computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition for multivariate economic time series abstract this note shows how the result of newbold 1990 newbold p 1990 precise and efficient computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series journal of monetary economics 26 453 457 can be extended to the computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition in the multivariate case where series are generated by vector arima models a separate treatment is provided for the cointegrated case

the term structure of interest rates in the new and prospective eu countries this article uses cointegration and common trends techniques to investigate empirically the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates for the 10 new eu countries along with bulgaria and romania the empirical results support the expectations theory of the term structure for all countries except malta by decomposing each term structure into its transitory and permanent components we also analyse short run and long run interdependence among the term structures of interest rates in these countries our results indicate only weak linkages among the term structures of the 10 new eu countries and strong linkages between bulgaria and romania joined the eu in 2007

the environmental social interface of sustainable development capabilities social capital institutions the social dimension has commonly been recognised as the weakest pillar of sustainable development notably when it comes to its analytical and theoretical underpinnings while increasing attention has lately been paid to social sustainability the interaction between the environmental and the social still remains a largely uncharted terrain nevertheless one can argue that the key challenges of sustainable development reside at the interfaces synergies and trade offs between its various dimensions this paper looks for preliminary ideas on frameworks for analysing the environmental social interface it first discusses the concept of sustainable development and the relations of the three dimensions of sustainability on the basis of the fundamental premises of neoinstitutional and ecological economics and briefly presents the bioeconomy model based on this conceptualisation of sustainable development it then goes on to analyse two popular ways of addressing the social dimension of sustainability namely the capability approach of amartya sen and the concept of social capital and discusses the potential of these as bases for the analysis of the environment social interaction the organisation for economic cooperation and development oecd environmental performance review epr programme is presented as an example of attempts to analyse the environmental social interface in practice the paper concludes by noting that a single framework for studying environmental social interface is neither feasible nor desirable it questions the usefulness of analysing only two dimensions of sustainability at a time and emphasises the need to situate the analysis in its context in particular it stresses the need to involve the potential users as well as to take into account the planned use of the analysis and the interactions between different levels of analysis and decision making capabilities and social capital can both be useful in structuring thoughts but are not as such directly applicable as suitable analytical frameworks in particular they do not provide adequate tools for examining the social preconditions for institutional change needed for environmentally sustainable development

the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series a quick computational method this note describes a much simpler computational method for carrying out the beveridge and nelson decomposition of economic time series into permanent and cyclical components

monetary policy regimes expected inflation and the response of interest rates to money announcements this paper examines the response of the term structure of interest rates to weekly money announcements estimated responses for both the pre and post october 1979 periods are first presented then two competing hypotheses involving the policy anticipations and expected inflation effects are formally specified and compared with the estimated responses both hypotheses are found to be consistent with the responses but they have sharply different implications about the federal reserve s short run monetary policy by exploiting these different implications additional empirical results focusing directly on the money stock process support the policy anticipations hypothesis

strike incidence and the business cycle in ireland strike incidence equations are estimated for manufacturing strikes in ireland from 1960 to 1989 using both poisson and negative binomial regression models a number of alternative business cycle measures are specified the pro cyclicity of strikes is confirmed in all cases and is invariant to the measurement of the cyclical component the numerical size of the cyclical effect on strike activity is however quite small

real business cycles under test abstract according to the theory of real business cycles exogenous technological productivity shocks are the primary source of economic fluctuations following the lines of the multisectoral long and plosser 1983 model the paper shows that such a view of business cycles leads to an inherent sectoral ordering in which non consumer sectors are exogenous on the contrary empirical evidence based on var testing and cross spectral methods reveals that consumer goods sectors precede this result can be explained by a simple extension of the dynamic long and plosser innovation process in which significant stochastic demand disturbances are taken into account in particular these demand shocks have to dominate inverse supply innovations such issues of real business cycle theory suggest that only a more explicit modelling of demand influences will reconcile theory with observation

diffusion of technical change and the decomposition of output into trend and cycle in this paper we argue that modelling the trend component in real gnp as a random walk is inconsistent with its interpretation as productivity growth as an alternative we specify the trend as an arima whose impulse response function follows an s shaped pattern reflecting the process of diffusion of technical change such an arima is employed to build and estimate an ucarima using usa postwar quarterly data we find that our model although more parsimonious fits the data equally well than the standard random walk plus ar 2 cycle moreover our model has a very low cycle trend variance ratio

testing the expectations hypothesis in the brazilian term structure of interest rates a cointegration analysis in this article the expectations hypothesis eh is tested using cointegration techniques for maturities ranging from 1 to 12 months for the brazilian market we found evidence suggesting that for the period 1995 2006 the cointegration implication generally seems to hold we also found strong evidence supporting causality from short to long rates and also in the opposite direction empirical evidence supports the expectations theory of the term structure of interest rates

are business cycles asymmetric some european evidence economic thought has often regarded business cycles as asymmetric this study examines the existence of asymmetries over the business cycle in seven european countries france germany ireland italy luxembourg the netherlands and the united kingdom to analyse this issue industrial production in these countries from 1957 to 1998 is examined and quarterly contractions and expansions in this variable are compared the results obtained with both parametric and non parametric methods allow the existence of asymmetries in these countries to be questioned

