speculative attacks and the information role of the interest rate this paper models currency attacks as carried out by speculators who condition their actions on private signals about the state and on the market clearing interest rate besides affecting speculators payoffs this interest rate also provides an endogenous public signal for a plausible type of investment strategies the dual role of the interest rate allows the model to explain abrupt and intense speculative attacks solely via economic fundamentals without resorting to sunspot variables this result underlies a novel policy implication an official intervention in the foreign exchange market may reinforce a currency peg by influencing the precision of public information jel d82 d84 f31

fixed exchange rates credibility flexibility and multiplicity abstract this paper surveys recent work on the sustainability of fixed exchange rates it considers a dynamic version the barro gordon framework in which the level of a state variable in this case debt determines the pay offs available to the government at each point in time multiple equilibria and self fulfilling runs are possible but only at certain levels of debt a surprise devaluation can either increase or decrease future expected devaluation relative to a no devaluation situation

national accounting and the valuation of ecosystem assets and their services there has long been interest in integrating the value of environmental stocks and flows into standard measures of economic activity and wealth in particular through the development of adjusted measures of gdp and extended measures of national wealth this paper examines how the valuation of ecosystem services and ecosystem assets can be undertaken in an integrated national accounting setting we clarify the relevant valuation principles most significantly the need to apply the concept of exchange values and explain why the integration of ecosystem services necessitates an extension of the standard production boundary used in economic measurement the main implications of an accounting approach are discussed including the need to distinguish benefits from services the need for valuation methods that exclude consumer surplus and the importance of aligning measures of income and degradation remaining challenges include the treatment of low or negative rents accounting for ecosystem disservices and the derivation of values for ecosystem assets meeting these challenges and advancing work in this area should be the joint focus of economists ecologists and accountants

the instability of fixed exchange rate systems when raising the nominal interest rate is costly abstract this paper points to a vicious circle which may arise when a government tries to defend its currency by raising the nominal interest rate in a fixed exchange rate system we present a stylised model in which raising the nominal interest rate helps to maintain the parity but is costly for the government the speculators are aware that this cost gives incentives for the government to stop defending the parity which in turn reinforces the speculation against the currency we show that this mechanism can generate self fulfilling currency crises the outcome of which depends on the level of sacrifice that the government is ready to endure and the evolution of domestic economic conditions we provide some informal evidence showing that this model explains some features of the 1992 93 ems crisis

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

coordination cooperation contagion and currency crises we analyze the effect of trade competition international coordination and cooperation on currency crises to do this we present a micro founded model where governments have an incentive to devalue to increase the national market share in a monopolistically competitive sector currency crises generated by self fulfilling expectations are possible because private agents demand high wages when they expect a devaluation this decreases the competitiveness and profits of national firms and induces the government to devalue we show that the more important trade competition the more likely self fulfilling speculative crises are and the larger the set of multiple equilibria coordination decreases the possibility of simultaneous self fulfilling speculative crises in the region and reduces the set of multiple equilibria however regional coordination even though welfare improving makes countries more dependent on other countries fundamentals so that it may induce more contagion cooperation further reduces the set of multiple equilibria with currency crises

social and private total hicksian incomes of multiple use forests in spain abstract the present national accounting system for forests measures only the commercial flows of the production account and the consumption of durable goods produced by human intervention and focuses particularly on final output while ignoring any intermediate output not arising from harvested agricultural crops environmental goods and services whether for public consumption or for the landowner s private use owner s self consumption are ignored in conventional measurements of the net domestic product of forests this paper presents and applies a forest accounting methodology that overcomes these limitations and allows for homogeneous aggregation of commercial and environmental values using exchange values and not welfare measurements for the latter we have applied the accounting system proposed here to two major types of multiple use forest of the iberian peninsula mediterranean forest monfrague cork oak dehesa and conifer forest scottish pine in the guadarrama mountain range our results show that non commercial incomes are relatively more important in the pine forest under consideration both in private and in social terms cork oak forest is notably more profitable in private terms than pine forest however conventional national accounting measures only 24 and 77 of social total income in guadarrama scottish forest and monfrague cork oak dehesa respectively

seigniorage revenue deficits and self fulfilling currency crises abstract this paper examines potential resolutions to the conflict between a fixed exchange rate and seigniorage revenue requirement of a stylized developing economy that gives rise to a currency crisis the government has an informational advantage and can decide when it is optimal to invoke an escape clause i e to drop the peg and float speculators must guess when the crisis will happen based on their assessment of the probability of collapse and this makes pegged exchange rate equilibria unstable

