social assistance and labour supply the longitudinal 1988 89 lmas makes it possible to study the interaction between social assistance and labour supply while allowing for substantial time dependence tobit equations for hours worked on and off social assistance which allow for endogenous selection of social assistance status are estimated by using fiml small but statistically significant effects for a social assistance benefit variable are obtained particularly for females a claw back variable is not consistently useful the wage rate has a consistently negative coefficient in the selection equations and is important in the tobit equations in this paper an attempt is made to reconcile results found in earlier literature jel classification i38 j22 aide sociale et offre de travail l etude longitudinale de l enquete de 1988 89 sur la population active rend possible l etude de l interaction entre l aide sociale et l offre de travail tout en permettant la prise en compte de l effet d inertie herite du passe on calibre des equations tobit pour les heures travaillees separement pour les personnes qui recoivent et ne recoivent pas d aide sociale et une equation probit qui permet une selection endogene du statut d assiste social en utilisant la methode du maximum de vraisemblance avec pleine information on obtient des impacts faibles mais statistiquement significatifs des prestations d aide sociale sur l offre de travail pour les femmes une variable qui tente de capturer les effets de recouvrement fiscal des prestations n est pas uniformement utile comme source d explication le taux de salaire a un coefficient negatif de maniere generale dans les equations de selection et est important dans les equations tobit le memoire tente de reconcilier ces resultats avec ceux que contiennent les etudes anterieures

the dynamic behavior of wages and prices cointegration tests within a large macroeconomic system the dynamic relationship between wages and prices has long held a central place within the economic literature most macroeconomic models make assumptions as to the causal relationship between the two variables unfortunately empirical investigations have produced widely divergent results in particular the present paper examines the results of time series studies and argues that the lack of a consensus is due to improperly specified models once the wage price relationship is embedded within a multiple vector system identification of a wage price cointegrating relationship is significantly improved in addition the increased efficiency yields evidence in favor of the dual feedback between wages and prices

the long and short of money short run dynamics within a structural model empirical examinations into aggregate money demand functions generally incorporate a monetary aggregate as the dependent variable while this custom may be inefficient it does not create any new difficulties for estimating the demand function s long run parameters as money supply would equal money demand the short run estimates however are not as fortunate as the monetary aggregate is a measure of supply and not demand one needs to tease out the short run responses associated with money demand changes with those which are associated with monetary supply shocks the present article therefore proposes a more complete representation of monetary sector behaviour and in doing so finds significant support for the so called buffer stock money demand models

the objective demand curve in general equilibrium with price makers objective demand curves in general equilibrium with explicitly modeled price makers have been defined so far in a number of specific cases this paper gives a general definition of such an objective demand curve the associated general equilibrium concept is defined and sufficient existence conditions are given copyright 1987 by royal economic society

the short run demand for money a reconsideration the partial adjustment approach to the specification of the short run demand for money has dominated the literature for more than a decade there are three basic problems with this approach first the same lag structure is imposed on all variables and each independent variable enters only as a current value in contrast a rational individual would respond to different variables income interest rates prices with quite different lags second when the general price levelis subject to gradual adjustment hut can move quickly in response to supply shocks the influence of these supply shocks should enter with a negative sign third the estimated equation for real balances may not be a money demand equation at all but rather its coefficients may represent a shifting mixture of demand and supply responses the empirical work examines several alternative dynamic specifications including a generalized partial adjustment framework and the error correction model both of the latter specifications exhibit greater structural stability after 1973 than the standard partial adjustment specification and the generalized partial adjustment model also yields relatively small errors in post sample dynamic simulations shifts in coefficients as the sample period is extended after 1973 are consistent with the interpretation that the real balance equation no longer traces out structural demand parameters hut rather a mixture of demand and supply responses this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the determinants of welfare participation of female heads of household in canada this paper assesses the impact on the probability of welfare participation of budget constraint variables such as the expected wage welfare benefit level and implicit welfare tax rate the empirical results are based on a model of welfare participation that is estimated using a sample of female heads of household in canada the coefficients on the budget constraint variables are significant and carry signs that are generally consistent with the predictions of the model and the results of related studies based on data from the united states in addition to the budget constraint variables which include important policy tools a wide range of sociodemographic variables are included in the specification