predictability in financial markets what do survey expectations tell us abstract there is widespread evidence of excess return predictability in financial markets for the foreign exchange market a number of studies have documented that the predictability of excess returns is closely related to the predictability of expectational errors of excess returns in this paper we investigate the link between the predictability of excess returns and expectational errors in a much broader set of financial markets using data on survey expectations of market participants in the stock market the foreign exchange market the bond market and money markets in various countries the results are striking first in markets where there is significant excess return predictability expectational errors of excess returns are predictable as well with the same sign and often even with similar magnitude this is the case for foreign exchange stock and bond markets second in the only market where excess returns are generally not predictable the money market expectational errors are not predictable either these findings suggest that an explanation for the predictability of excess returns must be closely linked to an explanation for the predictability of expectational errors

units of measurement and the stone index in demand system estimation the stone index typically used in estimating linear almost ideal demand systems is not invariant to changes in units of measurement which may seriously affect the approximation properties of the model a modification to the stone index or use of a regular price index instead are both desirable practices in estimating linear ai models

how is the debt managed learning from fiscal stabilizations this paper provides evidence on the behavior of public debt managers during fiscal stabilizations such episodes provide valuable information on the way debt instruments are chosen because they allow to overcome the problem that policymakers expectations of interest rates are generally not observable we find that governments increase the share of fixed rate long term debt denominated in the domestic currency the higher is the conditional volatility of short term interest rates the lower are long term interest rates and the stronger is the fall in long term rates that follows the announcement of the stabilization program by contrast conventional measures of the relative cost of issuing long term debt such as the long short interest rate spread are not significant this evidence suggests that debt managers tend to prefer long to short maturity debt because they are concerned about the risk of refinancing at higher than expected interest rates however when long term rates are high relative to their expectations they issue short maturity debt to minimize borrowing costs

real exchange rate and openness in emerging economies argentina in the long run argentina s economic policies since the beginning of the century give an interesting background to the study of real exchange rate rer management in emerging countries in this article four types of rer overvaluation are identified in the 1920s argentina provides a short example of overvaluation in a context of a fixed exchange rate policy moreover the estimations show that import substitution regimes can lead to a misalignment of rer argentina illustrates also the difficult management of rer in a volatile environment the results allow in addition to better understand the failure of the trade liberalization attempts of the country and remind that successfully integrating the world economy asks for an appropriate rer policy

macroeconomics and the term structure this paper provides an overview of the analysis of the term structure of interest rates with a special emphasis on recent developments at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance the topic is important to investors and also to policymakers who wish to extract macroeconomic expectations from longer term interest rates and take actions to influence those rates the simplest model of the term structure is the expectations hypothesis which posits that long term interest rates are expectations of future aver age short term rates in this paper we show that many features of the configuration of interest rates are puzzling from the perspective of the expectations hypothesis we review models that explain these anomalies using time varying risk premia although the quest for the fundamental macroeconomic explanations of these risk premia is ongoing inflation uncertainty seems to play a large role finally while modern finance theory prices bonds and other assets in a single unified framework we also consider an earlier approach based on segmented markets market segmentation seems important to understand the term structure of interest rates during the recent financial crisis jel e31 e43 e52 e58

measures of fit for rational expectations models this survey provides a detailed description of some of the recent theoretical and empirical literature on rational expectations econometrics the survey pays special attention to non stationarity of the data and to the various methods for evaluating rational expectations models that have been developed as alternatives to the classical statistical approach of testing overidentifying restrictions these methods have become very popular and widely used in empirical research we provide an illustration using danish stock market data and we summarize the many results obtained recently using these measures in areas as diverse as stock prices the term structure of interest rates exchange rates consumption and saving the balance of payments tax smoothing hyperinflation and linear quadratic adjustment cost models for inventories labour demand and money demand

household food demand in rural china this article explores rural household food consumption behaviour in china using a large household data set from jilin province data are classified into four main food groups grain vegetable products animal products and other foods a household food demand system incorporating four household characteristics is estimated using an la aids model assuming a three stage budgeting procedure expenditure elasticities for a range of food groups are estimated with a particular focus on animal products the inclusion of household characteristics did not have a big impact on the elasticity values in any of the three stages of the budgeting process the total expenditure elasticity for grain stage ii was 0 64 suggesting substantial future growth in household demand for fine grains such as rice and wheat as per capita incomes continue to grow in rural areas the highest conditional and total expenditure elasticity values were for the animal products stage ii group 1 22 and 0 76 respectively within this

detrending and turning points this paper examines the sensitivity of turning points classification to different detrending methods and the ability of each method to replicate nber dating we use two different turning point rules and a variety of detrending methods to compute the cyclical component of output we show that while differences are minor with the first rule the results are extremely sensitive to detrending with the second rule many detrending procedures generate false alarms and many miss several commonly classified turning points the output series detrended with the hodrick and prescott filter and with a frequency domain masking of the low frequency components of the series reproduce all nber turning points with at most two quarters lead or lag regardless of the dating rule used

a simple account of the behavior of long term interest rates recent empirical research on the term structure of interest rates has shown that the long term interest rate is well described by a distributed lag on short term interest rates but does not conform to the expectations theory of the term structure it has been suggested that the long rate overreacts to the short rate this paper presents aunified taxonomy of risk premia or deviations from the expectations theory this enables the hypothesis of overreaction to be formally stated it is shown that if anything the long rate has underreacted to the short rate however the independent movement of the long rate is primarily responsible for the failure of the expectations theory

precise and efficient computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series abstract this note shows how the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series can be precisely computed without the necessity for truncating infinite sums the algorithm includes those of beveridge and nelson 1981 and miller 1988 as special cases for particular models correcting an error in the latter