accounting for the value of ecosystem services abstract a value of ecosystem services ves may be calculated by multiplying a set of ecosystem services by a set of corresponding shadow prices this paper examines the role of the ves concept in measuring trends in human well being under conventional arguments from applied welfare economics standard measures of market consumption may be extended to include the value of direct environmental services which affect welfare in ways that are not mediated by the consumption of purchased goods the ves concept does not capture values such as ecological sustainability and distributional fairness that are not reducible to individual welfare and its operationalization is constrained by the well known limitations of nonmarket valuation methods nonetheless attempts to calculate the value of environmental services can provide insights into the tradeoffs between market activity and environmental quality that are implicit in the process of economic growth such efforts can promote informed debate concerning the achievement of sustainable development

do high interest rates defend currencies during speculative attacks new evidence kraay kraay a 2003 do high interest rates defend currencies during speculative attacks journal of international economics 59 297 321 documents the lack of any systematic association between monetary policy and the outcome of a speculative attack this paper revisits kraay s work and modifies it by introducing an improved measure of monetary policy and an additional country specific fundamental short term corporate debt to capture balance sheet vulnerabilities emphasized by the recent currency crises literature the results show that for low levels of short term corporate debt raising interest rates lowers the probability of a successful attack this effect decreases and eventually reverses for higher levels of debt these findings contrast earlier empirical evidence and imply a fundamental reconsideration of the role of monetary policy during currency crises

speculative currency attacks and balance of payments crises abstract this paper reviews the recent theoretical literature on collapsing exchange rate regimes using a combination of technique intuition and realworld observation we discuss the literature s main insights point out some unresolved questions and offer suggestions for future research the survey should be of interest to both specialists and non specialists in the field of international macroeconomics

are currency crises self fulfilling abstract this paper studies the respective roles of the fundamentals and self fulfilling speculation in currency crises we first present a model of a fixed exchange rate system in which self fulfilling speculation can arise following a bifurcation in the fundamentals we then estimate the model in the case of the 1992 3 crisis of the french franc and find some evidence that self fulfilling speculation was at work

on the intergenerational allocation of natural resources it is known hartwick and others that under standard assumptions a society that invests in reproducible capital the competitive rents on its current extraction of exhaustible resources will enjoy a consumption stream constant in time it is shown here that this result can be interpreted as saying that an appropriately defined stock of capital including the initial endowment of resources is being maintained intact and that consumption can be interpreted as the interest on that patrimony this seems like a useful rule of thumb for policy

schooling wages and profits negative pecuniary externalities from schooling and their consequences for schooling investments abstract this paper tests the hypothesis that the schooling of the poor reduces profits for landowners and that such negative pecuniary externalities in turn adversely affect schooling investments made by local governments a theoretical model of occupational choice in the presence of credit and labor market constraints combined with existing political economy models of the delivery of local public goods delivers such a result this hypothesis is tested using household data from india the empirical analysis shows that profits are reduced by the schooling of the poor and that this is primarily because of the effect of schooling on wages it also shows that the negative effect of wages on profits reduces government provided schooling inputs

can exchange rate predictability be achieved without monetary convergence evidence from the ems abstract the evidence presented here suggests that the european monetary system has indeed coincided with more predictable exchange rates nominal and real between france germany and italy but if increased monetary policy coordination is the main explanation then it is surprising that the conditional variance of real interest differentials between these countries does not appear to have fallen unless the disturbances are mostly real in which case fixed rates are suboptimal high onshore offshore interest differentials for franc and lira assets and the very slow convergence of intra ems inflation rates suggest that capital controls have played a large role

shadow rates and multiple equilibria in the theory of currency crises abstract this note generalizes to second generation models of currency crises the arbitrage based approach first applied by flood and garber to first generation models deriving policy switching rules based on the shadow exchange rate facilitates the comparative analysis of the literature using the shadow rate we provide and discuss an example of a common mechanism generating multiple equilibria in both first and second generation models

do high interest rates deter speculative attacks evidence and some theory abstract this paper presents the first empirical evidence on the efficacy of raising interest rates ex ante as a deterrent to speculative attacks using a dataset that covers 54 countries from march 1964 through december 2005 we find strong evidence that raising interest rates in advance has significantly different impacts in different country groups it significantly reduces the probability of attacks in countries that have a de facto hard peg but increases it in de facto soft pegging countries this finding is robust to alternative measure of monetary policy and to different specifications and samples we then present a simple two stage signaling model to offer a theoretical explanation for our empirical findings

