operating flexibility global manufacturing and the option value of a multinational network the multinational corporation is a network of activities located in different countries the value of this network derives from the opportunity to benefit from uncertainty through the coordination of subsidiaries which are geographically dispersed we model this coordination as the operating flexibility to shift production between two manufacturing plants located in different countries a stochastic dynamic programming model treats explicitly this flexibility as equivalent to owning an option the value of which is dependent upon the real exchange rate the model is extended to analyze hysteresis effects and within country growth options we show that the management of across border coordination has led to changes in the heuristic rules used for performance evaluation and transfer pricing

reaganomics and reputation revisited this paper considers a reformulation of backus and driffill s model of credibility following a change in regime following tabellini we alter their model to better fit macroeconomic policymaking as it is formulated in the u s where monetary and fiscal policies are made by independent policymakers by assuming that policymakers of divergent views have recently entered office and so have no track record the game s equilibrium corresponds to the u s experience during the first years of the reagan administration

on the integration of production and financial hedging decisions in global markets we study the integrated operational and financial hedging decisions faced by a global firm who sells to both home and foreign markets production occurs either at a single facility located in one of the markets or at two facilities one in each market the company has to invest in capacity before the selling season starts when the demand in both markets and the currency exchange rate are uncertain the currency exchange rate risk can be hedged by delaying allocation of the capacity to specific markets until both the currency and demand uncertainties are resolved and or by buying financial option contracts on the currency exchange rate when capacity commitment is made a mean variance utility function is used to model the firm s risk aversion in decision making we derive the joint optimal capacity and financial option decision and analyze the impact of the delayed allocation option and the financial options on capacity commitment and the firm s performance we show that the firm s financial hedging strategy ties closely to and can have both quantitative and qualitative impact on the firm s operational strategy the use or lack of use of financial hedges can go beyond affecting the magnitude of capacity levels by altering global supply chain structural choices such as the desired location and number of production facilities to be employed to meet global demand

inflation and reputation in many macroeconomic models with rational expectations optimal policy is time inconsistent and therefore announced policy may not be credible this paper models the government s credibility explicitly using kreps and wilson s analysis time consistent optimal government policy emerges as a sequential equilibrium in a repeated game this policy is at least as good as the inconsistent optimal policy and dominates the consistent policy when reputational effects are ignored thus the analysis resolves the problem of specifying a credible optimal policy in such models the results show why attempts to disinflate may lead to recession even with perfectly flexible prices this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

combination monetary policies to stabilize price and output under rational expectations sargent and wallace 1 1 12 conclude that in a model with a lucas type supply curve and the assumption of rational expectations there is no sense in which the monetary authority has the option to conduct countercyclical policy 12 p 177 sargent and wallace confine their analysis to pure money stock or interest rate policies woglom 14 drawing on the earlier work of poole 10 leroy 5 and leroy and waud 6 examines the effectiveness of combination policies within a model where expectations are formed rationally and with a lucas type supply schedule within the poole or woglom models a combination policy amounts to setting a deterministic relationship between the money stock and the interest rate leroy and leroy and waud make clear that the ability to execute such combination policies depends on the current observability to the monetary authority of the interest rate and money stock or level of reserves in the leroywaud framework since the monetary authority s policy setting is conditioned on such current information while in woglom s framework private agents expectations are conditioned only on past information systematic policy actions the parameters of the combination policy will affect the distribution of real output the sargent wallace

a real options approach to labour shifts planning under different service level targets abstract firms that experience uncertainty in demand as well as challenging service levels face among other things the problem of managing employee shift numbers decisions regarding shift numbers often involve significant expansions or reductions in capacity in response to changes in demand in this paper we quantify the impact of treating shifts in workforce expansion as investments while considering required service level improvements the decision to increase shifts whether by employing temporary workers or hiring permanent employees is one that involves significant risks traditional theories typically consider reversible investments and thus do not capture the idiosyncrasies involved in shift management in which costs are not fully reversible in our study by using real options theory we quantify managers ability to consider this irreversibility aiming to enable them to make shift decisions under conditions of uncertainty with the maximum level of flexibility our model aims to help managers make more accurate decisions with regard to shift expansion under service level targets and to defer commitment until future uncertainties can be at least partially resolved overall our investigation contributes to studies on the time required to introduce labour shift changes while keeping the value of service level improvements in mind

valuing interdependent multi stage it investments a real options approach in this paper we use the market asset disclaimer assumption and develop a binomial lattice based real options model to include cash flow interdependencies between multi stage information technology it investments using a simple two stage it investment problem with interdependent cash flows we apply the binomial lattice based real options model to obtain combined valuation of the two stage it investment in addition to investment valuation our experience with the two stage it investment valuation suggests that the binomial lattice based real options model provides a powerful decision aid tool for appropriate timing delaying and abandoning of the second stage it investment