barriers to green supply chain management in indian mining industries a graph theoretic approach a country s mining industry despite its significant contributions to the country s economic growth generally has a very poor public image because it is considered as a major environmental polluter to acquire an improved social image as well as to comply with government regulations mining industries are increasingly implementing environmental management systems ems cleaner production cp and adopting green supply chain management gscm practices gscm focuses on a reduction of the adverse impacts of supply chain activities as well as a minimization of energy and material usage this study focuses on the mining industry as a case study by which we will identify factors and sub factors hindering gscm implementation a graph theoretic and matrix approach gtma has been used to quantify the adverse impact of these barriers on gscm implementation an assessment of the inhibiting strength of the barriers will help decision makers rank them and decide a course of action that will make an optimum utilization of available resources during times of resource scarcity

a new approach to decomposition of economic time series into permanent and transitory components with particular attention to measurement of the business cycle abstract this paper introduces a general procedure for decomposition of non stationary time series into a permanent and transitory component allowing both components to be stochastic the permanent component is shown to be a random walk with drift and the transitory or cyclical component is a stationary process with mean zero the decomposition methodology which depends only on past data and therefore is computable in real time is applied to the problem of measuring and dating business cycles in the portwar u s economy we find that measured expansions and contractions are of roughly equivalent duration and that our dating of cyclical episodes tends to lead the traditional nber dating and to a lesser extent the growth cycle chronology of zarnowitz and boschan 1977

long run trends in 26 primary commodity prices abstract this paper uses time series techniques to re examine the prebisch singer hypothesis that there has been a secular deterioration in primary commodity prices in terms of manufactured goods instead of using price indices it considers 26 individual commodity prices over the period 1900 1983 this avoids possible aggregation and interpretation problems associated with the use of aggregate indices the study finds that 16 of the 26 prices are trendless five have statistically significant negative trends the remaining five have positive trends it concludes that the prebisch singer hypothesis should certainly not be considered a universal phenomenon or stylized fact

supply chain specific understanding the patchy success of ethical sourcing initiatives as a number of high profile companies have found to their cost corporate reputations can be significantly affected by firms management of sustainability issue including those that are outside their direct control such as the environmental and social impacts of their supply networks this paper begins by examining the relationship between corporate social responsibility reputation and supply network conditions it then looks at the effectiveness of one tool for managing supply network sustainability issues ethical sourcing codes of conduct by examining how the characteristics of three supply networks branded clothes diy wood products and branded confectionary affects the implementation ethical sourcing codes of conduct it ends by setting out conclusions on why implementation of such codes has been so much more successful in some sectors than others and recommendations on effective approaches to managing sustainability issues in supply networks

lithuania s food demand during economic transition the linear approximate version of the almost ideal demand system la aids model is estimated using data from the lithuanian household budget survey hbs covering the period from july 1992 to december 1994 price and real expenditure elasticities for 12 food groups were estimated based on the estimated coefficients of the model very little or nothing is known about the demand parameters of lithuania and other former socialist countries so the results are of intrinsic interest estimated expenditure elasticities were positive and statistically significant for all food groups while all own price elasticities were negative and statistically significant except for that of eggs which was insignificant results suggest that lithuanian household consumption did respond to price and real income changes during their transition to a market oriented economy

permanent and transitory components of colombia s real gdp abstract cuddington s 1986 over consumption hypothesis is revised by exploring how sensitive the results are to different methods of real gdp decomposition using a different model selection procedure we adopt an arima specification which leads to have a real gdp decomposition that lends no support to the over consumption hypothesis however cuddington s model also used in recent jde paper cuddington and urzua 1989 could be chosen for avoiding hypersensitivity of the permanent income how to balance trade offs between statistical and theoretical criteria in decomposition is an issue that requires further research

tests of the expectations hypothesis resolving the anomalies when the short term rate is the federal funds rate abstract the expectations hypothesis eh of the term structure plays an important role in the analysis of monetary policy where shorter term rates are assumed to be determined by the market s expectation for the overnight federal funds rate with two exceptions tests using the effective federal funds rate as the short term rate easily reject the eh these exceptions are when the eh is tested over the nonborrowed reserve targeting period and when the test is performed only using data for settlement wednesdays the last day of bank reserve maintenance period this paper argues that these exceptions are anomalous in the former case the failure to reject the eh occurs when economic analysis suggests that the market should be less able to forecast the federal funds rate in the latter case it occurs when there are sharp spikes in the funds rate that cannot improve materially the market s ability to forecast the funds rate additional analysis shows that these anomalous results are a consequence of the procedure used to test the eh

preferred habitat for liquidity in international short term interest rates abstract risk shifting window dressing and a preferred habitat for liquidity have been offered as possible explanations as to why us money market rates are higher before the year end than afterwards the two hypotheses differ in the timing of the rate decline at the year end and the evidence on the timing of the decline supports the preferred habitat hypothesis in us money markets this paper extends this line of research to the behavior of international short term interest rates at year ends and quarter ends using london interbank offer rates libor for 11 different currencies the results suggest that the behavior of libor for five currencies the us dollar euro japanese yen swiss franc and german mark is consistent with year end or quarter end preferred habitats for liquidity other currencies do not demonstrate consistently distinct patterns in turn of the year and turn of the quarter yields none of the results provides any support for risk shifting window dressing

