the inexorable and mysterious tradeoff between inflation and unemployment this paper discusses the short run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment although this tradeoff remains a necessary building block of business cycle theory economists have yet to provide a completely satisfactory explanation for it according to the consensus view among central bankers and monetary economists a contractionary monetary shock raises unemployment at least temporarily and leads to a delayed and gradual fall in inflation standard dynamic models of price adjustment however cannot explain this pattern of responses reconciling the consensus view about the effects of monetary policy with models of price adjustment remains an outstanding puzzle for business cycle theorists several years ago i gave myself a peculiar assignment i decided to try to summarise all of economics in ten simply stated principles the purpose of this task was to introduce students to the economic way of thinking in the first chapter of my textbook principles of economics i figured if god could boil all of moral philosophy down to ten commandments i should be able to do much the same with economic science most of the ten principles i chose were microeconomic and hard to argue with they involved the importance of tradeoffs marginal analysis the benefits of trade market efficiency market failure and so on i allocated the last three principles to macroeconomics the first of these was a country s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services which i viewed as the foundation of all growth theory the second was prices rise when the government prints too much money which i took to be the essence of classical monetary theory the last of my ten principles is the subject of today s lecture society faces a short run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment perhaps not surprisingly this statement turned out to be controversial when my publisher sent out the manuscript for review a few readers objected

short term inflation expectations evidence from a monthly survey note the assumption that economic agents have rational expectations is commonplace in studies of macroeconomic policy and asset market behavior research examining observable expectations from surveys however has generally found that the data reject the rational expectations hypothesis friedman 1980 reports that forecasts of long term interest rates from surveys of financial market participants are not rational figlewski and wachtel 1981 note that most investigators of the livingston survey data on economists inf lation expectations conclude that these data do not conform to the rational expectations hypothesis british survey data on the inflation expectations of consumers analyzed by evans and gulamani 1984 and on the inflation expectations of business firms examined by pesaran 1985 also appear inconsistent with rational expectations the failure of survey data to pass tests of rationality have led researchers such as mishkin 1983 to question the usefulness of survey data to proxy expectations this paper examines a different source of expectations data namely the surveys of money market participants conducted by money market services inc mms data from the mms surveys have been widely used in studies of how asset prices respond to unanticipated changes in economic variables recent papers by urich and wachtel 1984 pearce and roley 1985 and smirlock 1986 employ the median predicted inflation rate from the mms survey to construct a measure of the unexpected component of inflation announcements

distributional coalitions the industrial revolution and the origins of economic growth in britain from the late 1600s to the mid 1800s britain was able to transform from a divided kingdom with a fragmented often stagnant economy into a powerful and stable state that simultaneously saw an expansion in the power wealth and stability of the central government while encouraging an economic transformation that gradually allowed both industrial technology and liberal commerce to flourish and break out of its mercantilist straitjacket we explain how rent seeking elites who might normally have opposed such sweeping transformations promoted institutional changes that in the long run expanded the economy and encouraged innovation even at the expense of class interests in the short run this meant that rent seeking in the 18th century was not so much reduced as redirected from local monopolies to state authorities and parliament but in the longer run the process of professionalization made possible greater liberalism in general even at the expense of general rent seeking itself the position of parliament as a meta institution for reforming and weakening rent creating restrictions as needed was pivotal to this process ideological changes particularly the scottish enlighten ment transformed the terms of the debate but could only be operationalized once interests were aligned so that gainers from industrialization could compensate or overcome traditional interests

the valuation of options on yields abstract many contingent claims incorporate options on yield levels i derive closed form expressions for european yield option prices using a general equilibrium model in which the underlying yield is the relevant state variable the properties of these options differ markedly from those of conventional options on traded assets for example yield call values can be less than their intrinsic value and can be decreasing functions of the underlying yield these features have important hedging implications i examine the empirical implications of the model using price data for the 13 week t bill options traded on the chicago board options exchange