first impressions matter signalling as a source of policy dynamics we provide the first direct empirical support for the importance of signalling in monetary policy by testing two key predictions from a novel structural model first all policymaker types should become less tough on inflation over time and secondly types that weigh output more should have a more pronounced shift voting data from the bank of england s monetary policy committee strongly support both predictions counterfactual results indicate signalling has a substantial impact on interest rates over the business cycle and improves the committee designer s welfare implications for committee design include allowing regular member turnover and transparency regarding publishing individual votes

credibility of policies versus credibility of policymakers standard models of policy credibility defined as the expectation that an announced policy will be carried out emphasize the preferences of the policymaker and the role of tough policies in signaling toughness and raising credibility whether a policy is carried out however will also reflect the state of the economy we present a model in which a policymaker maintains a fixed parity in good times but devalues if the unemployment rate gets too high our main conclusion is that if there is persistence in unemployment observing a tough policy in a given period may lower rather than raise the credibility of a no devaluation pledge in subsequent periods we test this implication on ems interest rates and find support for our hypothesis

imperfectly credible disinflation under endogenous time dependent pricing the real effects of an imperfectly credible disinfl ation depend critically on the extent of price rigidity therefore the study of how policymakers credibility affects the outcome of an announced disinflation should not be dissociated from the analysis of the determinants of the frequency of price adjustments in this paper we examine how the policymaker s credibility affects the outcome of an announced disinflation in a model with endogenous time dependent pricing rules both the initial degree of price ridigity calculated optimally and more notably the changes in contract length during disinflation play an important role in the explanation of the effects of imperfect credibility we initially evalute the costs of disinfl ation in as etup where credibility is exogenous and then allow agents to update beliefs about the type of monetary authority that they face we show that in both cases the interaction between the endogeneity of time dependent rules and imperfect credibility increases the output costs of disinflation

signalling wage controls and monetary disinflation policy focuses on wage control and monetary disinflation policy how the crucial variable to control is the money supply and wage and price controls should be avoided because of their macroeconomic costs the two types of government as being low inflation governments and high inflation governments how wage controls have microeconomic costs

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

outsourcing and capacity planning in an uncertain global environment firms employing offshore outsourcing strategies may face both exchange rate and demand uncertainties in this paper we show that the firms may benefit from operational option to switch production by keeping capacities with both domestic and foreign suppliers the value of the operational option increases as the exchange rate uncertainty or demand uncertainty increases in addition when the firms become risk averse they may use domestic capacity to hedge against offshore capacity as a result the firms may choose to hold local capacity even if it exhibits negative marginal contribution to the profit furthermore risk averse firms may keep more total capacity than risk neutral firms

rational expectations and policy credibility following a change in regime we examine the dynamic path of an economy after a change in regime when neither the policy to be followed nor the reactions of the public are known the model is an application of kreps and wilson s reputation model to barro and gordon s macroeconomic policy game equilibrium is defined to be the dynamically consistent solution to a game between the government and the private sector it involves mixed strategies and bayesian learning by both sides until the uncertainty about government and public behaviour is resolved the absence of complete credibility of government policy and intransigence of private sector wage demands increase the output loss of disinflation the analysis also sheds light on the strategic nature of economic policymaking and the role of information in macroeconomics

global production planning under exchange rate uncertainty motivated by an aggregate production planning problem in an actual global manufacturing network we examine the impact of exchange rate uncertainty on the choice of optimal production policies when the allocation decision can be deferred until the realization of exchange rates this leads to the formulation of the problem as a two stage recourse program whose optimal policy structure features two forms of flexibility denoted as operational hedging 1 production hedging where the firm deliberately produces less than the total demand and 2 allocation hedging where due to unfavorable exchange rates some markets are not served despite having unused production our characterization of the optimal policy structure leads to an economic valuation of production and allocation hedging we show that the prevalence of production hedging is moderated by the degree of correlation between exchange rates a comprehensive examination under the following four generalized settings provides the depth scope and relevancy that our proposed operational hedges play to facilitate aggregate planning 1 multiple periods 2 demand uncertainty 3 price setting or monopolistic pricing and 4 price setting under demand uncertainty we show that production and allocation hedging are robust for these generalizations and should be integrated into the overall aggregate planning strategy of a global manufacturing firm