sources of regime switching in short term interest rates for canada the purpose of this study is to identify sources of regime switching in short term interest rates for canada the choice of information variables is based on three well known hypotheses about interest rates the expectations hypothesis the fisher relationship and the condition for uncovered interest parity the empirical framework consists of an autoregressive distributive lag adl model in error correction form with information spreads and a markov regime switching estimation methodology the models choose interest rate regimes that are similar in many respects to those found for the usa the different regimes in canada are driven by movements in the monetary policy rate the us short term rate and the long term yield the monetary policy rate is found to trigger very large changes in the short term rate responding one for one in the high variance regime and slightly less in the more normal interest rate regime both the us short rate and long term yield are also found to trigger relatively large

trends and cycles in the net barter terms of trade a new approach this study has two objectives first it uses time series techniques including unit root tests to reexamine the classic prebisch singer hypothesis that the relative prices of primary commodities in terms of manufactured goods are characterized by secular deterioration second commodity price movements are decomposed into permanent and cyclical components using the beveridge and nelson 1981 technique the latter information is valuable when assessing the viability of commodity stabilization funds and formulating countercyclical macroeconomic policy responses to commodity booms and busts copyright 1989 by royal economic society

the term structure spread and future changes in long and short rates in the g7 countries abstract according to the expectations hypothesis when the spread between long and short rates widens next quarter s long rate should rise in the united states however long rates decline instead of rising this anomaly is also present in canada the uk germany and japan four of the additional six g7 countries nevertheless in contrast to the us where long rates appear to overreact to expected future developments the anomalous short run movement of long rates in these other g7 countries is caused by an additive white noise error on long rates that does not materially affect the information in their term structure

macroeconomic sources of risk in the term structure we develop a new way of modeling time variation in term premia based on the stochastic discount factor model of asset pricing the joint distribution of excess u s bond returns of different maturity and the observable fundamental macroeconomic factors is modeled using multivariate garch with conditional covariances in the mean to capture the term premia by testing the assumption of no arbitrage we derive a specification test of our model we estimate the contribution made to the term premia at different maturities through real and nominal sources of risk from the estimated term premia we recover the term structure of interest rates and examine how it varies through time finally we examine whether the reported failures of the rational expectations hypothesis can be attributed to an omitted time varying term premium

capital flows and saving in latin america and asia a reinterpretation abstract both theory and the empirical evidence for a broad range of countries have identified a negative relationship between domestic and foreign saving still based on the experience of the 1990s a popular view has emerged that domestic and foreign saving are positively related in asia and negatively related in latin america we argue that this popular discussion does not discriminate between trends in domestic saving which are very different in the two regions and the cyclical component of saving which is linked to capital flows we show that when trend and cyclical components of domestic saving and capital flows are properly taken into account the two regions do not differ in the short run response of domestic saving to capital inflows we conclude that the main differences pertain to the long run behavior of saving rates which are driven by trends in demographic factors per capita gdp and other factors that have little to do with fluctuations in capital flows

interest rate co movements global factors and the long end of the term spread the decoupling of us short and long interest rates has been a distinctive feature of the 2000s we employ recent advances in panel econometrics to document this disconnect for industrial countries and link it to a global latent factor in long term rates we investigate whether international forces such as global inflation global output or the global savings glut may be behind this global latent factor the savings glut is the most likely contender suggesting that reserve accumulation and a search for yield from emerging markets has lowered long rates internationally driving a wedge between domestic short and long rates

term structure of interest rates and the expectation hypothesis the euro area abstract this paper investigates the informational content of the yield curve in the european market using data on the italian term structures according to the expectation hypothesis theory eht the current forward rate equals the future short rate plus a constant risk premium that is time invariant but maturity dependent this theory has been widely tested in the empirical literature providing various findings according to the country where it has been applied and to the segment of the yield curve examined or the period under study the standard approach to test the eht uses the regression techniques assuming data on spot rates and their first differences to be stationary recently an increasing number of studies evidenced the non stationarity of interest rates time series and some tests of the eht are formulated using term spread and forward spot spread which are stationary a new strand of literature suggests to investigate the eht using a restricted var framework in this paper following jondeau e ricart r 1999 the expectations hypothesis of the term structure tests on us german french and uk euro rates journal of international money and finance 18 725 750 ghazali n a low s w 2002 the expectations hypothesis in emerging financial markets the case of malaysia applied economics 34 1147 1156 and seo b 2003 non linear mean reversion in the term structure of interest rates journal of economic dynamics and control 27 2243 2265 we test if the expectation hypothesis holds using cointegration and error correction analysis for the period under study results suggest that the long and short term interest rates are cointegrated and therefore subject to a long equilibrium path providing evidence that the eht holds for the italian and the european market

tests of the expectations hypothesis resolving the campbell shiller paradox one of the more puzzling results in the expectations hypothesis eh testing literature is the campbell shiller paradox csp in an influential paper campbell and shiller 1991 found that the slope of the term structure almost always gives a forecast in the wrong direction for the short term change in the yield on the longer bond but gives a forecast in the right direction for long term changes in short rates this paper provides an econometric resolution to the csp specifically it shows that by their construction these tests can generate results consistent with the csp if the eh does not holdnwhatever the reason monte carlo experiments confirm that this explanation can account for campbell and shiller s paradoxical results for most pairings of short term and long term rates considered

the effect of changes in the federal funds rate target on market interest rates in the 1970s abstract this paper examines the influence of monetary policy on interest rates by estimating the effect of changes in the federal funds rate target the federal reserve s policy instrument on market interest rates in the 1970s we find that changes in the target caused large movements in short term rates and smaller but significant movements in intermediate and long term rates we hypothesize that the similarity of the reactions of three six and twelve month rates to changes in the target offers a possible explanation for the lack of support for the expectations theory from studies that have tested the theory using these rates