on the valuation of an option to exchange one interest rate for another abstract this paper studies the problem of pricing a european option on the difference of two interest rates which is analogous to an option to exchange one asset for another studied in margrabe 1978 it is first shown that such option may be valued as exchanging two interest rates implied in relevant futures prices through an extended black 1976 model and then by a two factor heath jarrow morton hjm model which shows that introduction of imperfect interest rates movements is essential for pricing such options for which a one factor model such as ho and lee 1986 should not be applied

taxes lawyers and the decline of witch trials in france abstracthow is rule of law established we address this question by exploring the effect of increases in fiscal capacity on the establishment of well enforced formal legal standards in a preindustrial economy between 1550 and 1700 there were over 2 000 witch trials in france prosecuting a witch required local judges to significantly deviate from formal rules of evidence hence we exploit the significant variation across time and space in witch trials and fiscal capacity across french regions between 1550 and 1700 to show that increases in fiscal capacity were associated with increased adherence to the formal rule of law as fiscal capacity increased local judges increasingly upheld de jure rules and the frequency of witch trials declined

the asymmetry of the new keynesian phillips curve in the euro area abstract using a two stage quantile regression framework we uncover significant asymmetries across quantiles for all coefficients in an otherwise standard new keynesian phillips curve nkpc for the euro area a pure nkpc specification accurately captures inflation dynamics at high inflation quantiles

empirical evidence on inflation expectations in the new keynesian phillips curve abstract we review the main identification strategies and empirical evidence on the role of expectations in the new keynesian phillips curve paying particular attention to the issue of weak identi

the two pillars of the european central bank i interpret the european central bank s two pillar strategy by proposing an empirical model for inflation that distinguishes between the short and long run components of inflation the latter component depends on an exponentially weighted moving average of past monetary growth and the former on the output gap estimates for the 1971 2003 period suggest that money can be combined with other indicators to form the broadly based assessment of the outlook for future price developments that constitutes the ecb s second pillar however the analysis does not suggest that money should be treated differently from other indicators while money is a useful policy indicator all relevant indicators should be assessed in an integrated manner and a separate pillar focused on monetary aggregates does not appear necessary stefan gerlach

expectations as a source of macroeconomic persistence evidence from survey expectations in a dynamic macro model abstract embedding survey expectations in a standard dsge model helps to identify key slope parameters in standard relationships dramatically reduces the need for lagged dependent variables often motivated by price indexation and habit formation and obviates the need for autocorrelated structural shocks in the key equations formal statistical tests demonstrate that much of the persistence in aggregate data is better accounted for by slow moving expectations rather than by habits indexation and autocorrelated structural shocks

bond pricing and the term structure of interest rates a new methodology for contingent claims valuation this paper presents a unifying theory for valuing contingent claims under a stochastic term structure of interest rates the methodology based on the equivalent martingale measure technique takes as given an initial forward rate curve and a family of potential stochastic processee for its subsequent movements a no arbitrage condition restricts this family of processes yielding valuation formulae for interest rate sensitive contingent claims which do not explicitly depend on the market prices of risk examples are provided to illustrate the key results in relation to the term structure of interest rates arbitrage pricing theory has two purposes the first is to price all zero coupon default free bonds of varying maturities from a finite number of economic fundamentals called state variables the second is to price all interest rate sensitive contingent claims taking as given the prices of the zero coupon bonds this paper presents a general theory and a unifying framework for understanding arbitrage pricing theory in this context of which all existing arbitrage pricing models are special cases in particular vasicek 1977 brennan and schwartz 1979 langetieg 1980 ball and torous 1983 ho and lee 1986 schaefer and schwartz 1987 and artzner and delbaen 1988 the primary contribution of this paper however is a new methodology for solving the second problem i e the pricing of interest rate sensitive contingent claims given the prices of all zero coupon bonds the methodology is new because i it imposes its stochastic structure directly on the evolution of the forward rate curve ii it does not require an inversion of the term structure to eliminate the market prices of risk from contingent claim values and iii it has a stochastic spot rate process with multiple stochastic factors influencing the term structure the model can be used to consistently price and hedge all contingent claims american or european on the term structure and it is derived from necessary and more importantly sufficient conditions for the absence of arbitrage the arbitrage pricing models of vasicek 1977 brennan and schwartz 1979 langetieg 1980 and artzner and delbaen 1988 all require an iformerly titled bond pricing and the term structure of interest rates a new methodology