activist monetary policy under rational expectations the purpose of this paper is to argue that the pursuit of an activist monetary policy may make economic sense even when people s expectations are formed rationally the paper presents a simple model in which 1 prices are costly to adjust 2 there is uncertainty concerning the parameters affecting aggregate demand and 3 there are positive costs of gathering and processing information by reference to this model it can be shown that an activist monetary policy may or may not be useful in offsetting aggregate disturbances depending upon the extent of information costs and of parameter uncertainty

call center outsourcing contract analysis and choice this paper considers a call center outsourcing contract analysis and choice problem faced by a contractor and a service provider the service provider receives an uncertain call volume over multiple periods and is considering outsourcing all or part of these calls to a contractor each call brings in a fixed revenue to the service provider answering calls requires having service capacity thus implicit in the outsourcing decision is a capacity decision insufficient capacity implies that calls cannot be answered which in turn means there will be a revenue loss faced with a choice between a volume based and a capacity based contract offered by a contractor that has pricing power the service provider determines optimal capacity levels the optimal price and capacity of the contractor together with the optimal capacity of the service provider determine optimal profits of each party under the two contracts being considered this paper characterizes optimal capacity levels and partially characterizes optimal pricing decisions under each contract the impact of demand variability and the economic parameters on contract choice are explored through numerical examples it is shown that no contract type is universally preferred and that operating environments as well as cost revenue structures have an important effect

financing flexibility the case of outsourcing abstract we investigate the relationship between the extent and timing of vertical flexibility and the financial choices of a firm by vertical flexibility we mean partial total and reversible outsourcing of a necessary input a firm simultaneously selects the vertical setting and the financial sources of investment in flexibility in particular debt and venture capital a loan may come from a lender that requires the payment of a fixed coupon over time and an option to buy out the firm in certain circumstances debt leads to the same level of flexibility of an unlevered firm yet investment occurs earlier the injection of venture capital reduces the quest for vertical flexibility and speeds up investment then there arises a fresh substitutability between a financial venture capital and a real variable vertical flexibility

destabilizing effects of exchange rate escape clauses abstract this paper studies policy rules with escape clauses analyzing as an example fixed exchange rate systems that allow member countries the freedom to realign in periods of stress while well designed escape clause rules can raise society s welfare in principle limited credibility makes it difficult to implement such rules in practice an ems type institution that imposes political costs on policymakers who realign may raise welfare but can also produce equilibria far inferior to an irrevocably fixed exchange rate switches between multiple equilibria may have the character of sudden speculative attacks

the credibility of a fixed exchange rate how reputation is gained or lost we examine the interest rate differential between each of the four largest nordic countries and the countries of their foreign currency baskets on monthly data for the period 1978 79 92 the interest rate differential is assumed to reflect devaluation expectations which partly depend on government reputation we investigate the formation of the reputation of the government assuming that reputation is updated using bayes s formula it is shown theoretically that when there is no devaluation the improvement in government reputation is larger the larger the prior devaluation expectations for norway the evidence gives support to this assertion

a balanced budget constraint in modern stochastic macromodels currently september 1985 a constitutional balanced budget amendment is pending in the u s senate thirty two states have passed resolutions calling for a constitutional convention to enact such an amendment in 1963 senator harry byrd sr asked budget director kermit gordon what balancing the budget would do for the country gordon replied that it probably would add about 2 5 million people to the rolls of the unemployed delay the recovery about four years and knock 10 percent off u s output 16 284 the keynesian conventional wisdom of the 1960s was that fiscal and monetary policy should focus on the benefit cost tradeoffs between inflation and unemployment stabilization along with tradeoffs implicit in resource allocation and the distribution of income given these objectives there should be no independent consideration of the budget deficit of the federal government 24 as abba lerner argued in his early statement of keynesian principles of functional finance the instruments to prevent unemployment and inflation are not available until it is recognized that the size of the national debt is relatively unimportant 17 302 as outlined by walter heller 15 and others the stabilization role of fiscal policy together with monetary policy in the 1960s was to provide the appropriate degree of stimulus or restraint to achieve a target level of real output since the mid 1960s such a role for fiscal policy has been challenged first by the friedman phelps 14 27 accelerationist hypothesis and then by the lucas sargent 19 29 policy ineffectiveness proposition the accelerationist or natural rate theory especially as advanced by milton friedman argues that stabilization policy should be geared toward rules and control of nominal variables such as the inflation rate friedman s analysis also implies the futility of using aggregate demand policy to achieve fixed output targets friedman s analysis suggests the possibility that with monetary policy geared to price stabilization and with sustainable real output gains not attainable via aggregate demand policy fiscal policy instruments may be adjusted to achieve a balanced budget without cost buchanan and wagner 7 rely on friedman s analysis to support their call for a constitutional balanced budget amendment