a measure of the u s output gap abstract an autoregressive distributed lag regression of the unemployment rate on output growth is structurally stable over the 1890 1986 period inverting this equation yields a measure of the output gap which is not subject to the spurious detrending problem

output and unemployment dynamics in the united states 1950 1985 for us data over 1950 1985 the stochastic components of gnp growth and the unemployment rate appear to be stationary and there is substantial feedback between these variables the unconditional mean rate of unemployment in a joint model thus provides a natural benchmark in discussions of the business cycle a bivariate var model is used to describe output unemployment dynamics to estimate the degree of persistence of output innovations and to decompose output into trend and cycle the bivariate results are interpreted using a restricted var and it is shown that a closely related cyclical measure can be obtained directly from the okun s law equation

do corporate global environmental standards create or destroy market value arguments can be made on both sides of the question of whether a stringent global corporate environmental standard represents a competitive asset or liability for multinational enterprises mnes investing in emerging and developing markets analyzing the global environmental standards of a sample of u s based mnes in relation to their stock market performance we find that firms adopting a single stringent global environmental standard have much higher market values as measured by tobin sq than firms defaulting to less stringent or poorly enforced host country standards thus developing countries that use lax environmental regulations to attract foreign direct investment may end up attracting poorer quality and perhaps less competitive firms our results also suggest that externalities are incorporated to a significant extent in firm valuation we discuss plausible reasons for this observation

covariance versus component based estimations of performance in green supply chain management abstract in this paper we investigate the relationships between environmental management em and performance to verify whether the implementation of an effective internal environmental is a firm s precondition to belong to a green supply chain which type of environmental practices either internal or external contribute the most to increasing a firm s performances and whether performing the environment translates into higher economic performance we use structural equation modeling for testing our research hypotheses on a large sample of italian firms and estimate the structural paths between constructs by means of both covariance and component based approaches the use of both estimation methods allows us contributing to the recent debate about the specification of the performance construct as an emerging rather than as a latent variable and then using formative rather than reflective indicators formative indicators are used whenever a construct does not exist without its measures any change in one of the indicators causes a change in the construct and the measures are ingredients of the construct rather than being caused by it for instance economic performance is an emerging construct since economic measures e g profits and market share contribute to forming the construct rather than reflecting the behavior of the latent variable we show that the correct model specification changes the estimates of the path coefficients and leads to research findings aligned to the literature our results indicate that being green internally is a prerequisite for collaboration into a green supply chain internal em contributes to increasing performance more than external em while performing the environment does not lead to a higher economic performance

reserves announcements and interest rates does monetary policy matter the author provides evidence on the perceived existence of strong liquidity effect the analysis is based on the response of the term structure of interest rates to the weekly federal reserve announcements of bank reserves during the post october 1979 period it is shown that unanticipated changes in the mix between borrowed and nonborrowed reserves cause expected real interest rates to change after the announcement because they provide information about a future change in the supply of money a precise model is developed and tested during subperiods of nonborrowed and borrowed reserves targeting by the fed

why do term structures in different currencies co move abstract yield curve fluctuations across different currencies are highly correlated this paper investigates this phenomenon by exploring the channels through which macroeconomic shocks are transmitted across borders macroeconomic shocks affect current and expected future short term rates as central banks react to changing economic environments investors could also respond to these shocks by altering their required compensation for risk macroeconomic shocks thus influence bond yields both through a policy channel and through a risk compensation channel using data from the us the uk and germany we find that world inflation and us yield level together explain over two thirds of the covariance of yields at all maturities further these effects operate largely through the risk compensation channel for long term bonds

the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates open interest rate parity and central bank policy reaction abstract a rational expectations model with endogenous monetary policy reacting to the exchange rate and the term spread shows that the empirical performance of the expectations hypothesis of the term structure and the uncovered interest rate parity hypothesis improves with the strength of the policy reaction to the exchange rate and the term spread respectively

trends and cycles in macroeconomic time series two structural time series models for annual observations are constructed in terms of trend cycle and irregular components the models are then estimated via the kalman filter using data on five u s macroeconomic time series the results provide some interesting insights into the dynamic structure of the series particularly with respect to cyclical behavior at the same time they illustrate the development of a model selection strategy for structural time series models

a multi country study of the information in the shorter maturity term structure about future inflation abstract empirical analysis of data from ten oecd countries indicates that except for france the united kingdom and germany the shorter maturity term structure does not contain a great deal of information about the future path of inflation on the other hand except for the united kingdom there is a great deal of information in the term structure of nominal interest rates at shorter maturities about the term structure of real interest rates these results are explained by differences in the relative variability of expected future inflation changes and real term structure slopes for the different countries

computation of the beveridge nelson decomposition in the case of cointegrated systems with i 0 variables abstract this paper shows how the result of arino and newbold economics letters 61 1998 37 for the multivariate bn decomposition in the cointegrated case can be extended when i 0 variables are considered in the vec model an application of the extended procedure to the spanish peseta french franc real exchange rate is also provided

the beveridge nelson decomposition of economic time series another economical computational method abstract this note describes a simple and an economical computational procedure for generating the permanent cyclical decomposition of economic time series proposed by beveridge and nelson 1981 our procedure is a more complete alternative than the method suggested by cuddington and winters 1987

