exchange rate regimes and the international transmission of business cycles capital account openness matters abstract we investigate the role of exchange rate regimes in the international transmission of business cycles during the global financial crisis we find that exchange rate regimes alone did not account for differences in the international transmission of business cycles during the crisis however analysis considering capital account openness and countries with currencies pegged to the u s dollar indicates that exchange rate regimes play an important role in shaping business cycle co movement adopting a fixed regime with high capital account openness additionally increased business cycle co movement with the united states during the crisis whereas u s dollar peggers with relatively restrictive capital accounts during the crisis were not found to affect business cycle transmission

inflation taxation and welfare with externalities and leisure this paper examines how inflation taxation affects resource allocation and welfare in a neoclassical growth model with leisure a production externality and money in the utility function switching from consumption taxation to inflation taxation to finance government spending reduces real money balances relative to income but increases consumption labor capital and output the net welfare effect of this switch depends crucially on the strength of the externality and on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution while it is always negative without the externality it is likely to be positive with a strong externality and elastic intertemporal substitution

does exchange rate variability depress trade flows evidence from error correction models this paper examines the impact of exchange rate volatility on the trade flows of the g 7 countries in the context of a multivariate error correction model the error correction models do not show any sign of parameter instability the results indicate that the exchange rate volatility has a significant negative impact on the volume of exports in each of the g 7 countries assuming market participants are risk averse these results imply that exchange rate uncertainty causes them to reduce their activities change prices or shift sources of demand and supply in order to minimize their exposure to the effects of exchange rate volatility this in turn can change the distribution of output across many sectors in these countries it is quite possible that the surprisingly weak relationship between trade flows and exchange rate volatility reported in several previous studies are due to insufficient attention to the stochastic properties of the relevant time series copyright 1993 by mit press

international institutions and the volatility of international trade during the past half century states have established a large number of international trade institutions both multilateral and regional in scope the existing literature on this topic emphasizes that these agreements are chiefly designed to liberalize and increase the flow of overseas commerce yet such institutions have another function that has been largely ignored by researchers namely reducing volatility in trade policy and trade flows exposure to global markets increases the vulnerability of a country s output to terms of trade shocks governments seek to insulate their economies from such instability through membership in international trade institutions particularly the world trade organization wto and preferential trading arrangements ptas we hypothesize that these institutions reduce the volatility of overseas commerce we further hypothesize that because market actors prefer price stability trade institutions increase the volume of foreign commerce by reducing trade variability this article conducts the first large scale multivariate statistical tests of these two hypotheses using annual data on exports for all pairs of countries from 1951 through 2001 the tests provide strong support for our arguments ptas and the wto regime significantly reduce export volatility in so doing these institutions also increase export levels

estimating the impact of currency unions on trade solving the glick and rose puzzle does leaving a currency union reduce international trade this paper uses a historical approach to re examine the puzzling large apparent impact of currency unions on trade i find that the early time series estimates were driven by the gradual decaying of colonial trade ties and other major geopolitical factors including warfare communist takeovers and ethnic cleansing episodes my methodology which carries lessons for other uses of gravity equations in policy analysis yields point estimates of currency unions on trade that are not statistically distinct from zero

the demand for money in developing countries assessing the role of financial innovation traditional specifications of money demand have commonly been plagued by persistent overprediction implausible parameter estimates and highly autocorrelated errors the authors argue that some of these problems stem from the failure to account for the impact of financial innovation they estimate money demand for ten developing countries using various proxies for financial innovations they also assess the relative importance of this variable finding financial innovation can be better modeled as a stochastic random walk trend rather than a deterministic time trend financial innovation plays an important role in determining fluctuations of the demand for money the importance of this role increases with the rate of inflation

u s bilateral trade flows and exchange risk during the floating period abstract this paper tests for real exchange rate risk effects on u s bilateral trade flows during the floating period using several new as well as previously used risk measures significant negative effects occur in five of six u s import flows and in two of six u s export flows with one export flow showing a significant positive effect these results are consistent with several previous findings for aggregate u s trade two risk measures using the forward exchange rate and assuming a time varying risk premium provide marginally more significant results than the others

the optimum quantity of money theory and evidence in this paper we propose a simple and general model for computing the ramsey optimal inflation tax which includes several models from the previous literature as special cases we show that it cannot be claimed that the friedman rule is always optimal or always non optimal on theoretical grounds the friedman rule is optimal or not depending on conditions related to the shape of various relevant functions one contribution of this paper is to relate these conditions to measurable variables such as the interest rate or the consumption elasticity of money demand we find that it tends to be optimal to tax money when there are economies of scale in the demand for money the scale elasticity is smaller than one and or when money is required for the payment of consumption or wage taxes we find that it tends to be optimal to tax money more heavily when the interest elasticity of money demand is small we present empirical evidence on the parameters that determine the optimal inflation tax calibrating the model to a variety of empirical studies yields an optimal nominal interest rate of less than 1 per year although that finding is sensitive to the calibration