reconciling the green accounts in an optimally managed economy green nationalexpenditure is equal to the linearization of the hamiltonian from theproblem of maximizing discounted social utility herein we utilize theadjoint conditions to add to the basis for viewing green nnp as an index ofsocial utility under ideal conditions and to show the equality of netnational income and expenditure the results apply even when returns toscale are increasing or decreasing unpriced net environmental benefitsshould be incorporated into comprehensive nnp in much the same way as thedisutility of labor otherwise current practices of the national accountscan be defended including the treatment of capital gains

simulated exchange values and ecosystem accounting theory and application to free access recreation abstract this paper discusses the simulated exchange value method a practical method to estimate values for goods and services currently outside of the market in a manner consistent with the market based figures considered in national accounts the method proposes to simulate in a partial equilibrium context the price that would occur if a good or service outside of the market such as free access recreation in forests were internalized the method takes into account the demand estimated using non market valuation techniques the supply and the market structure the discussion covers the case of a linear demand and the case in which the demand is estimated using discrete choice methods this paper applies the method to free access recreation in the forests of andalusia in the south of spain and compares the results to those obtained using hicksian variations

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

currency crises and monetary policy in an economy with credit constraints this paper presents a simple model of currency crises which is driven by the interplay between the credit constraints of private domestic firms and the existence of nominal price rigidities the possibility of multiple equilibria including a currency crisis equilibrium with low output and a depreciated domestic currency results from the following mechanism if nominal prices are sticky a currency depreciation leads to an increase in the foreign currency debt repayment obligations of firms and thus to a fall in their profits this reduces firms borrowing capacity and therefore investment and output in a credit constrained economy which in turn reduces the demand for the domestic currency and leads to a depreciation we examine the impact of various shocks including productivity fiscal or expectational shocks we then analyze the optimal monetary policy to prevent or solve currency crises we also argue that currency crises can occur both under fixed and flexible exchange rate regimes as the primary source of crises is the deteriorating balance sheet of private firms

learning large deviations and recurrent currency crises this article studies a version of obstfeld s journal of international economics 43 1997 61 77 escape clause model the model is calibrated to produce three rational expectations equilibria two of these equilibria are e stable and one is unstable dynamics are introduced by assuming that agents must learn about the government s decision rule it is assumed they do this using a stochastic approximation algorithm it turns out that as a certain parameter describing the sensitivity of beliefs to new information gets small the algorithm converges to a small noise diffusion process the dynamics of exchange rate changes are then characterized using large deviation techniques from freidlin and wentzell random perturbations of dynamical systems second edition berlin springer verlag 1998 these methods describe the sense in which the limiting distribution of exchange rate changes is approximated by a two state markov switching process where the two states correspond to the two e stable equilibria the model is calibrated to the exchange rate histories of argentina brazil and mexico currency crises in these countries resemble the predicted escape routes of the model a key feature of these escape routes is that expectations of a devaluation erupt suddenly without large contemporaneous shocks this is consistent with evidence showing that crises are often poorly anticipated by financial markets

national accounts and environmental resources in the paper optimal growth theory is used to derive the appropriate definition of the net national product concept when there are environmental resources and environmental damage to take into account the basic conclusions are that conventional defined np should be corrected by deducting environmental damage and adding the value of the net change of all resources

value and income abstract this paper argues that income is a flow of value to society therefore an economic modeler s choice of a concept of value imposes a concept of income the argument is used to distinguish three concepts of national income 1 in a discounted utilitarian model which is usually the basis for theoretic discussions of net national income the formulation of value imposes a concept of income that is not observable and hence does not provide income statistics 2 in a perfectly competitive economy national income is in principle observable study of the competitive model provides a theoretic foundation for national accounting with extensions to distorted economies however two unobservable components of ideal income consumers surplus and capital gains are perforce neglected 3 a maximin program is the mathematical representation of another value sustaining an economy it employs a method of intertemporal valuation that does not involve discounting income is sustained value since a maximin program is not expressed for a distorted economy there is no observable indicator of whether an economy is being sustained

recording environmental assets in the national accounts accounting information is a core element of economic decision making at both national and corporate levels it is widely accepted that much economic activity is dependent upon natural capital and natural resources generically termed environmental assets in an accounting context environmental assets are under threat of depletion and degradation from economic activity consequently the incorporation of information on environmental assets into standard accounting frameworks is an essential element in mainstreaming environmental information and broadening the evidence base for economic decisions and the assessment of sustainability this paper describes the treatment of environmental assets within the national economic accounts and summarizes recent developments that extend the accounting approaches as described in the united nations system of environmental economic accounting seea the potential for implementation of accounting standards for environmental assets is shown through a description of work in australia on environmental economic accounting