choosing a monetary instrument the case of supply side shocks abstract this paper examines the monetary instrument choice problem in models with an explicit supply sector and endogenous prices and price expectations we use the popular linear quadratic certainty equivalence framework to obtain analytic solutions the results indicate that interest rate policies generally are better able to insulate the real sector from unanticipated supply shocks we also show that at this level of abstraction the optimal choice of an instrument is independent of the specification of expectations e g rational vs adaptive price expectations the paper then reports empirical evidence from two experiments on the large nonlinear mit penn ssrc econometric model the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that interest rate policies are preferable if the supply sector is the major source of uncertainty

screening location strategies to reduce exchange rate risk abstract a firm that markets its products and services world wide may face significant financial risk due to exchange rate fluctuations unless it maintains an international sourcing production network thus the firm must evaluate various sourcing production network designs the selection of the appropriate design is not straight forward since decisions are made in an environment of uncertainty and involve multiple time periods we propose a two phase approach to screen various alternative designs configurations utilizing a number of criteria and illustrate it using a popular harvard business school case as by products we introduce a new criterion for making a pairwise stochastic comparison of alternatives and demonstrate the value of maintaining excess geographically dispersed production capacity

time consistent taxation by a government with redistributive goals abstract in a dynamic economy whose government is interested in both equity and efficiency time consistency problems arise even if the government has access to nondistortionary tax instruments moral hazard in production leads to a nondegenerate distribution of income which the government would like to flatten ex post self enforcing social agreements can mitigate the tendency toward excessive redistribution we investigate the nature of the distortions caused by the time consistency problem and show that in the constrained optimal equilibrium usually a linear tax schedule is imposed this remains true if renegotiation of the social agreement is possible journal of economic literature classification numbers c7 c73 e6 h21

competition and outsourcing with scale economies scale economies are commonplace in operations yet because of analytical challenges relatively little is known about how firms should compete in their presence this paper presents a model of competition between two firms that face scale economies i e each firm s cost per unit of demand is decreasing in demand a general framework is used which incorporates competition between two service providers with price and time sensitive demand a queuing game and competition between two retailers with fixed ordering costs and pricesensitive consumers an economic order quantity game reasonably general conditions are provided under which there exists at most one equilibrium with both firms participating in the market we demonstrate in the context of the queuing game that the lower cost firm in equilibrium may have a higher market share and a higher price an enviable situation we also allow each firm to outsource their production process to a supplier even if the supplier s technology is no better than the firms technology and the supplier is required to establish dedicated capacity so the supplier s scale can be no greater than either firm s scale we show that the firms strictly prefer to outsource we conclude that scale economies provide a strong motivation for outsourcing that has not previously been identified in the literature

the effects of asset specificity on maintenance financial performance an empirical application of transaction cost theory to the medical device maintenance field abstract this study uses multivariate regression analysis to examine the effects of asset specificity on the financial performance of both external and internal governance structures for medical device maintenance and investigates how the financial performance of external governance structures differs depending on whether a hospital is private or public the hypotheses were tested using information on 764 medical devices and 62 maintenance service providers resulting in 1403 maintenance transactions as such our data sample is significantly larger than those used in previous studies in this area the results empirically support our core theoretical argument that governance financial performance is influenced by assets specificity

coordinating investment production and subcontracting we value the option of subcontracting to improve financial performance and system coordination by analyzing a competitive stochastic investment game with recourse the manufacturer and subcontractor decide separately on their capacity investment levels then demand uncertainty is resolved and both parties have the option to subcontract when deciding on their production and sales we analyze and present outsourcing conditions for three contract types 1 price only contracts where an ex ante transfer price is set for each unit supplied by the subcontractor 2 incomplete contracts where both parties negotiate over the subcontracting transfer and 3 state dependent price only and incomplete contracts for which we show an equivalence result while subcontracting with these three contract types can coordinate production decisions in the supply system only state dependent contracts can eliminate all decentralization costs and coordinate capacity investment decisions the minimally sufficient price only contract that coordinates our supply chain specifies transfer prices for a small number 6 in our model of contingent scenarios our game theoretic model allows the analysis of the role of transfer prices and of the bargaining power of buyer and supplier we find that sometimes firms may be better off leaving some contract parameters unspecified ex ante and agreeing to negotiate ex post also a price focused strategy for managing subcontractors can backfire because a lower transfer price may decrease the manufacturer s profit finally as with financial options the option value of subcontracting increases as markets are more volatile or more negatively correlated