towards a testable model of entry a study of the us manufacturing industries this paper develops a simple model of firms entry decisions fits it to interindustry data and tests hypotheses related to contestability theory it is shown that entry increases with the profit level of incumbents holding fixed the expected losses that the entrant would suffer in the event of exit these expected losses are greater the higher the probability of a predatory incumbent response and the larger the sunk costs that must be committed by the entrant the effects of sunk costs are significant and incumbents are significantly more likely to react aggressively when they are both profitable and concentrated copyright 1990 by the london school of economics and political science

inflation and welfare in a monetary economy it is in everyone s private interest to try to get someone else to hold non interest bearing cash and reserves but someone has to hold it all so these efforts must simply cancel out all of us spend several hours per year in this effort and employ thousands of talented and highly trained people to help us these person hours are simply thrown away wasted on a task that should not have to be performed at all

exchange rate regimes and fdi in developing countries a propensity score matching approach abstract theory suggests that regimes of relatively fixed exchange rates encourage inward foreign direct investment fdi relative to regimes of more flexible exchange rates we use propensity score matching psm to investigate the relationship between the exchange rate regimes of 70 developing countries and fdi into such countries using de facto regime classifications we include a large number of variables in the logit equation that estimates the propensity score the probability of regime choice we also use general to specific modeling to get alternative parsimonious versions based on four matching procedures the average treatment effects suggest with overall modest statistical significance that relatively fixed de facto regimes do encourage fdi compared with relatively floating regimes in addition the estimated effects are sometimes economically large

nonoptimality of the friedman rule with capital income taxation this paper studies the efficient taxation of money and factor income in intertemporal optimizing growth models with infinite horizons transaction costs technologies and flexible prices second best optimality calls for a positive inflation tax and a non zero capital income tax when there are restrictions on taxation of production factors or profits rents our cases of nonoptimality of the friedman rule which differ from those of mulligan and sala i martin 1997 and extend substantially those of schmitt grohe and uribe 2004a follow from the violation of the diamond and mirrlees 1971 principle on production efficiency

de facto exchange rate arrangement tightness and bilateral trade flows abstract this paper estimates the effect of switching into and out of 14 different modes of exchange rate arrangements on bilateral exports between 1948 and 2001 in the world economy increasing the exchange rate arrangement tightness by one degree in the classification of reinhart and rogoff reinhart carmen m and kenneth s rogoff 2004 the modern history of exchange rate arrangements a reinterpretation quarterly journal of economics 119 1 48 increases bilateral trade flows by about 2 4 as compared to their initial level

the determinants of research and development intensity in the uk the primary purpose of this paper is to discover whether research and development expenditures are related to firm size market structure and technological influences in the uk after providing a preliminary analysis of r d activity the paper tackles the problem of the rather limited data set two approaches are adopted first analysing part of the relationship using a broadly based sample and second providing data on a more narrowly based sample over three years the results suggest that firm size and concentration have virtually no influence on r d intensity in the uk among firms with r d programmes

inflationary finance and currency substitution in a public finance framework abstract this paper analyzes the impact of currency substitution on inflationary finance in a public finance framework it is shown that if foreign money balances can be taxed or subsidized the optimal inflation tax is always zero in the more realistic case in which foreign money cannot be taxed the optimal inflation tax is positive whenever there are revenue needs moreover the optimal inflation tax is an increasing function of government spending and the foreign nominal interest rate

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

exchange rate determination interest rates and an integrative approach to the demand for money abstract this paper presents a simple framework in which the money in the utility function miuf and the cash in advance cia approaches to the demand for money can be seen as equivalent this integrative approach to money demand is extended to a two country world and the equilibrium relationship between terms of trade exchange rates and interest rates implied by the underlying stochastic structure of the economy is discussed a theory of currency substitution is presented

the friedman rule in an overlapping generations model with nonlinear taxation and income misreporting this paper models a two period overlapping generations economy with money populated with individuals of different skills they face a nonlinear income tax schedule and can engage in tax evasion money serves two purposes the traditional one modeled through a money in the utility function it also facilitates tax evasion the main message of the paper is that income tax evasion in this framework leads to the violation of the friedman rule the paper also shows that even in the absence of tax evasion when optimality requires differential commodity taxation complementarity of real cash balances and labor supply does not guarantee the optimality of the friedman rule as a boundary solution an additional assumption is required