incentive effects of the u s welfare system a review the author would like to acknowledge support for prior work on this topic from the u s department of health and human services and helpful comments from three anonymous referees rebecca blank howard chernick john fitzgerald irwin garfinkel peter gottschalk edward gramlich david greenberg judith gueron james heckman v joseph hotz robert hutchens michael keane frank levy larry mead michael murray robert plotnick anuradha rangarajan philip robins howard rolston jeffrey smith and daniel weinberg all opinions and errors are those of the author alone

money income prices and interest rates including data from the 1980s sharply weakens the postwar time series evidence indicating significant relationships between money however defined and nominal income or between money and either real income or prices separately focusing on data from 1970 onward destroys this evidence altogether evidence indicating cointegration of real income and real money balances with due allowance for the effect of interest rates also deteriorates when the sample extends through the 1980s a positive finding is that the spread between the commercial paper rate and the treasury bill rate consistently contains highly significant information about future movements in real income copyright 1992 by american economic association

did canadian welfare reform work the effects of new reform strategies on social assistance participation this paper measures the extent to which declines in social assistance sa participation were associated with novel and aggressive reforms referred to as new reform strategies work requirements diversion earning exemptions and time limits controlling for province specific benefit levels eligibility requirements gdp growth labour market conditions and demographics sa participation rates were more than one percentage point lower equivalent to a 13 decline in provinces with new reforms work requirements with strong sanctions had the sharpest negative associations new reform strategies explain at least 10 of observed declines in sa participation twice that of benefit levels and eligibility requirements

does a cointegrating m2 demand relation really exist in the united states this paper reexamines evidence on m2 demand cointegration in the postwar united states equilibrium relations between m2 and various sets of its determinants are analyzed using quarterly observations from 1959 1 to 1988 4 1990 4 and 1993 4 based on three different testing methods for earlier subsamples mixed results are obtained suggesting both cointegration and no cointegration for the full sample however virtually no evidence supports cointegration accordingly a m2 error correction model is no longer appropriate to investigate short run dynamics of business fluctuations in the 1990s copyright 1996 by ohio state university press

the demand for nominal and real money balances in a large macroeconomic system cointegration has become a popular empirical technique used to estimate the existence and stability of money demand relationships a common approach has been to estimate a single equation system with real money balances ml real income and an interest rate although hafer and jansen 13 friedman and kuttner 10 and stock and watson 29 find only minimal support for this specification baba hendry and starr 6 estimate a more complicated ml relation by including specific opportunity cost variables and find stronger support for the ml relation using post wwii data there have been four reasons put forth to explain the lack of a cointegrating relation between ml real income and the interest rate stock and watson 29 conclude that a stable money demand relation exists in data from 1900 89 but not for the post war period alone their explanation is that sufficient variation exists in the longer sample to identify money demand but excessive multicollinearity among variables during the post war period prevents unique identification baba hendry and starr 6 bhs maintain that misspecification of the ml relation is the reason for poor results they augment the money demand function with inflation a measure of long term bond yield and risk and learning curve weighted yields on newly introduced ml and m2 assets bhs claim their specification is able to account for the missing money period of 1975 76 the velocity decline of 1982 83 and the ml explosion of 1985 86 while standard ml models cannot friedman and kuttner 10 offer a third reason why the simple money demand equation fails they estimate a single equation model for several periods and conclude that a money demand vector exists over the 1960 2 79 4 period for ml however when data is included

the impact of the potential duration of unemployment benefits on the duration of unemployment abstract this paper examines the impact of the potential duration of unemployment insurance ui benefits on unemployment in the united states first we use a large sample of household heads to examine differences in the unemployment spell distributions of ui recipients and nonrecipients sharp increases in the escape rate from unemployment both through recalls and new job acceptances are apparent for ui recipients around the time of benefits exhaustion such increases are not apparent at similar points of spell duration for nonrecipients second our analysis of accurate administrative data from 12 states indicates that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of ui recipients by 0 16 to 0 20 weeks