fixed exchange rates as a means to price stability what have we learned abstract the paper discusses what we have learned from last year s currency crises in erm and the nordic countries about fixed exchange rates as a means to achieve price stability after discussing the explanations for the crises the paper concludes that fixed exchange rates are not a shortcut to price stability monetary stability and credibility have to be built at home and cannot easily be imported from abroad fixed exchange rates are more fragile and difficult to maintain than previously thought they may even be in conflict with price stability by inducing a procyclical destabilizing monetary policy and by inducing an inflation bias building monetary credibility is even more important with flexible exchange rates

a currency crisis model with a misaligned central parity a stochastic analysis abstract the currency crisis model outlined in this paper assumes state contingent reserve dynamics which depend on the deviations of the exchange rate from a misaligned central parity the size of the misalignment is affected by an underlined fundamental which embodies money aggregates and a stochastic shock the main result in the presence of an irreversible switch of regime is that the size of the attack is amplified by the feedback effect from the composite fundamental to the exchange rate

self fulfilling risk predictions an application to speculative attacks abstract we show that changing market beliefs about currency risk can generate a self fulfilling speculative attack on a fixed exchange rate the attack does not require a later change in policies to make it profitable we illustrate this point by introducing an endogenous risk premium into a first generation model of a speculative attack the model is further modified to take account of sterilization debt financed fiscal deficits and anticipatory price setting behavior we use the model to interpret the 1994 mexican peso crisis

an operative framework for total hicksian income measurement application to a multiple use forest a methodology for estimating total hicksian income in multiple use forests is presented the approach consistently incorporates commercial as well as non commercial economic values and enables the measurement of national accounting aggregates taking into account variation in man made and natural capital innovative solutions are developed i for the estimation of non market values such as recreation where an attempt to determine exchange values has been made simulating markets ii for timber where standing timber valuation methods have been extended to cover uneven stands and iii for carbon fixation valuation where only permanently fixed carbon after 1990 has been taken into account the methodology is applied to a multiple use pinewood in the guadarrama mountains near madrid spain timber cattle grazing hunting recreation carbon fixation and conservation values are measured and integrated in the accounting system using primary microeconomic data from the case study results indicate the importance of non commercial income which accounts for 51 of the total income and the social relevance of the analysed forest implying that only 31 of the total income generated is appropriated by the forest owner

national account of timber and forest environmental resources in sweden this paper outlines an extension of the national account of income from forest resources in sweden 1987 incorporating changes in timber inventories production of nonmarketed timber and nontimber goods and depletion or improvement in vital environmental stocks such as soil nutrients biodiversity and carbon sinks the total net value added provided by forest resources and forestry labour 1987 is estimated to 22 billions sek this is one third more than the contribution of forestry to ordinary gnp

policy delegation and fixed exchanges rates recent literature interpreting the european monetary system emphasizes credibility gains from delegating monetary policy to a low inflation country through fixed exchange rates this paper presents a model of an exchange rate system as a device for policy delegation in the context of a repeated monetary policy game in contrast to single shot games it generates credibility gains for the high inflation and low inflation countries in the system credibility gains neither require nor imply hegemony of the low inflation member stochastic realignments enable the members to adopt different inflation trends without destroying the credibility benefits from policy delegation copyright 1992 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

monetary accounting of ecosystem services a test case for limburg province the netherlands ecosystem accounting aims to provide a better understanding of ecosystem contributions to the economy in a spatially explicit way ecosystem accounting monitors ecosystem services and measures their monetary value using exchange values consistent with the system of national accounts sna we pilot monetary ecosystem accounting in a case study in limburg province the netherlands seven ecosystem services are modelled and valued crop production fodder production drinking water production air quality regulation carbon sequestration nature tourism and hunting we develop monetary ecosystem accounts that specify values generated by ecosystem services per hectare per municipality and per land cover type we analyse the relative importance of public and private ecosystem services we found that the sna aligned monetary value of modelled ecosystem services for limburg was around 112 million in 2010 with an average value of 508 per hectare ecosystem services with the highest values were crop production nature tourism and fodder production due to the exclusion of consumer surplus in sna valuation calculated values are considerably lower than those typically found in welfare based valuation approaches we demonstrate the feasibility of valuing ecosystem services in a national accounting framework

two cases for sand in the wheels of international finance the incompatibility of pegged exchange rates international capital mobility and national monetary autonomy is a basic postulate of open economy macroeconomies in the present environment of high capital mobility and political uncertainty even the possibility that governments may utilize their policy autonomy can defeat efforts to peg the exchange rate this leaves two possibilities one is to fix the exchange rate irrevocably through monetary unification the other is to live with floating rates either way a case can be made for throwing sand in the wheels of international finance where monetary unification is not an option this is a may to make distinct national currencies tolerable and international money and capital markets compatible with modest national autonomy in monetary and macroeconomic policy for eu counties striving to create a monetary union it is the only politically and economically feasible way of completing the transition to stage iii of the maastricht process