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

the optimal mix of taxes on money consumption and income abstract we determine the optimal combination of taxes on money consumption and income in transactions technology models where exogenous government expenditures must be financed with distortionary taxes we show that the optimal policy does not tax money regardless of whether the government can use as alternative fiscal instruments an income tax a consumption tax or the two taxes jointly these results are at odds with recent literature we argue that the reason for this divergence is an inappropriate specification of the transactions technology adopted in the literature

trade integration and business cycle convergence is the relation robust across time and space in this paper we investigate the relationship between trade intensity and the business cycle correlation using a panel data set taken from 24 countries over the period 1959 2003 most previous studies did not account for the possibility that the business cycle correlation may be influenced by unobservable country pair specific effects our estimates using both fixed and random effects methodologies suggest that trade intensity and the business cycle correlation are positively related to one another however detailed investigation shows that this relationship exists mainly for the european countries

the optimal inflation tax when money reduces transactions costs abstract it has been argued that if money acts as an intermediate good the optimal inflation tax is zero this paper reexamines such a claim in the context of a model in which money reduces transactions costs it is shown that modeling money as an intermediate good does not necessarily imply that the optimal inflation tax is zero the optimality of a zero inflation tax depends on the properties of the transactions costs technology in particular if the transactions costs technology does not exhibit constant returns to scale it is optimal to resort to the inflation tax

age size growth and survival uk companies in the 1980s this paper examines growth and survival amongst quoted and unquoted u k companies in the period 1975 85 and compares the results with earlier u k and u s studies an examination of death rates shows that smaller companies had higher death rates but the largest and smallest companies were least vulnerable to takeover careful attention is therefore paid to problems of sample selection bias it is shown that smaller companies grew faster than larger companies that gibrat s law does not hold amongst smaller firms that age is negatively related to growth and that these results are not an artifact of sample selection bias copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

to bi or not to bi differences between spillover estimates from bilateral and multilateral multi country models abstract asymptotic analysis and monte carlo simulations show that spillover estimates obtained from widely used bilateral such as two country var models are in general less accurate both in terms of bias and mean squared error than those obtained from multilateral such as global var models in particular the accuracy of spillover estimates obtained from bilateral models depends on two aspects of economies integration with the rest of the world first accuracy worsens as direct bilateral transmission channels become less important for example when the spillover sender accounts only for a small share of the spillover recipient s overall integration with the rest of the world second accuracy worsens as indirect higher order spillovers and spillbacks become more important for example when the spillover recipient is more integrated with the rest of the world overall empirical evidence on the global output spillovers from us monetary policy is consistent with these generic results spillover estimates obtained from two country var models are systematically smaller than those obtained from a global var model and the differences between spillover estimates obtained from two country var models and a global var model are more pronounced for economies for which the us accounts for a smaller share of their overall trade and financial integration with the rest of the world and for economies which are more integrated with the rest of the world overall

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

one money one market the effect of common currencies on trade currency unions their dramatic effect on international trade a gravity model is used to assess the separate effects of exchange rate volatility and currency unions on international trade the panel data bilateral observations for five years during 1970 90 covering 186 countries includes 300 observations in which both countries use the same currency i find a large positive effect of a currency union on international trade and a small negative effect of exchange rate volatility even after controlling for a host of features including the endogenous nature of the exchange rate regime these effects statistically significant imply that two countries sharing the same currency trade three times as much as they would with different currencies currency unions like the european emu may thus lead to a large increase in international trade with all that that entails andrew rose

home bias exchange rate disconnect and optimal exchange rate policy abstract this paper examines how much the central bank should adjust the interest rate in response to real exchange rate fluctuations the paper first demonstrates in a two country dynamic stochastic general equilibrium dsge model that home bias in consumption is important to replicate the exchange rate volatility and exchange rate disconnect documented in the data when home bias is high the shock to uncovered interest rate parity uip can substantially drive up exchange rate volatility while leaving the volatility of real macroeconomic variables such as gdp almost untouched the model predicts that the volatility of the real exchange rate relative to that of gdp increases with the extent of home bias this relation is supported by the data a second order accurate solution method is employed to find the optimal operational monetary policy rule our model suggests that the monetary authority should not seek to vigorously stabilize exchange rate fluctuations in particular when the central bank does not take a strong stance against the inflation rate exchange rate stabilization may induce substantial welfare loss the model does not detect welfare gain from international monetary cooperation which extends obstfeld and rogoff s obstfeld m rogoff k 2002 global implications of self oriented national monetary rules quarterly journal of economics may 503 535 findings to a dsge model

hard or soft pegs choice of exchange rate regime and trade in africa summary this paper revisits the link between fixed exchange rate regimes and trade in the context of africa s exchange rate arrangements differentiating the effects of hard pegs currency unions from conventional soft pegs using a novel dataset of exchange rate regime classification the paper augments the gravity model of bilateral trade flows with measures of currency unions and conventional pegged arrangements and benchmarks africa s experience against the rest of the world we find that in both samples currency unions and pegs increase trade vis a vis more flexible exchange rate arrangements through channels in addition to reduced exchange rate volatility however the effect is almost twice as large for africa in addition the trade generating effect of pegs is at least as large for africa as that of currency unions suggesting that pegs could present a viable option perhaps an alternative to currency unions to promote trade in the region