buffer stock money interpreting short run dynamics using long run restrictions time series techniques are used to assess the quantitative importance of buffer stock money the short run response of real money holdings to nominal money supply shocks the empirical model a vector autoregression of real and nominal money balances captures general dynamic properties of the time series but requires theoretical restrictions for sensible interpretation the authors just identify the system by imposing a long run neutrality restriction nominal money shocks have no permanent effects on real money they find that buffer stock effects play an important role in the evolution of real m1 in the short run the evidence for m2 is less conclusive copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

wage growth and the inflationary process a reexamination the nature of the relationship between wage growth and inflation has long been the subject of ongoing debate the expectations augmented phillips curve theory contends that the two variables are mutually causal however the original wage type phillips curve model argues it is inflation that causes wage growth rather than vice versa the price markup scheme holds an opposite view and asserts that wage growth plays an independent causal role in the inflationary process of course other theories e g the monetarist deny the presence of any reliable linkage between wages and prices researchers have also expended enormous effort attempting to investigate empirically the relationship between wage growth and inflation but with mixed results for example mehra 24 and ashenfelter and card 1 report results suggesting a bidirectional causality barth and bennett 2 and stein 37 38 find causality running from prices to wages without feedback while shannon and wallace 34 and hill and robinson 19 report results showing causality only in the reverse direction from wages to prices still gordon 11 bazdarich 4 batten 3 and mehra 27 find no causal linkage between the two variables clearly such remarkably mixed evidence is unfortunate in light of the profound implications that the precise wage price relationship may have for economic and public policy a more recent and quite interesting study is that of mehra 28 mehra employed the technique of cointegration and error correction modelling on u s quarterly data for the period 1959 1 1989 3 he concluded that inflation and wage growth are cointegrated implying that their long run movements are correlated as the expectations augmented phillips curve theory predicts however contrary to this theory and in accordance with the original wage type phillips curve view mehra argued that the inflation wage growth long run correlation is primarily the outcome of the former causing the latter mehra s model encompasses three basic variables namely prices p productivity adjusted wages w and an output gap proxy g he tested each of the three variables in logs for the presence of unit roots finding evidence of two unit roots in p and w but a single unit root in g mehra then examined cointegration of the two variables having two unit roots p w his re

modeling the demand for narrow money in the united kingdom and the united states abstract despite the importance of well specified empirical money demand functions for inference forecasting and policy problems in modeling have arisen concerning the economic theories of money demand the data institutional frameworks financial innovation and econometric implementation by developing constant data coherent m 1 demand equations for the u k and the u s we investigate these issues and explain such puzzles as missing money the great velocity decline and the recent explosion in m 1 the endogeneity of money the lucas critique and the non invertibility of our m 1 models are also discussed

multivariate estimates of the permanent components of gnp and stock prices the economic assumption that a present value relation holds between consumption and income and between stock prices and dividends or the statistical assumption that the consumption income ratio and the dividend price ratio are stationary imply that the permanent or random walk component in each series of a pair must be the same as the permanent component in the other series of a pair either assumption then allows us to estimate the variance of the permanent component of one series gnp stock prices from the variance of the permanent component of the other consumption dividends or from the covariance of the two series permanent components this paper presents such estimates and finds that the permanent components are about half those estimated by similar univariate methods a series of recent papers has examined the importance of a potential unit root to the behavior of real gnp campbell and mankiw 1986 1987 cochrane 1986 clark 1987 and stock prices fama and french 1986 lo and mai if by 0 the series is stationary the response can be any real number which is the innovation in these estimates instead of forcing us to ask the dichotomous question is there a unit root or not they allow us to continuously measure the importance of a potential unit root the actual estimating technique used in these papers varied somewhat cochrane poterba and summers and lo and mai if a series is stationary the variance of k differences will tend to a precursor to this paper appeared under the title spectral density estimates of unit roots we thank masanao aoki lam hansen masao ogaki and chris sims for helpful suggestions the computer programs and data used in this paper are available on request from the authors

the demand for m1 in the u s a 1960 1988 estimated u s m1 demand functions appear unstable regularly breaking down over 1960 1988 e g missing money great velocity decline m1 explosion we propose a money demand function whose arguments include inflation real income long term bond yield and risk t bill interest rates and learning curve weighted yields on newly introduced instruments in m1 and non transactions m2 the model is estimated in dynamic error correction form it is constant and with an equation standard error of 0 4 variance dominates most previous models estimating alternative specifications explains earlier breakdowns showing the model s distinctive features to be important in accounting for the data