the expectations hypothesis of the term structure the uk interbank market using a high quality weekly data set the author provides several tests of the expectations hypothesis using the vector autoregression and cointegration methodologies for several maturities between one week and twelve months for the u k interbank market on the basis of the johansen cointegration analysis there appears to be a break in the term structure when both the six month and twelve month maturities are included as a pair the latter may be due to either the presence of liquidity constraints or market segmentation or a time varying term premium all of which would invalidate the assumptions underlying the expectations hypothesis the author provides some tentative explanations of these diverse results copyright 1996 by royal economic society

the information content of the term structure of interest rates this paper presents the results of an alternative test of the rational expectations theory of the term structure of interest rates other researchers have also examined the validity of the expectations hypothesis of term structure while there is more often rejection of the expectations hypothesis no other theory data consistent with the entire yield curve provides an empirically adequate explanation of this phenomenon the study considers postwar us pure discount zero coupons bond yields with various maturities from one month to 60 months based on the ex post formation of rational expectations the expectations error is quantified and the level of truth of the expectations hypothesis tested that is the strength of the departure of the yield curve from the expectations theory the results suggest that a significant amount of information available at no cost to market agents is not incorporated in forming people s expectations

elasticities in aids models comment green and alston have written two articles 1990 1991 for the journal on the correct method of calculating elasticities for the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids their articles are a departure from the typical approach to the la aids the la aids is generally used to estimate the parameters of deaton and muellbauer s almost ideal demand system aids the elasticity formulae for the aids are known green and alston s formulae are relevant only if the la aids is treated as a system in its own right such a treatment has merit however after checking the implications of treating the la aids as a system in its own right we discover that the la aids itself lacks merit

targeting the real exchange rate theory and evidence abstract this paper presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of policies aimed at setting a more depreciated level of the real exchange rate an intertemporal optimizing model suggests that in the absence of changes in fiscal policy a more depreciated level of the real exchange rate can only be attained temporarily this can be achieved by means of higher inflation and or higher real interest rates depending on the degree of capital mobility evidence for brazil chile and colombia supports the model s prediction that undervalued real exchange rates are associated with higher inflation

trends and cycles in colombia s real gdp and fiscal deficit abstract the purpose of this paper is twofold the first is methodological we review the beveridge nelson technique for decomposing economic time series and illustrate its usefulness for examining the cyclical and secular movements in real gdp in colombia second we examine government expenditures and revenues in order to assess the extent to which the sharp increase in the fiscal deficit in the early 1980s should be viewed as a cyclical rather than a secular phenomenon

market perceptions of federal reserve policy and the weekly monetary announcements abstract in october 1979 the federal reserve altered its operating procedures emphasizing control of the growth rate of the money stock was the fed able to gain credibility in the market the paper investigates this question by examining the reactions of spot and expected future exchange rates foreign interest rates and long run domestic forward interest rates to the weekly federal reserve announcements of m l both before and after october 1979 the empirical evidence points out that the fed did gain credibility but was unable to establish full credibility the market reactions are consistent with the hypothesis that market participants attached a positive probability to the event that the fed may at some point in the future abandon its money stock targets

testing the expectations hypothesis in eurodeposits abstract analyzing data on euro rates for 1978 1998 we find some consistent evidence in favor of the expectations hypothesis eh of the term structure a interest rates offered on deposits in a given currency form a cointegrated system b the restrictions of the eh on the cointegrating relationships are not rejected c forward rates contain significant explanatory power on future interest rates unbiasedness being an acceptable hypothesis as a cointegrating relationship between forward rates and the appropriate future value of the corresponding short term interest rate however we also provide evidence that past rates contain information additional to that in forward rates to predict future short term rates against the rational expectations version of the eh and market efficiency

a multicountry comparison of term structure forecasts at long horizons abstract this paper extends previous work on the information in the u s term structure at longer maturities to britain west germany and switzerland we find strong evidence that the term structure does have significant ability to forecast changes in inflation particularly at long maturities on the other hand the ability of the term structure to forecast changes in one year interest rates is somewhat weaker only at the very longest horizon five years is there significant forecasting ability for interest rate changes

new hope for the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates survey data on interest rate expectations permit separate testing of the two alternative hypotheses in traditional term structure tests that the expectations hypothesis fails and that expected future interest rates are ex post inefficient forecasts we find that the source of the spread s poor predictions of future interest rates varies with maturity at short maturities the expectations hypothesis fails at long maturities however changes in the yield curve reflect changes in expected future rates one for one an implication of the expectations hypothesis this result confirms earlier findings that long rates underreact to short rates but now it cannot be attributed to term premia if the attractiveness of an economic hypothesis is measured by the number of papers which statistically reject it the expectations theory of the term structure is a knockout most tests beginning with macaulay 1938 find no evidence supporting the expectations hypothesis 1 many cannot even reject statistically the alternative hypothesis that the spread between long and short rates contains no information about future interest rate changes 2 to make matters worse in u s postwar data future long rates tend to rise when short rates are above long rates since the expectations hypothesis would predict that long rates tend to fall the theory often does worse than even the naive model that future interest

a defense of traditional hypotheses about the term structure of interest rates expectations theories of asset returns may be interpreted either as stating that risk premia are zero or that they are constant through time under the former interpretation different versions of the expectations theory of the term structure are inconsistent with one another but i show that this does not necessarily carry over to the constant risk premium interpretation of the theory i present a general equilibrium example in which different types of risk premium are constant through time and dependent only on maturity furthermore i argue that differences among expectations theories are secondorder effects of bond yield variability i develop an approximate linearized framework for analysis of the term structure in which these differences disappear and i test its accuracy in practice using data from the crsp government bond tapes in a well known article in this journal cox ingersoll and ross cir 4 reexamine and find wanting certain hypotheses about the term structure of interest rates a striking feature of cir s re examination is that it is entirely theoretical cir show that different versions of the pure expectations theory of the term structure which traditionally were regarded as equivalent are in fact inconsistent with one another when interest rates are random furthermore in a fairly general continuous time arbitrage pricing framework when interest rates are random all versions of the theory except one are incompatible with equilibrium at first sight cir s results appear to be devastating to traditional empirical work on the term structure they suggest that researchers must specify arbitrage pricing models with a small number of state variables before proceeding to empirical work such models must restrict not only the deterministic components