rational and self fulfilling balance of payments crises speculative attacks on a pegged exchange rate must sometimes occur ifasset price paths are to be free of abnormal profit opportunities suchattacks are fully rational as they reflect the market s response to aregime breakdown that is inevitable the authors shows that under someexpectations about policy balance of payments crises can also be purely self fulfilling events in such cases even a permanently viableregime may collapse and the economy will possess multiple equilibriacorresponding to different subjective assessments of the probability ofa crisis the behavior of the domestic interest rate will naturally reflect the possibility of a speculative attack copyright 1986 by american economic association

natural resources national accounting and economic depreciation abstract the current value hamiltonian in an aggregate optimal growth problem with heterogeneous capital stocks including exhaustible renewable and environmental stocks is the nnp function routine substitutions reveal that the using up of natural resource stocks is representable as easy to interpret economic depreciation magnitudes we obtain true nnp inclusive of natural resource stock diminution implications for actual national accounting practices are also discussed

an interest rate defense of a fixed exchange rate defending a government s exchange rate commitment with active interest rate policy is not an option in first generation models of speculative attacks in those models the interest rate is the passive reflection of currency depreciation expectations in this paper we show how to adapt the first generation framework to allow for an interest rate defense it is shown that increasing domestic currency interest rate before the attack makes domestic assets more attractive according to an asset substitution effect but weakens the domestic currency by increasing the government s fiscal liabilities as a result an interest rate defense can be successful only conditional on sound fiscal policy

monetary policy and the exchange rate during the asian crisis identification through heteroscedasticity abstract this paper examines whether a monetary policy tightening i e an increase in the domestic interest rate was successful in defending the exchange rate from speculative pressures during the asian financial crisis we estimate a bivariate vecm for four asian countries and improve upon existing studies in two important ways first by using a long data span we are able to compare the effects of an interest rate rise on the nominal exchange rate during tranquil and turbulent periods second we take into account the endogeneity of interest rates and identify the system by exploiting the heteroscedasticity properties of the relevant time series following rigobon identification through heteroscedasticity review of economics and statistics in press we find that while tight monetary policy helped to defend the exchange rate during tranquil periods it had the opposite effect during the asian crisis

collapsing exchange rate regimes some linear examples abstract we construct a pair of linear examples to study the collapse time of a fixed exchange rate regime the first example is a perfect foresight continuous time model which allows calculation of the exact collapse time and the tracking of reserves the second example is a discrete time stochastic model which yields an endogenous probability distribution over the collapse time and produces a forward discount of the exchange rate

self fulfilling currency crises and central bank independence we develop a model of a fixed exchange rate peg arrangement derived from the barro gordon model of rules versus discretion it is shown that the fixed peg is vulnerable to self fulfilling currency crises in which the unemployment rate increases the credibility of the rule decreases but paradoxically the reputation of the policy maker improves delegating monetary policy to an independent central banker does not prevent this type of crisis from arising and can even make it more costly

capital controls and foreign exchange market crises in the ems abstract it is widely held that capital controls are necessary to prevent foreign exchange market crises in a fixed but adjustable exchange rate system like the ems it was therefore argued that capital market liberalization which came in july 1990 might lead to recurrent crises in the ems events since july 1990 have shown that capital controls were not necessary for the stability of the ems this paper shows that even with capital controls the system might enter turbulent periods and might experience a self fulfilling balance of payments crisis if the authorities are perceived to dislike high domestic interest rates a crisis can then be triggered by any small shock if the authorities are not willing to raise domestic interest rates sufficiently to defend the exchange rate

do high interest rates defend currencies during speculative attacks abstract do high interest rates defend currencies during speculative attacks or do they have the perverse effect of increasing the probability of a devaluation of the currency under attack drawing on evidence from a large sample of speculative attacks in developed and developing economies this paper argues that the answer to both questions is no in particular this paper documents a striking lack of any systematic association whatsoever between interest rates and the outcome of speculative attacks the lack of clear empirical evidence on the effects of high interest rates during speculative attacks mirrors the theoretical ambiguities on this issue

disparate information and the probability of currency crises empirical evidence abstract this paper tests the impact of the distribution of information on the probability of currency crises within a markov switching framework less disparate information among domestic and foreign investors proxied by premia on country funds lowers the probability of a crisis