stochastic trends and economic fluctuations are business cycles mainly the result of permanent shocks to productivity this paper uses a long run restriction implied by a large class of real business cycle models identifying permanent productivity shocks as shocks to the common stochastic trend in output consumption and investment to provide new evidence on this question econometric tests indicate that this common stochastic trend cointegration implication is consistent with postwar u s data however in systems with nominal variables the estimates of this common stochastic trend indicate that permanent productivity shocks typically explain less than half of the business cycle variability in output consumption and investment copyright 1991 by american economic association

breaking the cycle the effect of education on welfare receipt among children of welfare recipients abstract we examine the impact of high school graduation on the probability individuals from welfare backgrounds use welfare themselves our data consist of administrative educational records for grade 12 students in a canadian province linked with their own and their parents welfare records we address potential endogeneity problems by 1 controlling for ability using past test scores 2 using an instrument for graduation based on school principal fixed effects and 3 using a heckman singer type unobserved heterogeneity estimator graduation would reduce the probability of welfare receipt of drop outs by 1 2 to 3 4 effects are larger for individuals from troubled family backgrounds and low income neighbourhoods

the behavior of money demand in the 1980s existing money demand functions did not predict the strength in m1 in the 1980s this strength derived from the combination of a change in the character of m 1 due to elnancial deregulation and the sharp fall in market rates that began in 1982 the public s m2 demand function however remains unaffected by the forces that altered the m1 demand function the character of the public s m 1 demand function changed with the legalization nationwide in january 1981 of the checkable deposits known as nows because nows pay explicit interest they are used by the public as an instrument for saving as well as for effecting transactions mehra 1986 the addition of nows to m1 therefore caused m1 to become more highly substitutible with the savings instruments included in the non ml component of m2 that is savings deposits small time deposits money market deposit accounts mmdas and money market mutual funds of noninstitutional investors mmmfs furthermore financial institutions move the rate paid on nows only sluggishly in response to changes in market rates in contrast the rates paid on small time deposits mmdas and mmmfs move promptly in response to changes in market rates consequently when market rates fell beginning in late summer 1982 the differential between the rates paid on the non ml components of m2 and on nows fell sharply the public then substituted out of the non ml components of m2 and into the nows in m1 these substitutions increased m1 de

undominated prices in the three good model abstract any movement away from walrasian prices will make somebody worse off we ask which other prices share this property the paper characterizes the set of such prices called undominated prices for the three good economy output labor and a nonproduced good that is now well known from the work of barro grossman benassy and malinvaud we consider two groups of consumers workers and shareholders we show that under some conditions there exist prices and wages that generate unemployment and are undominated this requires that a workers be poorly endowed with the nonproduced good b there be little substitution in consumption between the produced and the nonproduced good and c the market for the produced good be balanced i e prices equal marginal costs

regression direction and weak exogeneity abstract the absence of testing for weak exogeneity in money demand has often led to stark conditioning claims regarding the validity of price equations this paper uses the johansen procedure to explore the conditioning properties of money demand systems for nonborrowed reserves m1 and m2 our results show that irrespective of the specification of the cointegrating relation a feedback mechanism enters the equation for money the opposite however is not true for the price equations the results also cast a warning for single equation models of money demand in that weak exogeneity is sensitive to how the system is defined

the long run link between money growth and inflation is inflation always a monetary phenomenon many economists believe that the link between money growth and inflation in the u s has weakened over the last two decades due in part to the federal reserve s policy experiment in 1979 1982 and innovations in the financial sector of the economy i find that the long run relationship between money growth and inflation is strong in a statistical sense and important economically the key result is that the trend or growth component in cpi inflation is entirely due to the trend component of monetary base growth jel c32 e31 e51

production growth and business cycles ii new directions abstract this paper outlines new directions for investigations of real business cycle models consideration of stochastic growth of exogenous and endogenous forms analysis of suboptimal outcomes arising due to externalities of distorting taxes and implications of labor market heterogeneity