on occasional monetary policy coordinations that fix the exchange rate abstract occasionally central banks have simultaneously expanded monetary policy to prevent adverse effects upon the exchange rate this paper offers a motivation for this behavior although governments prefer non cooperative policies most of the time upon viewing sufficiently excessive disturbances to output the benefits of stabilization become greater than the costs required to institute temporary policy coordinations thus coordination occurs during periods when the gains are the greatest also since the authorities target a higher employment level than labor markets coordination of policies occurs with greater frequency during periods of low rather than high output shocks

recent advances in oligopoly theory from a game theory perspective abstract this paper surveys the contribution that recent developments in game theory have made to the understanding of oligopoly theory it is argued that conventional models suffer from the problem that there are a number of solution concepts offered with little guidance as to which should be selected and this is related to the static nature of the models employed one important development in game theory has been the analysis of repeated games and when applied to oligopoly theory this suggests that outcomes may be more cooperative than conventional theory suggests related to this is the requirement that firms employ credible threats to punish cheating from cooperative outcomes and the paper examines the extent to which imperfect information may restrict the scope of firms to employ such punishments one way in which firms may seek to make threats credible is through strategic investments for example in production capacity and the paper explores how competition over price or output is integrated with competition over instruments for strategic investment

structural uncertainty and subsidy removal for economies in transition abstract economies in transition are faced with a high degree of structural uncertainty i e uncertainty about which it is possible to learn through experience we study structural uncertainty s effects on a subsidy removal program subsidy removal causes unemployment but yields fiscal benefits and facilitates private sector growth when the policymaker does not know the speed with which the private sector absorbs the unemployed he will be driven toward a more decisive and therefore more informative policy the model also rationalizes policy reversals and implies that irreversibility constraints and political instability dampen the learning effect making policy more gradualist

gaining and losing erm credibility the case of the united kingdom the model of this paper highlights two aspects of credibility signaling the type of government which is assumed not to be known and for any type the likelihood that if circumstances are sufficiently unfavorable a devaluation will be impossible to avoid since not to do so would go against the government s interests these two factors have opposite implications for the link between unemployment and interest differentials high unemployment signals a tough government but also makes it less likely that even a tough government will maintain an existing parity copyright 1995 by royal economic society

targeting nominal income further results there has been a great deal of interest in designing optimal policy in stochastic macroeconomic models under rational expectations many authors including turnovsky 11 and benavie and froyen 2 have stressed that pure policy rules such as a strict money rule or an interest rate peg are generally not the optimal policy response to both demand and supply shocks recently however bean 1 has disputed this claim using a version of the standard sargent and wallace 10 model he shows that nominal income targeting provides an optimal response to both demand and supply shocks as long as labor supply is perfectly inelastic extending this analysis bradley and jansen 3 report that the argument in favor of nominal income targeting is substantially strengthened by considering optimal wage indexing they show that the combination of nominal income targeting and optimal wage indexing to price is perfectly stabilizing regardless of the elasticity of labor supply this paper extends the work by bean 1 and bradley and jansen 3 to the case of an interest elastic and wealth elastic labor supply the goal is to determine if nominal income targeting continues to provide the optimal response to both demand and supply disturbances in a more general model bean and bradley and jansen utilize the so called lucas supply curve a standard construct in new classical models that is often justified by reference to the work of lucas and rapping 7 however lucas and rapping actually derive a supply curve in which both the ex ante real rate of interest and wealth affect aggregate supply 2 this paper employs a supply curve which includes both interest rate and wealth effects and finds that with this more general supply curve nominal income targeting even in combination with wage indexing is not perfectly stabilizing prior results by bean 1 and bradley and jansen 3 are the result of the lucas supply

comment choosing a monetary instrument the case of supply side shocks abstract in a recent paper craine and havenner 1981 claim that an additional advantage of the linear quadratic framework which is not well known is that the basic forces affecting the instrument choice decision can be analyzed without an explicit specification for price expectations since the distribution of the error terms in a linear model is independent of the predetermined variables p 219 the aim of this note is to demonstrate that craine and havenner s claim does not generalize to models with expectations of future variables conditioned on present information such as turnovsky s 1980 model

selection of contract suppliers under price and demand uncertainty in a dynamic market in this paper we consider a supply contracting problem in which the buyer firm faces non stationary stochastic price and demand first we derive analytical results to compare two pure strategies i periodically purchasing from the spot market and ii signing a long term contract with a single supplier the results from the pure strategies show that the selection of suppliers can be complicated by many parameters and is particularly affected by price uncertainty we then develop a stochastic dynamic programming model to incorporate mixed strategies purchasing commitments and contract cancellations computational results show that increases in price demand uncertainty favor long term short term suppliers by examining the two way interactions of contract factors price demand purchasing bounds learning and technology effect salvage values and contract cancellation both intuitive and non intuitive managerial insights in outsourcing strategies are derived