how to estimate market concentration given grouped data a novel method is proposed of estimating market concentration for the census case in which firms are grouped into size classes and all that is known about the firms in each category is their number and aggregate size the formula arises as a way of applying an alternative expression for the concentration ratio based upon the original and first moment size distributions of firms the semi parametric technique which includes a method of interval as well as point estimation is derived applied and validated using actual and simulated data it is anticipated that the estimator will be of use in competition analysis as well as in academic research

the impact of inflation on budgetary discipline abstract this paper views the budgetary process as a limited contingencies contract between the treasury and the ministers allowing a minister to ask for budget revisions upon costly verification by the treasury the minister may obtain extra funds for significant state verification costs and for low volatility the contract is non contingent for volatility significant enough the contract becomes state contingent it reduces the initial allocation and reduces the threshold associated with budgetary revisions in volatile economics the projected revenue understates the realized budget and the average budget error is positive the model s predictions are confirmed using data from latin america

trade blocs currency blocs and the reorientation of world trade in the 1930s we analyze the impact of commercial and financial policies on the reorientation of trade in the 1930s we report evidence that commercial policies attenuated prior connections between income growth and trade and that exchange rate instability marginally discouraged international trade in contrast the tendency toward regionalization commonly ascribed to the formation of trade and currency blocs was already evident to a considerable extent prior to the regional policy initiatives of the 1930s this reorientation is more properly attributed to ongoing historical forces such as commercial and financial links between countries forged over many years

a quantitative analysis of inflation as a tax on the underground economy abstract inflation rates are more dispersed and are persistently higher in developing countries this paper quantifies the importance of the public finance motive for inflation in the presence of a tax evading sector the underground economy the approach is motivated by the observation that the underground economy is especially large in poor countries the analysis builds on a general equilibrium monetary model with two production sectors where income in one of the sectors cannot be taxed a benevolent government finances its budget using an optimal combination of the income tax rate and the inflation rate the model is first calibrated to the u s economy and is then used for a cross country simulation the resulting relationships between the size of an underground economy inflation rate income tax rate and the share of seigniorage in the government revenue rationalize the cross country data quantitatively well

a multinomial logit approach to exchange rate policy classification with an application to growth we model a country s de jure exchange rate policy as the choice from a multinomial logit response conditioned on the volatility of its bilateral exchange rate the volatility of its international reserves and the volatility of its effective exchange rate the category with the highest predictive probability implied by the logit regressions serves as our de facto exchange rate policy an empirical investigation into the relationship between the de facto classifications and gdp growth finds that growth is higher under stable currency value policies for non industrialized countries a more nuanced characterization of exchange rate policy finds that those who exhibit fear of floating experience significantly higher growth

is the friedman rule optimal when money is an intermediate good in contrast to the recent literature on the optimal inflation tax we show that in models where money reduces transactions costs it is optimal to set the inflation tax to zero when seigniorage is replaced by revenue from distortionary taxes the main reasons for this result are that the variable costs of supplying real balances are negligible and the inflation tax is a unit tax we also show that the intermediate good optimal taxation rules in the public finance literature cannot be directly applied both when money is costless and when it requires resources to be produced

currency substitution and the optimal inflation tax abstract there exist conflicting results on the optimal inflation tax in open economies subject to currency substitution this paper reconciles the different results and concludes that except in very special cases the optimal inflation tax is positive

the effects of real exchange rate risk on international trade abstract by assuming real profit maximization and uncertain prices as well as exchange rates we conclude that it is uncertain percentage changes in the real exchange rate that are risky in international trade empirical estimation of fourteen bilateral trade flows among industrialized countries finds a significant negative effect on trade quantity from such risk in a number of these cases the expectation variable has a positive effect in a larger number of cases significant price effects from the expectation variable are fewer and from risk are negligible

optimal fiscal and monetary policy some recent results this paper studies the quantitative properties of fiscal and monetary policy in business cycle models in terms of fiscal policy optimal labor tax rates are virtually constant and optimal capital income tax rates are close to zero on average in terms of monetary policy the friedman rule is optimal nominal interest rates are zero and optimal monetary policy is activist in the sense that it responds to shocks to the economy

welfare costs of inflation in a dynamic economy with search unemployment abstract we present a monetary general equilibrium model with labor market frictions in the form of search unemployment which is calibrated for the us economy interestingly both employment and output may even increase with the rate of inflation depending on the elasticity of labor supply considering the transition dynamics following a change in the monetary policy the optimal quarterly inflation rate is found to amount to approximately 0 6 in the benchmark case a reduction of the inflation rate from its current level to its optimal value only results in small welfare gains equal to 0 08 of total consumption