an untold story the characteristics of welfare use in british columbia the dynamics of welfare participation are analyzed using a unique longitudinal data set derived from provincial administrative records over the period 1980 92 the principal findings are that the majority of welfare spells are experienced by single men and women without children and that while most welfare spells are short there is a high incidence of recidivism although continuous long term use and dependence on welfare is not characteristic of most recipients experiences the program does not provide an effective route to financial independence since most users periodically return to the program

how well does the is lm model fit postwar u s data postwar u s time series for money interest rates prices and gnp are characterized by a multivariate process driven by four exogenous disturbances those disturbances are identified so that they can be interpreted as the four main sources of fluctuations found in the is lm phillips curve model money supply money demand is and aggregate supply shocks the dynamic properties of the estimated model are analyzed and shown to match most of the stylized predictions of the model the estimated decomposition is also used to measure the relative importance of each shock to interpret some macroeconomic episodes and to study sources of permanent shocks to nominal variables

tightening a welfare system the effects of benefit denial on future welfare receipt abstract we derive local average treatment effect estimates of the impact of welfare benefit denial on future receipt using a unique experiment involving reassessment of some applicants who were originally slated to receive benefits we find evidence of considerable heterogeneity among applicants our results support a model with a peripheral group who exhibit scarring effects from being granted benefits and a core group who do not the core group moves quickly back onto welfare when they are denied benefits even for the peripheral group benefit denial has intermediate term but not permanent impacts

welfare and the family the canadian experience canada has a universal social assistance program that is almost completely administered through the federal canada assistance program however provinces determine the levels of assistance for various groups eligible for welfare this article exploits the variation in payments and uses microdata to estimate the effect of changes in welfare benefits on welfare participation single parenthood births out of wedlock divorce and labor force participation among low income women in canada it would appear that welfare benefits influence these decisions

market size and substitutability in imperfect competition a bertrand edgeworth chamberlin model competition is often associated with the idea that there are many traders in the market or that each price maker is small as compared to the market this paper introduces this notion of market size in a model of price competition with imperfect substitutes by constructing a model which creates a bridge between the chamberlin and bertrand edge worth lines of work on price competition we investigate the role of two fundamental parameters in the existence of an equilibrium the market size given by the number n of competitors and the degree of substitutability we prove that a for a given number of n 2 of competitors a sufficiently large but finite degree of substitutability entails nonexistence this thus generalizes the bertrand edgeworth nonexistence result which applies only to perfect substitutes b conversely for a given upper bound on the degree of substitutability a sufficiently large number of competitors ensures existence which thus introduces a significant role for market size in models of imperfect competition we finally investigate the proximity of an equilibrium when it exists to a competitive outcome and we find that both high substitutability and large market size are a condition for competitiveness

the simple macroeconomics of profit sharing this paper is in the spirit of the temporary equilibrium approach to macroeconomics it basically extends that framework to cover a profit sharing system and then compares the macroeconomic characteristics with those of the more familiar wage system a first preliminary step is to demonstrate how a microeconomic model of monopolistic competition can be built up into a junior member of the keynesian macro family the methodology is to create from first principles including a careful formulation of a monopolistically competitive product market structurea natural underpinning for the standard aggregate demand specification the primary goal of the paper is to apply the integrated monopolistic competitionkeynesian type apparatus described above to investigate the macroeconomic properties of a profit sharing economy the existence of a consistent general framework covering both cases invites meaningful comparisons that indicate clearly why an economy based on profit sharing principles possesses natural immunity to stagflation by contrast the wage economya system we have largely accepted without critically examining its macroeconomic consequences is more prone to suffer from unemployment and inflation the policy implications for aggregate demand management in wage and share systems are analyzed and contrasted in writing this paper my philosophy has been to not shirk from using those reasonable parameterizations and functional forms which yield nice crisp results and permit me to focus sharply on the essential logic of basic issues it is certainly possible to present the main results in a somewhat more general formulation as the astute reader will appreciate but i fear only at some cost of distracting attention from those central features i wish to highlight

the stability of long run money demand in five industrial countries abstract this study provides strong evidence for the stability of long run demand functions for narrowly defined money m1 in five industrial countries u s japan canada u k and west germany using post war quarterly data evidence of stability is examined using two different estimation techniques and through a formal test of parameter constancy designed specifically for cointegrating vectors in the majority of these countries the key to stability is the imposition of a unitary long run income elasticity that is rarely rejected by the data