near unit roots and the predictive power of yield spreads for changes in long term interest rates the ability of yield spreads to predict changes in long term interest rates implied by the expectations hypothesis is usually rejected it is suggested that this rejection is often caused by high persistence in the spread when standard inference is employed instead the asymptotically valid method of cavanagh et al 1995 is applied to monthly u s data from 1952 1 1991 2 the persistence of the spreads seems to have varied over time and in subsample analysis the expectations hypothesis cannot be rejected at the long end of the maturity spectrum

revisiting the expectations hypothesis of the term structure of interest rates the expectations hypothesis of the term structure has been decisively rejected in a large empirical literature that spans several decades in this paper using a newly constructed dataset of synthetic zero coupon bond yields we show that evidence against the expectations hypothesis is substantially weaker in data generated after the widespread publicity of its failure these results are consistent with the idea that asset pricing anomalies tend to disappear once they are widely recognized

estimating food demand in paraguay from household survey data we estimate a food demand system in paraguay based on the 1997 national household survey considering 12 food categories to obtain demand elasticity estimates from household survey data accounting for quality effects measurement errors and censored observations price indexes are obtained from ordinary least squares predictions of changes in unitary values caused by spatial and temporal variations and the two step estimation procedure shonkwiler and yen 1999 is applied our approach yields reasonable estimates of combined quantity and quality responses with respect to price results suggest distinct consumption behavior in urban and rural areas particularly for chicken eggs dairy and fats and oils which are likely because of differences in the food distribution system and availability of nonmarket food sources

economic development and food production consumption balance a growing global challenge abstract rising affluence in major developing countries principally china and india and increasing diversion of agricultural resources for energy production usa and brazil sharply increase agricultural resource demand food consumption and production changes during development are analyzed using resource based cereal equivalent measures diet upgrades to livestock products require fivefold increases in per capita food resource use reflecting a consistent pattern which is only marginally affected by land base food consumption increases exceed production during early development leading to imports consumption eventually stabilizes at high incomes but production falls short in land scarce countries pork and poultry consumption increase the most less efficient beef and dairy production command a majority of agricultural resources

the expectations hypothesis of the term structure tests on us german french and uk euro rates abstract this paper tests the expectations hypothesis of the term structure on us german french and uk euro rates three tests are examined the first is based on forward rates and the other two are based on the interest rates spread first we show that the sign puzzle highlighted by campbell and shiller campbell j y shiller r j 1991 yield spreads and interest rate movements a bird s eye view review of economic studies 58 495 514 for us data does not arise in the cases of french and uk short term rates second we propose tests for the expectations hypothesis based on error correction models with these tests the sign puzzle disappears but the country puzzle remains

elasticities in aids models in the literature a variety of approaches have been used to calculate demand elasticities in almost ideal demand system aids models of demand it is common to estimate the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids instead of the aids when the la aids is estimated all of the previously reported approaches to compute elasticities are theoretically incorrect this paper presents correct formulas for la aids elasticities and illustrates the potential errors from using incorrect computing the almost ideal demand system aids of deaton and muellbauer 1980a b has become popular in recent years anderson and blundell blanciforti and green 1983a b blanciforti green and king chalfant eales and unnevehr fujii khaled and mak fulponi heien and willett murray parsons ray a variety of approaches to computing elasticities has been used and some of the approaches may lead to significant errors this paper clarifies the differences between alternative approaches to estimating demand elasticities in aids models

to identify the critical success factors of sustainable supply chain management practices in the context of oil and gas industries ism approach abstract the concept of sustainable supply chain management sscm has been considered as an important organizational philosophy to achieve profits by reducing environmental risk and impact while improving the economic and social efficiency factors esef the objective of this paper is to present an approach to identify the critical success factors csfs of motivation and encouragement for the successful implementation of sscm practices in indian oil and gas industries 32 csfs were identified from the literature and opinions of academicians and industry practitioners the interpretive structural modeling ism methodology was used for establishing the mutual relationships among the drivers which not only helps in understanding the relative relationship between the csfs but also in determining their interdependence while implementing sustainability further the importance of csfs with respect to sustainability was identified based on their driving and dependence power by using micmac analysis global climatic pressure and ecological scarcity of resources was determined to be the most influential criterion that may force industries to implement sustainable practices an example of indian oil and gas industry has been presented to show the real world applicability of the proposed model this study may help academicians government regulators and practitioners to emphasize their efforts towards implementation of sscm at various levels of organization

endogenous term premia and anomalies in the term structure of interest rates explaining the predictability smile abstract numerous studies have documented a predictability smile in the post war term structure of interest rates spreads between long rates and short rates predict subsequent movements in short rates provided the long horizon is less than three months or greater than two years but not for intermediate maturities proposed explanations of the smile involve interest rate smoothing by the fed time varying risk premia peso problems and measurement error we show that despite their highly restrictive nature some parameterizations of the cox ingersoll ross cir and chen scott cs models of the term structure can account for the predictability smile cir and cs parameterizations which are consistent with the smile regularity are inconsistent with other features of the data however