sectoral effects of exchange rate volatility on united states exports abstract we analyze the effects of real exchange rate volatility on the proportions of bilateral exports of nine categories of goods from the united states to seven major industrial countries using a fixed effect framework in six of the nine categories the volatility of the real exchange rate significantly affects the value of exports and in five of these categories the effect is positive these results are consistent with a model in which risk neutral firms increase supply of elastically demanded exports in response to an increase in the volatility of the real exchange rate

the optimal inflation path in a sidrauski type model with uncertainty abstract in this paper it is shown that in a sidrauski type model with uncertainty the chicago rule remains valid as a prescription for the average rate of inflation although there is a systematic difference between the perfect foresight and the uncertainty case quantitatively however the difference turns out to be very small the paper shows how to calculate the optimal monetary policy as a function of the state variables using the method of parameterized expectations in terms of expected utility the optimal policy is as good as the simple policy that reduces the money supply at the rate of time preference

the effects of exchange rate volatility on agricultural trade i extend cho sheldon and mccorriston s 2002 analysis of the effect of exchange rate volatility on agricultural trade among the g 10 countries to a broad sample of developed and developing nations i replicate their original finding that exchange rate volatility has a large negative impact on agricultural trade between g 10 members after controlling for agricultural export subsidies which are correlated with exchange rate volatility i show that the original impact declines by half using the extended sample i find that the effect of exchange rate volatility is much larger for developing country exporters than for developed exporters copyright 2008 oxford university press

seller concentration the technological explanation and demand uncertainty the level of seller concentration in an industry depends on two characteristics of the size distribution of the firms concerned their number and the inequality of their sizes acknowledging these two dimensions the aim of this paper is to construct a unified theoretical framework capable of shedding some light on the economic forces which determine the degree of concentration it builds on the analysis of two schools of thought within the existing literature the first of these we shall label the technological explanation of concentration since it emphasises the role of the cost curve in particular the minimum efficient scale of production and barriers to the entry of new firms implicitly this attaches most importance to the firm number component of concentration the second school includes the various stochastic models of firm growth these models have demonstrated the influence on concentration of what is sometimes called luck or more deterministically those factors which might influence the spread of growth rates of firms within an industry to that extent these models emphasise the other component of concentration size inequalities we see our present contribution as an attempt to build a bridge between these two approaches we develop the well known simon and bonini i958 stochastic growth model in such a way as to provide a formal statement of the technological explanation and then discuss various ways of deepening the economic content of their original contribution section i provides a brief resume of the technological explanation and section ii describes the salient features of the simon and bonini model it goes on to show how this model can be used to disentangle a mathematical relationship between the concentration ratio and i minimum efficient scale ii the share of sub optimal firms and iii the degree of firm size inequalities this relationship is tested with some success using i968 uk census data an important conclusion of the simon and bonini model is that firm size inequalities depend crucially on the probability of entry by new firms section iii considers how this proposition may be invested with more economic content the discussion is couched at a fairly general level but in the appendix we suggest a specific model which explains entry as a consequence of the fact that incumbent firms typically operate in a world of demand uncertainty where entry deterrence may be too costly it provides specific economic predictions

inflation employment and welfare in the presence of transactions costs for some time now two issues of primary importance in macroeconomics and monetary theory have been the relation between inflation and unemployment the phillips curve and the optimum rate of inflation the optimum quantity of money in both of these areas the work of friedman and phelps has been influential friedman 1968 and phelps 1970 emphasized the role of inflationary expectations in generating a short run phillips curve like tradeoff but argued that in the long run the phillips curve is vertical that is friedman and phelps claimed that in the long run defined as the time period within which expectations fully adjust to actual circumstances inflation and employment should be uncorrelated more recently friedman 1977 has argued that since the rate of inflation and its variability tend to be positively related inflation and employment may be negatively related in the long run this is the positively sloped phillips curve phenomenon in recent years the link between inflation and employment has continued to receive considerable attention the vast rational expectations literature on the role of monetary policy and the equilibrium approach to the business cycle are in large part an outgrowth of the earlier phillips curve controversy the notion that there is an inverse long run relation between inflation and employment has recently received theoretical support from barro and santomero 1976 stockman 1981 and aschauer and greenwood 1983 related studies concerning the real effects of inflation have been undertaken by jovanovic 1982 stockman 1984 and abel 1985 the common element running through all of these papers is that the real effects of inflation arise from the transactions technology that underlies money demand l