bashing and coercion in monetary policy bashing and coercion in monetary policy i introduction we ve got excess plant capacity i don t think that growth is excessive i have not been overly concerned with inflation president bush in a february 14 1989 interview with the wall street journal p a8 with the economy running close to potential the risks seem to be on the side of a further strengthening of price pressure chairman greenspan in testimony before congress on february 21 1989 reprinted from the wall street journal february 22 1989 p a2 many investors appeared to be confused by conflicting statements by bush greenspan and other u s officials wall street journal february 22 1989 p a1 if the fed pushes interest rates significantly higher bush may go public with critism wall street journal march 24 1989 p a1 recent research in macroeconomic policy games by rogoff 1985 alesina 1988 tabellini 1987 and waller 1989a has concentrated on the importance of an independent central bank in a discretionary policymaking environment in the original work on policy games by barro and gordon 1983a 1983b no distinction was made between the monetary authority and the fiscal authority but these researchers argue that because the fiscal authority may have incentives to create excessive inflation giving the powers of money creation to an independent monetary authority whose inflation preferences differ from the current fiscal authority may enable society to reduce the equilibrium inflation rate this results holds even though monetary policy is still chosen in a discretionary fashion therefore backus and driffill 1985a 537 conclude autonomous central banks thus act as a precommitment device which may help to make noninflationary policies more credible and less costly implicit in the term independent is the belief that the central bank is free to choose monetary policy without interference from the fiscal authority administration however this is not generally the case the appointment of central bankers by the legislative or executive branch of the government governmental oversight of policy decisions or political pressure on the central bank by these branches will tend to influence the setting of monetary policy and subsequently the extent to which the central bank is truly independent 1 kane 1984 argues that even if it is not able to directly choose monetary policy the current administration still may be able to achieve its preferred monetary growth path by putting pressure on the monetary authority to do its bidding restricting the powers of the central bank public criticism of central bank performance here after referred to as bashing 2 exclusion from fiscal policy planning which hurts the egos of central bankers or undertaking actions which damage the post central bank income or opportunities of the central bankers are ways he suggests in which the administration can coerce cooperation from the central bank in creating excessive money growth such arguments have given rise to the view that the administration is engaged in a reputation building game with the central bank although the central bank has control of the money supply the administration can threaten to impose a welfare loss by bashing the central bank if it does not generate the monetary policy preferred by the administration the success of this strategy depends on the size of the bashing costs imposed on the central bank and also on the extent to which these threats are credible credibility in turn depends on the benefits and costs incurred by the administration in carrying out its threats as a result the administration may choose to bash the central bank if it does not produce the administration s preferred money inflation outcome by establishing a reputation for bashing the administration may be able to obtain its desired policy outcome in the future

credibility may require discretion not rules abstract we reexamine the common argument that rules produce greater credibility than discretion rules limit the actions of agents restricting observations of the agents preferences or types in a second best world where rules cannot be everlasting a regime of discretion in some periods may produce superior credibility and dominate a regime of rules

optimal reputation building in the new keynesian model abstract we study the optimal committed monetary policy when the private sector has imperfect information and has to infer the central banker s ability to commit the optimal policy is designed to influence learning and improve the central banker s reputation of being committed the reputation building implies that when a committed central banker first takes office he should resist the temptation to stimulate output with initially high but declining inflation he should reverse a missed inflation target rather than accommodate it and he should adopt a less accommodative inflation response to a cost push shock than a full commitment solution suggests

credibility and changes in policy regime this paper addresses the issue of credibility from an econometric perspective it develops a rational expectations model of inflation in which the dynamics are driven by the level of government spending and by the effect of past inflation rates on the value of real taxes government expenditure is modeled as an exogenous autoregressive process subject to discrete changes in regime the regimes are defined by whether the level of spending is or is not consistent with the rate of inflation targeted by the government as part of a stabilization program in making their money demand decision the agents need to construct probability inferences regarding the state of the expenditure process credibility is quantified by the agents inferred probability that the joint observation of inflation the nominal interest rate and government spending is generated by the reformed expenditure regime in an application to israel results indicate that the failed stabilization program of november 1984 was less than fully c

