sustainable monetary policies abstract this paper uses a model with utility maximizing households monopolistically competitive firms and sticky goods prices to derive a version of barro and gordon s time consistency problem for monetary policy where the government s objectives are consistent with a representative household s preferences the paper applies the methods of chari and kehoe to characterize the entire set of time consistent or sustainable outcomes it goes on to find conditions under which the friedman rule the optimal policy under commitment can be supported when the government lacks a commitment technology

discretionary inflation in a general equilibrium model this paper extends the barro and gordon 1983 model to a general equilibrium framework in which the costs and benefits to surprise inflation reflect the preferences technology and market structure of the economy the benefit of such an approach is that we can relate the underlying features of the economy to the size of the inflation bias in particular it can be shown that an increase in the source of the monetary authority s incentive to inflate does not necessarily result in a worsened inflation bias due to offsetting changes in the cost of inflation furthermore changes in the real interest rate affect the monetary authority s incentives and hence the discretionary level of inflation lastly we can show that an increase in the labor share of national income worsens the inflation bias the model also indicates the importance of a nominal rigidity lack of policy precommitment and a distortion for optimal monetary policy to be characterized by a level of discretionary inflation that exceeds the friedman 1969 rule

multivariate tests of the zero beta capm abstract a cross sectional regression test csrt of the capm is developed and its connection to the hotelling t2 test of multivariate statistical analysis is explored algebraic relations between the csrt the likehood ratio test and the langrange multiplier test are derived and a useful small sample bound on the distribution function of the csrt is obtained an application of the csrt suggests that the crsp equally weighted index is inefficient but that the inefficiency is not explained by a firm size effect from february to december

on multivariate tests of the capm abstract this paper evaluates the power of multivariate tests of the capital asset pricing model the results indicate that when employing an unspecified alternative hypothesis the ability of the tests to distinguish between the capm and other pricing models is poor an upper bound is derived for the distance the alternative distribution of the test statistic can be from the null distribution when the deviations from the capm are due to missing factors this upper bound explains the low power of the tests

monetary institutions monopolistic competition unionized labor markets and economic performance recent literature on the interactions between labor unions and monetary institutions features either a supply or a demand channel of monetary policy but not both this leads to two opposing views about the effects of central bank conservativeness we evaluate the relative merits of those conflicting views by developing a unified framework we find that i the effect of conservativeness on employment depends on unions relative aversion to unemployment versus inflation and ii for plausible values of this relative aversion and more than one union social welfare is maximized under a highly conservative central bank we also evaluate the effects of centralization of wage bargaining and product market competition on unemployment and inflation

a note on the geometry of shanken s csr t2 test for mean variance efficiency abstract shanken 1985 derives a test for the zero beta capital asset pricing model capm which as he points out is equivalent to a test of the mean variance efficiency of the market portfolio this note illustrates the geometry of shanken s test in the mean variance space

monetary conservatism and fiscal coordination in a monetary union abstract in monetary unions time inconsistency provides the rationale for monetary conservativeness and against fiscal coordination however this depends on the assumption of exogenous labor markets once wage setting behavior is explicitly modeled fiscal coordination and less conservative central bankers improve the performance

what do we learn from recall consumption data in this paper we use two complementary italian data sources the 1995 istat and bank of italy household surveys to generate householdspecific nondurable expenditure in the bank of italy sample that contains relatively high quality income data we show that food expenditure data are of comparable quality and informational content across the two surveys once we properly account for heaping rounding and time averaging we therefore depart from standard practice and rely on the estimation of an inverse engel curve on istat data to impute nondurable expenditure to bank of italy observations and show how we can use these estimates to analyze consumption age profiles conditional on demographics our key result is that predictions based on a standard set of demographic and socioeconomic indicators are quite different from predictions that also condition on simulated food consumption in the sense that their age profile is less in line with the implications of the standard consumer intertemporal optimization problem

central governance or subsidiarity a property rights approach to federalism abstract we consider a model where one region in a federation can realize a public project after undertaking value increasing investments while negotiations on the federal level ensure that an efficient project size is implemented in equilibrium non contractibility of investments causes the overall outcome to differ across regimes if the region bears the entire implementation costs of its policies underinvestment prevails and subsidiarity centralized governance is superior when spillovers are weak strong conversely if linear cost sharing arrangements are feasible decentralized authority often admits a socially optimal outcome while centralized authority with majority or unanimity rule does not

large labour unions and terms of trade externality this paper shows that large labour unions reduce the incentive for uncoordinated monetary policies to improve the terms of trade this finding implies that concentrated labour markets significantly affect the optimal policy prescription in an open economy