do firm sizes and profit rates converge evidence on gibrat s law and the persistence of profits in the long run three panel unit root tests are applied to a 31 year firm size growth and profit rate data set for 96 large quoted uk firms all tests reject the unit root null for log size if the augmented dickey fuller autoregressions exclude a linear time trend if a linear trend is included the results are more ambiguous and appear to differ systematically between tests the view that firm growth is either random or near random does not receive unequivocal support in all tests there is however strong and consistent evidence of mean reversion in profit rates

exchange rate regimes and international trade evidence from the classical gold standard era in this paper we show that the spread of the classical gold standard in the late nineteenth century increased international trade flows this positive effect was compounded whenever a group of countries formed a monetary union applying the gravity model of trade to more than 1 100 country pairs during the 1870 1910 period we find that two countries on gold would trade 60 percent more with each other than with countries on a different monetary standard moreover a monetary union would more than double bilateral trade flows our findings are relevant for current discussions on alternative monetary arrangements for the twenty first century

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

measuring and analysing the effects of short term volatility in real exchange rates this paper examines short term volatility in the real effective exchange rates of industrial countries and its impact on their imports it yields three conclusions first volatility has not diminished as markets have gained experience with floating exchange rates the trend appears to be in the opposite direction for some countries second exposure to short term volatility has differed among countries japan and sweden have experienced much more than most other industrial countries third volatility appears to depress the volume of international trade this third finding is consistent with results reported by cushman and by akhtar and hilton and challenges earlier findings by hooper and kohlhagen

pass through of exchange rates and competition between floaters and fixers this paper studies how a rise in the share of u s imports from china or any country with a fixed exchange rate could disproportionately lower pass through of exchange rates to u s import prices we develop a theoretical model showing how changes in the competitive environment induce exporters from other countries to lower markups in response to a dollar depreciation thereby moderating pass through the model indicates that a particular local bias condition is necessary for this effect and that free entry amplifies it the model also produces an approximately log linear structural equation for pass through regressions including the china share panel regressions over 1993 2006 indicate that the rising share of trade from china or from all countries with fixed exchange rates can explain a decline in pass through by about onefifth of its size

seigniorage and tax smoothing in the united states 1914 1986 abstract when monetary and fiscal authorities cooperate to minimize the distortionary costs of financing an exogenous stream of government expenditures barro s tax smoothing model implies a long run relationship between tax revenues and inflation previous empirical tests of this relationship are reinterpreted in light of recent work on cointegration and are shown to hold only when stochastic temporal variation in the excess burden of taxes and seigniorage is transitory in nature a new test that holds in the presence of nonstationary disturbances is developed and applied annual u s data from the period 1914 to 1986 reject the revenue smoothing hypothesis

time consistency of fiscal and monetary policy the problem of time inconsistency arises from two different sources first as shown by guillermo a calvo 1978 the re is an incentive for each government to engage in an initial unanti cipated inflation second as discussed by robert e lucas and nancy l stokey 1983 there is an incentive for each government to deviat e from the path of taxes announced by the preceding government in th is paper it is shown that these two sources of time inconsistency ca n be removed by a particular method of debt management involving bot h nominal and indexed government bonds of various maturities copyright 1987 by the econometric society

collateral damage trade disruption and the economic impact of war abstract conventional wisdom in economic history suggests that conflict between countries can be enormously disruptive of economic activity especially international trade we study the effects of war on bilateral trade with available data extending back to 1870 using the gravity model we estimate the contemporaneous and lagged effects of wars on the trade of belligerent nations and neutrals controlling for other determinants of trade as well as the possible effects of reverse causality we find large and persistent impacts of wars on trade national income and global economic welfare we also conduct a general equilibrium comparative statics exercise that indicates costs associated with lost trade might be at least as large as the conventionally measured direct costs of war such as lost human capital as illustrated by case studies of world wars i and ii

the dynamic effects of currency union on trade abstract the response of trade to a monetary union is a dynamic process an empirical study of the european monetary union finds that the extensive margin of trade in new goods responded several years ahead of emu implementation and ahead of overall trade volume a dynamic rational expectations trade model shows that early entry of new firms in anticipation is explainable as a rational forward looking response to news the model helps identify which types of trading frictions are reduced by a currency union and shows how new entry can be affected by uncertainty about emu

the dynamics of exchange rate regimes fixes floats and flips the impermanence of fixed exchange rates has become a stylized fact in international finance the combination of the mirage view that pegs do not really peg with the fear of floating view that floats do not really float generates the conclusion that exchange rate regimes are in practice unimportant for the behavior of the exchange rate this is consistent with evidence on the irrelevance of exchange rate regimes for general macroeconomic performance recent studies however show that the exchange rate regime matters this can be understood by considering the dynamics of exchange rate regimes we demonstrate that the mirage view is somewhat misleading and incomplete pegs frequently break but many do last also there is a high degree of flipping that is the re formation of pegs that have broken thus a fixed exchange rate today is a good predictor that one will exist in the future we also investigate the quantitative effect of fixed exchange rates while the fear of floating view suggests little actual difference in fixed and floating rates with respect to exchange rate volatility we show that fixed exchange rates exhibit considerably greater bilateral exchange rate stability than flexible rates both today and in the future 2007 elsevier b v all rights reserved