impacts of world prices transmission to domestic rice markets in rural iran abstract this paper attempts to assess the degree to which iranian rural households have responded to the change in price of imported rice due to exchange rate unification and to examine the extent to which the policy has affected the economic welfare of various household income groups particularly the poor utilizing samples of 2472 households selected from national expenditure survey data of 2002 and 2003 armington and pass through elasticities were calculated as two measures of substitutability and are discussed separately for each household group in these areas the findings of this study indicate that domestic rice prices are associated differently with imported rice prices among the households however a price increase in imported rice that is mainly consumed by the poor worsens their position much more severely than for the rich people who mainly prefer domestic rice the findings contribute to the understanding of how price changes resulting from trade liberalization may affect various groups of households and the ways they respond to such changes in prices

information forecasts and measurement of the business cycle the beveridge nelson bn technique provides a forecast based method of decomposing a variable such as output into trend and cycle when the variable is integrated of order one i 1 this paper considers the multivariate generalization of the bn decomposition when the information set includes other i 1 and or stationary variables we show how the relative importance of the cyclical component depends on the size of the information set and is necessarily higher with multivariate bn decompositions the results are illustrated using post wwii united states data an explanation is also provided for the empirical finding of a positive association of the multivariate bn cycle with output growth

new techniques to extract market expectations from financial instruments this paper is a selective survey of new or recent methods to extract information about market expectations from asset prices for monetary policy purposes traditionally interest rates and forward exchange rates have been used to extract expected means of future interest rates exchange rates and inflation more recently these methods have been refined to rely on implied forward interest rates so as to extract expected future time paths very recently methods have been designed to extract not only the means but the whole risk neutral probability distribution from a set of option prices

what does the term structure tell us about future inflation abstract this empirical analysis indicates that for maturities of six months or less the term structure of nominal interest rates provides almost no information about the future path of inflation but does provide information about the term structure of real interest rates however as maturities lengthen to nine and twelve months the nominal term structure begins to contain information about future inflation but ceases to provide information about the real term structure these results are explained by differences in the relative variability of expected future inflation changes and real term structure slopes at different points in the term structure

an international examination of affine term structure models and the expectations hypothesis we examine the yield curve behavior and the relative performance of affine term structure models atsms using government bond yield data from canada germany japan the u k and the u s we find strong predictability of forward rates for excess bond returns and reject the expectations hypothesis in all five countries a three factor model is sufficient to capture movements in the yield curve of canada japan the u k and the u s but may not be enough for germany an exhaustive comparison among atsms with no more than three factors reveals that the three factor essential affine model a 1 3 e with only one factor affecting the volatility of the short rate but with all three factors affecting the price of risk performs best in all five countries simulations provide inconclusive evidence on whether this best affine model can successfully generate the rich yield curve behavior observed in the data

evaluating the linearized almost ideal demand system linearizing the almost ideal demand system laids by recourse to the stone share weighted price index is common practice two issues are addressed here first scrutiny of the errors in variables implications of the linearization reveals that not only is the sur estimator inconsistent but a consistent iv estimator cannot be constructed second some alternatives to the green alston elasticities specifically designed for the laids model are developed but neither these nor the green alston elasticities are found to have any advantages over the conventional elasticity formulae some errors in the green alston 1990 paper are corrected the inconsistency and elasticity issues are documented by a monte carlo investigation

the term structure of euro rates some evidence in support of the expectations hypothesis abstract this paper studies 1 3 6 and 12 month euro rates for 17 countries using between 10 and 30 years of data term spreads contain information about future short term rates in all 51 regressions that we estimate moreover in 35 cases we are unable to reject the expectations hypothesis using cross sectional regressions we estimate the variance of the term premium and the correlation of the term premium and the expected change in short rates we conclude that despite evidence of a time varying term premium for many countries the expectations hypothesis is broadly compatible with the data

nominal term structure and term premia evidence from chile abstractthe downwards trend exhibited in chile s nominal term structure since 2003 has been a common pattern shared by other developed and developing economies to understand the behaviour of the nominal yield curve in chile we rely on an affine dynamic term structure model which allows the term structure to decompose into the expected short term interest rate related to the monetary policy expectation and the term premium we show that most of the fall of long term interest rates as well as its dynamics are related to the term premium rather than the expected short term interest rate moreover we find evidence that term premium is driven primarily by the us term premium and domestic nominal uncertainty derived from expected inflation

term structure anomalies term premium or peso problem abstract the goal of this paper is to develop a test for the relative importance of the time varying term premium and the peso problem for rejection of the expectation hypothesis of the term structure ehts our reasoning is based on a term structure model that allows for both phenomena simultaneously if we assume that only one regime is observed ex post we can estimate all the information we need to evaluate distortions generated by both hypotheses we can also test the presence of a peso problem firstly we find that a peso problem might explain rejection of the ehts in germany and the united kingdom after the european exchange rate crisis secondly we show that this explanation appears inappropriate to explain the ehts failure in the united states

the term structure of commercial paper rates this paper tests the expectations hypothesis in the market for commercial paper our main dataset which is new to the literature consists of daily indexes constructed from the actual market yields for nearly all commercial paper issued by u s corporations between january 1998 and august 2003 we show that the term premia built into commercial paper yields rise dramatically at year end causing the expectations hypothesis to be rejected however once we control for these predictable year end eects we nd the reverse that commercial paper yields largely conform with the expectations hypothesis