the likelihood ratio test statistic of mean variance efficiency without a riskless asset abstract the question whether a given porfolio is mean variance efficient is a basic problem of investment analysis mean variance efficiency is also the basis of the capital asset pricing model this paper presents the explicit form of the likelihood ratio test of the hypothesis that a given portfolio or a particular market index is ex ante mean variance efficient in the case where there is no riskless asset geometric relations are illustrated to provide intuition about the constrained maximum likelihood estimators and the test statistic and two simple economic interpretations of the test are given

potential performance and tests of portfolio efficiency abstract the potential performance of an asset set may be obtained by choosing the portfolio proportions to maximize the sharpe 1966 performance measure if a portfolio has a sharpe measure equivalent to the potential performance of the underlying set of assets then it is efficient multivariate statistical procedures for comparing potential performance and testing portfolio efficiency are developed and then evaluated using simulations two likelihood ratio statistics are then used to compare stock and bond indices against sets of 20 and 40 portfolios the procedures are also compared to the gibbons 1982 methodology for testing financial models

monetary union and pegging in the presence of labor unions as the european economic and monetary union grows power over monetary policy is shifting away from the original founders previously researchers have analyzed the impact of replacing an exchange rate peg with a monetary union in the presence of labor unions in these studies the authors have consistently concluded that unemployment in the country that originally controlled monetary policy will rise although they cite very different reasons in this paper we present a more general model that reproduces the previous results in special cases and clarifies the relations across the results in addition the more general model shows that the results are reversed in certain conditions

optimal contracts and the role of the government in wage bargaining abstract this paper introduces a contract between the government and trade unions in a model of strategic wage bargaining a la lippi 2003 it shows that an optimal contract can be implemented through an appropriately defined inflation target

fiscal activism under inflation targeting and non atomistic wage setting this paper presents a game between a fiscal authority an independent central bank and non atomistic wage setters the effects of fiscal activism and inflation targeting on labour market outcomes are analysed the results suggest that inflation targeting provides incentive for wage restraint moreover real wages are increasing in the degree of fiscal activism as wage setters exploit the response of a fiscal authority seeking to promote employment numerical results suggest that the benefits of targeting inflation are larger when the government pursues an activist policy and therefore that there is some substitutability between fiscal and monetary rules

the number of factors in security returns both factor analysis of security returns and the analysis of eigenvalues seem to indicate that a market factor explains the major part of security returns we find that such evidence is consistent with an economy where there are in fact k equally important priced factors eigenvalue analysis in the context of such an economy will lead an investigator to the false inference that the one important factor is the return on an equally weighted market index this paper examines a particular exact k factor economy where each of the k factors is priced and contributes equally on average to the variance of returns we show analytically that for such an economy the approximate factor solution identifies the first factor as the return on an equally weighted market index and would lead to the inference that the remaining h 1 factors are not priced using a cross section regression technology our particular model is consistent with existing empirical work that has studied the number of factors in security markets these results suggest an important caveat to the interpretation of approximate factor solutions in an apt or multibeta pricing context one might also infer a capm bias in tests of the apt using the factor analysis technology on a more positive note the results suggest a simple rotation of the factor analysis solution that will lead to more powerful tests of the asset pricing relations to motivate this study consider the fact that the single factor market model suggested by markowitz 1959 and developed by sharpe 1963 remains one of the most popular empirical models of the return generating process the widespread acceptance of this model owes much to the work of king 1966 through a seven factor analysis of return data he concludes that one factor explains a large percentage of the variance of stock prices a factor on which each security tends to weight positively he interpreted this result to mean that there exists a basic market factor in operation which has a major effect on all securities this work supported the development of empirical research into the capital asset pricing model the model has been extensively applied in the event study context

the impact of affirmative action on labor demand a test of some implications of the le chatelier principle this paper presents an alternative approach to measuring the impact of affirmative action on firms affirmative action is modeled as a series of hiring quotas if the quotas are binding then a firm subject to affirmative action will operate with greater costs of production have less elastic demand for inputs and be less able to substitute between most inputs the results are consistent with the hypothesis that affirmative action regulations significantly constrain firms behavior own wage elasticities are less elastic and most inputs are less substitutable for constrained firms further affirmative action raises costs by 6 5 percent for firms subject to the program copyright 1992 by mit press

beyond balanced growth balanced growth models are commonly used in macroeconomics because they are consistent with the well known kaldor facts regarding economic growth these models however are inconsistent with one of the most striking regularities of the growth process the massive reallocation of labour from agriculture into manufacturing and services this paper presents a simple model consistent with both the kaldor facts and the dynamics of sectoral labour reallocation