macroeconomic stabilization policy and trade union behaviour as a repeated game lt is unquestionably true that the presence of trade unions in an economy affects its macroeconomic behaviour by attempting to maintain traditional patterns of relative wages among occupations and industries and by resisting cuts in real wages unions slow macroeconomic adjustment and structural change in response to macroeconomic shocks it is often argued that by insulating groups of workers from competitive pressures wage determination is less associated with market clearing than it otherwise would be overlapping contracts and resistance to relative wage changes thus give aggregate wage inflation mo mentum it would not otherwise have taylor 1980 jackman 1983 trade union bargaining may affect the position of the phillips curve jackman and layard 1982 nickell 1982 a popular argument for the increases in the nairu non acceleratinginflation rate of unemployment which have taken place between 1960 and 1980 in many industrialized countries where unions are strong is that trade unions have grown more militant and their bargaining behaviour has changed in some way this argument goes back at least as far as hines 1964

impact of sourcing flexibility on the outsourcing of services under demand uncertainty abstract this paper investigates the relationship between market conditions and the value and use of sourcing flexibility for service processes we develop and analyze a series of models and we derive expressions for the optimal switching decision the value of the option to outsource the value of the option to backsource and the probability and timing of switches between the alternative sources one contribution is the models and associated derivations which are largely new to the literature and may serve as a tool to support service sourcing plans and decisions the second contribution is a series of results with managerial implications 1 the probability of outsourcing is generally increasing in volatility for high skill process and decreasing in volatility for low skill processes earlier work has found that the hysteresis band is increasing in volatility which is interpreted as an indicator of increasing organizational inertia we also find that the hysteresis band is increasing in volatility but interestingly for the case of high skill processes organizational inertia tends to be decreasing in volatility 2 the option to backsource is generally more valuable for high skill processes than for low skill processes this result suggests that investments to make it easier to backsource should have a higher priority for high skill processes 3 the value of the option to backsource a high skill service process can be decreasing in volatility the result suggests that a rather nuanced consideration of volatility is in order when considering investments in the flexibility to backsource a high skill process

the optimality of nominal income targeting when wages are indexed to price in the last decade there has been renewed interest in alternative monetary regimes institutions and policy procedures one policy proposal that has received increased attention is nominal income targeting this proposal has been suggested for instance by feldstein 9 gordon 13 hall 16 meade 21 and tobin 25 26 taylor 24 discusses this proposal in some detail and mccallum 20 presents a statistical analysis of a particular nominal income targeting rule in a variety of contexts bean 3 presents a theoretical analysis of nominal income targeting examining the properties of such a policy in a stochastic macro model in which rational agents sign nominal wage contracts given that the monetary authority s objective is to minimize the divergence of output from its full information level nominal income targeting is the optimal policy if labor supply is perfectly inelastic with an elastic labor supply however nominal income targeting provides the optimal response to demand side shocks but not to supply side shocks the problem of designing optimal policy in the face of both demand and supply side shocks is not new authors such as benavie and froyen 4 craine and havenner 8 parkin 22 and turnovsky 27 have stressed that pure policy rules such as a strict money rule or an interest rate peg are generally not the optimal policy response to both demand and supply shocks thus bean s result that nominal income targeting provides the optimal policy response to all shocks as long as labor supply is perfectly inelastic is rather impressive one avenue of research that attempts to provide a partial solution to the problem of suboptimal policy rules in the face of demand and supply shocks is the investigation of wage indexing work by gray 14 15 drew attention to the properties of nominal wage contracts indexed to the price level the relation between the monetary authority s choice of policy rule and the degree of indexing in the labor market has been investigated by fethke and policano 11 fethke and

exchange rates and the choice of ownership structure of production facilities the aim of this research is to study the effects of real exchange rates on the long term ownership strategies of production facilities of firms entering foreign markets among the strategies considered are exporting exp joint ventures with local partners jv and wholly owned production facilities wos in the foreign country our research takes a first step in modeling the influence of exchange rates on the choice and dynamic adjustment of such strategies the insights obtained from our modeling analysis are then translated into testable hypotheses and empirically verified with the use of firm level data from u s multinational corporations both at the firm and a more aggregate level an insightful result of our model is the identification of a hysteresis phenomenon that characterizes switching behavior between strategies in the presence of switchover cost the magnitude of the hysteresis band which is a measure of the inertia associated with keeping the current ownership structure is affected by a multiplicity of factors such as exchange rate volatility and market power of the entering firm analytical and numerical results on the effects of such factors on the hysteresis band are provided the four testable hypotheses generated from our modeling analysis are rigorously tested with the use of a multinomial logit model on data obtained from the harvard multinational enterprise database and a data set maintained by the bureau of economic analysis the u s department of commerce the empirical results strongly support our insights that relatively depreciated real exchange rates i e weak home currency favor a the jv over the wos and b exp mode over the wos or jv finally we summarize our results into useful guidelines for global production managers