forecasting in a large macroeconomic system this paper examines the efficiency gains yielded from estimating multiple equation cointegrated systems as compared to their single equation counterparts in particular this paper is concerned with the ability of utilizing the cointegrating information to improve forecasting performance recently an inability to improve forecasts of real income once money demand error correction terms were introduced has been used to argue that the m2 relationship had broken down during the early 1990s however the results suggest that once the underlying responses of variables are more closely investigated the behaviour of m2 has remained stable

why is the rate of single parenthood lower in canada than in the u s a dynamic equilibrium analysis of welfare policies a critical question in the design of welfare policies is whether to target aid according to household composition as was done in the u s under the aid to families with dependent children afdc program or to rely exclusively on means testing as in canada restricting aid to single mothers for instance has the potential to distort behavior along three demographic margins marriage fertility and divorce we contrast the canadian and the u s policies within an equilibrium model of household formation and human capital investment on children policy differences we consider are eligibility dependence of transfers on the number of children and generosity of transfers our simulations indicate that the policy differences can account for the higher rate of single parenthood in the u s they also show that canadian welfare policy is more effective for fostering human capital accumulation among children from poor families interestingly a majority of agents in our benchmark economy prefers a welfare system that targets single mothers as the u s system does yet does not unlike the u s system make transfers dependent on the number of children

the effect of educational attainment on welfare dependence evidence from canada abstract the impact of educational attainment on the duration of welfare spells is analysed using a unique data set derived from the administration of the social assistance program in canada over the period 1986 1993 the empirical analysis includes controls for demographic characteristics program parameters labour market conditions and unobserved individual characteristics it is found that that educational attainment has a much greater impact on the welfare exit rate for women than for men additionally the welfare exit rate for women is more sensitive to family status and program benefits but less sensitive to the unemployment rate relative to that for men

imperfect competition and fixprice equilibria when goods are gross substitutes it is possible in principle that the price quantity pair generated by a model of imperfect competition may satisfy the conditions voluntary trading and absence of frictions for a fixprice equilibrium it is shown that imperfect competitors will typically satisfy voluntary trading provided that appropriate gross substitute assumptions are satisfied hence such assumptions are seen to ensure that the solutions of some well known imperfectly competitive general equilibrium models are indeed fixprice equilibria thus bringing together two important traditions in theoretical microeconomics copyright 1991 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

monopolistic equilibrium and involuntary unemployment abstract this note provides a simple example of an economy in which involuntary unemployment may be the consequence of monopolistic behavior on the product market

the buffer stock notion in monetary economics not the least of harry johnson s contributions to our discipline was the series of survey papers on aspects of monetary economics which he produced during the 1960s and 1970s it is no exaggeration to say that the way in which the literature of monetary economics is organised even now follows the design which johnson first set out in 1962 and built on in the subsequent decade nevertheless the subject has not stood still and one of the more interesting developments of the last few years has involved the introduction of what has been variously described as the disequilibrium money shock absorber or as i prefer to call it the buffer stock notion into monetary economics the development of this line of thought was getting underway before johnson s untimely death much of it indeed under the auspices of his own research programme at the lse even so this did not happen early enough for the relevant ideas to be put in their proper niche by johnson himself and the buffer stock approach is not yet fully integrated into the mainstream of monetary economics much of the relevant literature is empirical concerned with modelling particular aspects of the monetary experience of specific countries hence it is fragmented and contains few papers which attempt a coherent account of just what this approach is and how it relates to other approaches to monetary analysis although essays by goodhart 1982a b and judd and scadding 1982a contain important discussions of these issues to the best of my knowledge only jonson 1976a and knoester 1979a have devoted entire papers solely to this central issue and these are relatively inaccessible and hence less widely known than they deserve to be in this lecture i shall attempt to give a brief account of the essentials of this approach first i shall sketch out its microeconomic background and then i shall discuss those theoretical characteristics which differentiate it from the neo austrian analysis of robert e lucas jr and his associates as well as from the conventional keynesian approach to monetary economics last but by no means least i shall argue that it yields simple theoretical insights into important empirical and policy related issues which are troublesome for alternative approaches in short my tribute to harry