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

non atomistic wage setters and monetary policy in a new keynesian framework this paper extends an otherwise standard new keynesian nk model to allow for the presence of large wage setters building on monetary models from an earlier generation i contribute to the nk literature by adding some new insight it is shown that once the presence of large wage setters is taken into account the degree of wage setting centralization and the aggressiveness of the central bank in stabilizing inflation jointly affect steady state employment because of this interaction the benefits associated with inflation stabilization increase in the centralization of the wage bargaining process

the nonneutrality of monetary policy with large price or wage setters monetary rules matter for the equilibrium rate of employment when the number of price wage setters is small even when assuming rational expectations complete information central bank precommitment and absence of nominal rigidities if the central bank is nonaccommodating sufficiently large unions bargaining independently have an incentive to moderate sectoral money wages and thereby expected real wages the result is an increase in the real money supply and hence higher demand and employment this does not hold with accommodating monetary policy since unions wage decisions cannot then affect the real money supply a similar argument holds for large monopolistically competitive price setters

strategic monetary policy with non atomistic wage setters monetary policy analyses usually assume an atomistic private sector thereby ignoring potential interactions between policy and wage setting decisions yet non atomistic wage setters are a key feature of several industrialized economies we study the economic consequence of non atomistic agents and show that this qualifies previous results on the effects and desirability of a conservative central banker in particular the central bank aversion to inflation may have a permanent effect on structural employment while no such effect emerges with atomistic agents

a monte carlo investigation of the accuracy of multivariate capm tests abstract in a multivariate regression model relating individual returns to the market return capm implies non linear restrictions on the parameters several asymptotically valid tests of these restrictions have been suggested the existing monte carlo evidence shows that some of these tests are unreliable for reasonable sample sizes but does not indicate well which tests are reliable this paper reports the results of an extensive monte carlo experiment shanken s csr test and jobson and korkie s corrected likelihood ratio test are quite accurate in all cases we consider

dynamic monetary fiscal interactions and the role of monetary conservatism assuming that macroeconomic policies are directed by distinct monetary and fiscal policy makers who cannot commit to future actions we reassess the implications of monetary conservatism and fiscal impatience in a setting with nominal government debt for environments where a non negative steady state level of government debt assets emerges in the absence of conservatism and impatience monetary conservatism induces accumulation of a higher stock of liabilities assets and has adverse positive welfare implications this result obtains irrespectively of the degree of fiscal impatience and questions the unambiguous desirability of monetary conservatism traditionally found in the literature

when do cooperation and commitment matter in a monetary union abstract this paper offers a framework to study strategic interactions between private players national fiscal authorities and a common central bank in monetary unions we establish general conditions in terms of restrictions on spillover effects of actions by private and public players under which games that differ in the degree of cooperation and commitment can admit the same equilibrium outcome we use these conditions to characterize benchmark results on the irrelevance of cooperation and commitment established in recent literature moreover we show for a general setting in which the benchmark results do not apply that gains from fiscal cooperation depend on the number of countries and increase as this number gets larger

is monetary union necessarily counterproductive abstract this paper analyses the case of a monetary union between identical countries characterised by oligopolistic competition in their labour market it suggests that the switch to a common currency may improve their macroeconomic performances depending on labour market features

the effect of employment protection and product market regulation on labour market performance substitution or complementarity this article provides new evidence on the linkages between various forms of market regulation and joblessness and its components unemployment and inactivity one crucial contribution of this article is the analysis of the interdependence across product market regulation pmr and labour markets regulation employment protection legislation epl with the help of a dynamic fixed effect model with an interaction term we estimate the marginal impact of epl and pmr at different levels of the other interacted variable to cope with problems related to the inclusion of time invariant institutional variables in fixed effect models we present results of regressions based on a new procedure specifically designed to treat slowly changing variables we build time series data to account for the annual evolution of epl and use new data for unemployment insurance net replacement rates among other results we find evidence of a positive negative effect of epl pmr on employment performance as well as of subst

central bank independence centralization of wage bargaining inflation and unemployment theory and some evidence abstract this paper proposes a conceptual framework to investigate the effects of central bank independence of the degree of centralization of wage bargaining and of the interaction between those institutional variables on real wages unemployment and inflation in a framework in which unions are averse to inflation this aversion moderates union s wage demands as they attempt to induce the central bank to inflate at a lower rate an increase in the degree of centralization of wage bargaining a decrease in the number of unions triggers two opposite effects on real wages unemployment and inflation it reduces the substitutability between the labor of different unions and therefore the degree of effective competition between them this reduced competition effect raises real wages unemployment and inflation but the decrease in the number of unions also strengthens the moderating effect of inflationary fears on the real wage demands of each union this strategic effect lowers real wages unemployment and inflation for sufficiently inflation averse unions the interaction between those two effects produces a calmfors driffill type relation between real wages and centralization the paper analyzes the effects of central bank independence on the position and the shape of this relation as well as on inflation and unemployment the paper features two mechanisms one of which is novel through which monetary institutions have real effects the model implies that if there is a single union social welfare is maximized when the central bank attaches a zero weight to inflation but when the number of unions is larger than one this result is no longer true in general empirical evaluation of some of the theoretical implications using data from 19 developed economies is for the most part supportive of those implications