partial outsourcing monitoring cost and market structure we investigate firms outsourcing decisions when production requires a large number of inputs the novelty of our approach is that it provides a testable framework to characterize the equilibrium fraction of outsourced inputs we demonstrate that intensified competition in a cournot market for the final good typically enlarges the set of outsourced components relative to those produced in house the proportions of outsourced inputs are found to be strategic substitutes independently of whether firms compete with respect to quantities or prices in the market for the final good jel classification d20 l22 sous traitance partielle cout de monitarisation et structure de marche l auteur examine les decisions de sous traitance des entreprises quand la production reclame un grand nombre d intrants la nouveaute de l approche proposee est qu elle fournit un cadre conceptuel testable pour definir en equilibre la fraction des intrants obtenue en sous traitance on montre qu une concurrence plus intense pour le produit final dans un marchea la cournot accroit l ensemble des intrants obtenus en sous traitance par rapport a l ensemble de ceux qui sont produit a l interne il s avere que les proportions des divers intrants obtenus en sous traitance sont des substituts que les firmes se concurrencent par les prix ou les quantites dans le marche du produit final

flexible waste management under uncertainty in this paper we use stochastic dynamic programming to model the choice of a municipality which has to design an optimal waste management program under uncertainty about the price of recyclables in the secondary market the municipality can by undertaking an irreversible investment adopt a flexible program which integrates the existing landfill strategy with recycling keeping the option to switch back to landfilling if profitable we determine the optimal share of waste to be recycled and the optimal timing for the investment in such a flexible program we find that adopting a flexible program rather than a non flexible one the municipality i invests in recycling capacity under circumstances where it would not do so otherwise ii invests earlier and iii benefits from a higher expected net present value c 2013 elsevier b v all rights reserved less

monetary nominal income and exchange rate targets in a small open economy abstract in this paper i examine the properties of monetary nominal income and exchange rate targets as stabilization policies in an open economy perfect capital mobility and a wide variety of transitory random shocks is assumed nominal wages are assumed to have been set in advance of the realization of the shocks none of these rules is in general sufficient to minimize the welfare cost of aggregate fluctations and none necessarily dominates all others under the assumption that monetary control is subject to random errors optimal policy implies reactions to all observable shocks and is characterized by heavy exchange market intervention

optimal operating policies in the presence of exchange rate variability we study the structure of the optimal policies for a firm operating plants in different countries the relative costs of production between the plants are assumed to vary over time due to economic and political factors such as exchange rates inflation taxes and tariffs based on the costs the firm can alter the quantity produced in each plant we determine the structure of the optimal policies for deciding when and by how much to alter the production quantities when the switch over costs are linear or step functions regardless of whether the variable production costs are concave or piece wise linear convex and regardless of whether the firm is supplying one or more markets the optimal policy is always a barrier policy the optimal barriers can be determined by using linear programming techniques and the optimal costs can be computed by solving a system of linear equations when the number of optimal barriers is two the optimal expected costs and the condition that determines the optimal barriers are explicitly derived

monetary policy in a model with a federal funds market fixed versus flexible deposit rates this paper examines the comparative static effects of various monetary policy instruments under the assumption of a market determined interest rate on demand deposits and alternatively for the case of an exogenously fixed demand deposit rate in both cases monetary policy effects are analyzed where the monetary policy operating target is either the federal funds rate or a reserve aggregate the aim of the paper is to assess the differences in monetary policy effects for each operating procedure between the flexible and fixed deposit rate cases we extend previous analyses of this subject by incorporating an explicit federal funds market in our model and providing a detailed analysis of monetary policy with a federal funds rate operating target with both a flexible and a fixed deposit rate additionally we consider the differences in the role of secondary monetary policy instruments such as the discount rate and the required reserve ratio in the different regimes finally the paper considers the implications of flexibility of the deposit rate for the feasibility of the current monetary policy strategy of using a short run operating target either the federal funds rate or a reserve aggregate to attain target

time consistency of optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a small open economy abstract this paper characterizes conditions under which optimal monetary and fiscal policy is time consistent in a stylized small open economy with a flexible foreign exchange rate regime it shows that these conditions depend on the way in which leisure is assumed to enter preferences and or on the process which productivity is assumed to follow this paper further argues that these conditions may fail to be sufficient if the small open economy implements a fixed foreign exchange rate regime thus a credible fixed exchange rate regime does not necessarily help render optimal policy time consistent