exogeneity within the m2 demand function evidence from a large macroeconomic system a large body of literature investigates whether a stable and predictable long run association between money and its arguments exists one point of variation between models is whether to include an interest rate measure directly within the long run relationship several recent studies indicate that empirical findings are sensitive to the choice therefore the present article reexamines the empirical significance of the interest rate within a four equation macroeconomic system the results suggest that the interest rate 1 may be excluded from the m2 demand function 2 is strongly exogenous to most of the system s remaining variables and 3 may represent a common trend jel e41 e52 c32 i introduction much of recent macroeconomic literature has been dedicated to investigating whether long run relationships exist between macroeconomic variables 1 such preoccupation is understandable given the myriad models in which these relationships play a dominant role a significant portion of this literature has focused on whether a long run relationship exists between money demand and its arguments 2 of course the close association between the variables is an integral part of theories that suggest that the monetary authority may qualitatively influence the direction of the aggregate economy the estimation of long run money demand models have differed in their methodological approach and in countless other ways one specific way in which they may differ in whether the investigator s incorporates an interest rate measure directly within the long run relationship for example although fischer and nicholetti 1993 and baba et al 1992 incorporate various interest rate measures to identify the long run money demand function hendry and mizon 1998 and hendry and ericsson 1991 estimate the long run money demand function without an interest rate measure although the theoretical importance of the interest rate within the money demand function predates pigou s 1917 classic treatment and has been discussed at length elsewhere the importance empirically has recently been high lighted by sims 1980 in examining whether money granger causes output sims s results suggest that the tests are sensitive to whether a short term interest rate measure is included campbell and perron 1991 further argue that sims s findings are an outgrowth of whether the trivariate model of money prices and output are cointegrated that is i 0 or whether reduction to stationarity requires the introduction of a fourth variable the interest rate reduction to stationarity is important because estimating granger causality with nonstationary residuals may yield biased estimates due to nonstandard residual distributions the present article reexamines the significance of the interest rate within the long run money demand function specifically i examine two aspects of interest rate money behavior the initial examination is to test whether the interest rate measure three month treasury bill rate can be directly excluded from the long run m2 demand function following the methodology advanced by hendry and mizon 1993 johansen and juselius 1992 1994 and ericsson et al 1990 the test involves estimating the long run relationship with the interest rate measure and then impose the overidentifying zero restriction the associated log likelihood ratio statistics are distributed chi square n where n represents the number of overidentifying restrictions this approach however only examines whether the interest rate may be removed from the long run money demand vector a second area of interest is concerned with the short run responses of the interest rate more specifically the short run responses provide a test for granger causality within the cointegrated variables following ericsson et al 1998 granger causality is estimated where one or more cointegrated variables reject strong exogeneity

the demand for money in the united states evidence from cointegration tests this paper uses recent cointegration test procedures to investigate the underlying economic relationship between real money balances real income and interest rates for the united states unlike recent studies of money demand the authors analysis uses quarterly data spanning the period 1915 88 thus providing a sample encompassing a wide variety of economic experiences the evidence presented indicates that the broader m2 measure of money is the preferable measure with which to consider the long run effects of monetary policy copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

welfare benefits and the duration of welfare spells evidence from a natural experiment in canada abstract this paper uses a major reform of the welfare program implemented in the province of quebec canada in 1989 to analyze the impact of benefits on the length of welfare spells an important feature of this reform was the abolishment of discrimination based on age that applied to benefits as a result the monthly benefits of single individuals aged less than 30 increased from 173 to 425 1986 an increase of over 145 to assess the impact of the reform we estimate a series of semi parametric hazard models analogous to the regression approach to difference in differences estimation the estimated duration elasticities with respect to benefits for single men and women aged 22 29 are 0 25 and 0 28 respectively

time series representations of economic variables and alternative models of the labour market accepting the hypothesis that the time series facts of the aggregate labour market may be summarized by the linear autoregressive and moving average representations of wages prices unemployment and interest rates implies that a useful theory ought to lead to predictions about these representations following this approach this paper first catalogues many of the time series facts about the aggregate labour market and then compares them against alternative models of the labour market based on the intertemporal substitution and staggered contract hypotheses