models integrating real markets with flow of funds analysis had been particularly successful in predicting the great recession of 2007 2009 we introduce the general features of the sfc approach for a closed economy showing how the core model has been extended to address issues such as financialization and income distribution we next discuss the implications of the approach for models of open economies and compare the methodologies adopted in developing sfc empirical models for whole countries we review the contributions where the sfc approach is being adopted as the macroeconomic closure of microeconomic agent based models and how the sfc approach is at the core of new research in ecological macroeconomics finally we discuss the appropriateness of the name sfc for the class of models we survey

pairwise trade asset prices and monetary policy abstract we construct a search theoretic model where fiat money coexists with real assets and all assets can be used as a media of exchange the terms of trade in bilateral matches are determined by a pairwise pareto efficient pricing mechanism we do not have to appeal to exogenous liquidity constraints to generate asset prices that are consistent with the following facts i fiat money can be valued despite being dominated in its rate of return ii real assets with identical dividend flows can have different rates of return and iii an increase in inflation raises asset prices lowers their returns and widens the rate of return differences between assets on the normative side we show that there is a range of inflation rates that implement the first best allocation

optimizing multi stage negotiations abstract we consider procedures where issues of varying importance and risk are negotiated in stages negotiation at any stage requires an agreement at each previous stage if negotiation terminates players realize the benefits from all earlier agreements we formalize this process by a strategic n stage negotiation game the expected subgame perfect equilibrium outcome is characterized by an intuitive compact formula which aggregates all the structural elements of the multi stage process we describe the optimal negotiation agenda for a given decomposition of the bargaining problem and we derive intuitive prescriptions for an optimal decomposition