bilateral trade flows the linder hypothesis and exchange risk bilateral trade flows are used to examine the linder hypothesis and the effect of exchange rate variability in a gra vity type trade model derived from an underlying demand and supply mo del a behavioral model is used to justify examining these issues joi ntly the model performs well empirically using a sample of seventeen countries for the period 1974 82 the authors find overwhelming supp ort for the linder hypothesis and this version of the gravity model moreover they find strong support for the hypothesis that increased exchange rate variability affects bilateral trade flows copyright 1987 by mit press

trade and empire we employ a new database of over 21 000 bilateral trade observations from 1870 1913 to assess the contemporaneous effects of empire on trade our analysis shows that belonging to an empire roughly doubled trade relative to those countries that were not part of an empire the use of a common language the establishment of currency unions the monetisation of recently acquired colonies and the establishment of preferential trade agreements and customs unions help to account for the observed increase in trade associated with empire

on the flexibility of monetary policy the case of the optimal inflation tax this paper examines optimal monetary policy under uncertainty in a context in which policy makers are able to make credible policy commitments we study an optimal taxation problem of minimizing the social cost of financing a stochastic and exogenous level of government transfers since in the basic model the welfare costs of inflation derive only from expected inflation the optimal monetary policy is highly responsive to the state of nature in a benchmark case in which all shocks are transitory the optimal policy calls for loading all the variability of government transfers on the shoulders of the inflation tax

financial globalisation and monetary policy effectiveness abstract in theory financial globalisation has an ambiguous effect on monetary policy effectiveness on the one hand exposure to global financial cycles dampens the output effect of a tightening in monetary policy in financially integrated economies and thereby reduces monetary policy effectiveness on the other hand another salient feature of financial globalisation is that economies have become increasingly net long in foreign currency which amplifies monetary policy effectiveness economies experience larger valuation losses and wealth effects on their external balance sheets in response to an exchange rate appreciation when monetary policy is tightened hence triggering stronger output effects we quantify empirically the net impact of financial globalisation on monetary policy effectiveness through these two opposing channels we find that since the 1990s the second channel has dominated so that financial globalisation has amplified monetary policy effectiveness in the typical advanced and emerging market economy by our estimates the output effect of a tightening in monetary policy has increased by 25 due to financial globalisation our results imply that financial globalisation has modified the transmission of monetary policy by strengthening the importance of the exchange rate channel

a liquidity in advance model of the demand for money under price uncertainty abstract we develop a model of money demand in which the asset and goods markets open sequentially money balances are subject to price level and consumption risk empirical evidence from a bivariate arch framework suggests both sources of risk reduced money demand in the 1970s inflation risk depresses money demand throughout our sample 1962 1987 the econometric analysis resolves conflicting empirical estimates reported in the literature

optimality of the friedman rule in economies with distorting taxes abstract we find conditions for the friedman rule to be optimal in three standard monetary models our main contribution is to shed light on two issues in the literature first the conventional view maintains that when money is a final good its services should be taxed moreover if money demand is interest inelastic its services should be taxed heavily we show that this view is incorrect second there is an ongoing controversy about whether the optimality of the friedman rule is connected to the intermediate goods result from public finance we resolve this controversy by showing a deep connection between these results

inflation and growth pecuniary transactions costs and qualitative equivalence this paper develops a pecuniary transactions costs tc approach to reexamine the principal relationships and results concerning inflation and growth in a model with a general tc function and an endogenous labor leisure choice we consider four special cases by distinguishing among money as 1 a consumption good 2 a production good 3 an investment good and 4 a consumption good as well as an investment good under some weaker conditions as in related studies a reversed tobin effect obtains for all cases a high monetary growth rate leads to lower steady state capital labor consumption and real money balances these findings suggest that a pecuniary tc model is qualitatively equivalent to alternative models in the literature

on the distribution of exchange rate regime treatment effects on international trade abstract this paper provides evidence of heterogeneous treatment effects on trade for six different types of exchange rate regime transitions utilizing data on 218 643 country pair year observations all together previous research mainly focused on the currency union effect on trade and widely assumed that country pairs with identical observable characteristics receive the same effect we test the hypothesis of a homogeneous treatment effect empirically and find substantive statistical support for the presence of effect heterogeneity moreover we characterize the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity among observationally equivalent country pairs by way of a random coefficients model we estimate selected features of the empirical distributions of the treatment effects for each of the six different types of exchange rate regime transitions under two different sets of assumptions about the probability distribution of effect heterogeneity our findings suggest that the immediate effects on trade from switching to an exchange rate regime different from the one in the outset have wide waists and exhibit large positive extreme values we estimate the probability of two countries to experience an immediate positive effect on the growth of bilateral trade due to the adoption of any new exchange rate regime tighter or not to be approximately one half

optimal fiscal and monetary policy under sticky prices this paper studies optimal fiscal and monetary policy under sticky product prices the theoretical framework is a stochastic production economy without capital the government finances an exogenous stream of purchases by levying distortionary income taxes printing money and issuing one period nominally risk free bonds the main findings of the paper are first for a miniscule degree of price stickiness i e many times below available empirical estimates the optimal volatility of inflation is near zero this result stands in stark contrast with the high volatility of inflation implied by the ramsey allocation when prices are flexible the finding is in line with a recent body of work on optimal monetary policy under nominal rigidities that ignores the role of optimal fiscal policy second even small deviations from full price flexibility induce near random walk behavior in government debt and tax rates third sluggish price adjustment raises the average nominal interest rate above the one called for by the friedman rule finally an interest rate feedback rule whereby the nominal interest rate depends on inflation and output fits well the data emanating from the ramsey economy however the fitted rule is not of the taylor type for the implied inflation coefficient is less than one and close to zero and the output coefficient is negative jel classification e52 e61 e63

how large is the optimal inflation tax abstract i examine the title question in a competitive framework where the transaction demand for money is modeled using a cash in advance constraint and only distortionary taxes are possible empirical evidence and simulations are used to document the plausibility of the assumptions which produce the friedman rule these findings suggest that it is not a good benchmark my results suggest that an optimal monetary policy calls for nominal interest rates that can exceed 6 per year

has exchange risk depressed international trade the impact of third country exchange risk abstract this paper argues that the effect of exchange risk on bilateral and aggregate trade flows should be analyzed by including the impact of third country exchange risk factors in addition to direct bilateral or multilateral risk after a theoretical examination of these effects us bilateral export flow to its six largest trading partners are analyzed empirically i find individuality and jointly significant third country risk effects in most cases in contrast to some recent bilateral efforts i find a steadily growing negative impact on trade flows from exchange risk during floating and in contrast to recent aggregate trade flow studies i conclude that there was no temporary decline in exchange risk during the late 1970s

chinese trade price and yuan s valuation this paper studies how the major economic events would have affected chinese yuan s nominal exchange rate against us dollar from 1989 to 2013 the traditional average treatment effect estimation methods cannot be used to consistently estimate yuan s pegged exchange rate we develop a new estimation strategy by combining a novel panel data method proposed by hisao ching and wan and the purchasing power parity theory based on this new estimation strategy we find that during the period of pegging to us dollar chinese yuan were undervalued before the 1997 asian financial crisis the pegged exchange rate regime starting from january 1994 made the yuan undervalued by 2 62 china s accession to wto caused yuan undervalued by 36 60 after the reform of chinese exchange rate policy in july 2005 the undervaluation of the yuan was reduced to only 0 76 yuan was undervalued again by 20 43 because of 2008 china s economy stimulus package the policy reform in june 2010 made yuan overvalued by 14 40 we conclude that chinese fixed exchange rate policy indeed undervalued the yuan especially after its accession to wto the recent reforms of chinese exchange rate policy made progresses in re evaluating the yuan

fixed exchange rates and trade abstract a classic argument for a fixed exchange rate is its promotion of trade empirical support for this however is mixed while one branch of research consistently shows a small negative effect of exchange rate volatility on trade another more recent branch presents evidence of a large positive impact of currency unions on trade this paper helps resolve this disconnect our results which use a new data based classification of fixed exchange rate regimes show a large significant effect of a fixed exchange rate on bilateral trade between a base country and a country that pegs to it these results suggest an economically relevant role for exchange rate regimes in trade determination since a significant amount of world trade is conducted between countries with fixed exchange rates

the modern history of exchange rate arrangements a reinterpretation we develop a novel system of reclassifying historical exchange rate regimes one key difference between our study and previous classifications is that we employ monthly data on market determined parallel exchange rates going back to 1946 for 153 countries our approach differs from the imf official classification which we show to be only a little better than random it also differs radically from all previous attempts at historical reclassification our classification points to a rethinking of economic performance under alternative exchange rate regimes indeed the breakup of bretton woods had less impact on exchange rate regimes than is popularly believed

the optimal inflation tax in the presence of currency substitution abstract an important result in the optimal inflation tax literature is that if money is modeled as reducing transactions costs the optimal nominal interest rate is zero this paper examines this issue in the context of a small open economy where both domestic and foreign currency circulate as media of exchange it is shown that the presence of foreign money enables the government to reduce the distortion introduced into the economy by a positive foreign nominal interest rate by setting a positive domestic nominal interest rate