household versus economist forecasts of inflation a reassessment note in a recent article in this journal gramlich 1983 concluded that the mean inflation forecasts from the university of michigan survey research center src surveys of households were in the years 1956 1980 more accurate and more rational than the mean inflation forecasts from livingston s philadelphia inquirer surveys of professional economists these paradoxical elndings have proved robust with respect to improvements in testing procedures bryan and gavin 1986a 1 986b the purpose of this note is not to cast doubt on the result themselves but to urge caution in their interpretation with respect to forecast accuracy we show that while the average forecast from the src is indeed more accurate than the average forecast from the livingston survey the forecast of a typical household is much less accurate than that of a typical economist the apparent superiority of the src survey is entirely due to its larger

testing the rationality of inflation forecasts from survey data another look at the src expected price change data this paper develops a unified econometric approach for testing the rationality of expectations from survey data series the paper employs the estimation techniques of hansen 1982 and eichenbaum hansen and singleton 1982 to conduct tests of unbiasedness efficiency and orthogonality for the src expected price change data in contrast to the existing literature the analysis takes careful account of serial correlation and conditional heteroskedasticity in the disturbance terms the results do not reject the properties of unbiasedness efficiency or othogonality for this survey data series copyright 1989 by mit press

price dynamics and production lags this paper provides a new explanation of why inflation is sluggish in response to aggregate demand shocks and why aggregate output changes as result of such shocks we argue that these phenomena are related to lags between inputs and outputs in the production process production lags for short the broad intuition is that production activities in a modern economy are interconnected through complex input output relations with production lags within individual firms and that it takes considerable time for cost and price changes to penetrate the entire input output system our analysis provides a rationale for a prolonged inverse relation between inflation and unemployment the paper suggests that the interaction of inflation persistence and unemployment persistence may offer a possible explanation of high and prolonged european unemployment this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

elusive persistence wage and price rigidities the new keynesian phillips curve and inflation dynamics abstract we review the main new keynesian inflation equations that have arisen as a result of aggregation from individual firms price rigidities we find that on the whole they cannot account for inflation persistence a key feature of the empirical dynamics of inflation and with important policy implications the only exceptions seem to be when indexation is allowed in price setting or when price stickiness is combined with wage rigidity and staggering

reconciling the wage curve and the phillips curve the wage curve is the negative relationship that links wage levels to the unemployment rate it fits accurately with modern non competitive labour market models but goes against a phillips curve modelling because the latter ties wage growth to the unemployment rate in this article we present a comprehensive review of these non competitive models highlighting recent contributions that try to eliminate the possible gap that exists between the concepts of the wage curve on the one hand and the phillips curve on the other copyright blackwell publishers ltd 2005

survey measures of expected u s inflation of real interest rates and cash flows for decisions concerning investment expenditures international capital flows and exchange rate movements hinge in large part on expected real yield differentials across countries the federal reserve needs reliable measures of expected inflation to formulate and gauge the thrust of monetary policy in fact inflation expectations have become more important to the fed given the diminished stability of the link between the monetary aggregates and gdp expenditures since the early 1980s and the greater role which has been thrust upon expected real short term interest rates in the implementation of federal reserve policy the issue of rationality of inflation expectations that is the extent to which agents form expectations without making systematic mistakes in their beliefs about what inflation will be is important if inflation expectations are formed rationally labor and financial markets will strongly tend to neutralize the potential redistributive effects of inflation over time financial capital will flow efficiently within and across national borders moreover some of the stronger claims of new classical macroeconomics like the claim that only unexpected monetary policy actions will

the new keynesian phillips curve and lagged inflation a case of spurious correlation the new keynesian phillips curve nkpc specifies a relationship between inflation and a forcing variable and the current period s expectation of future inflation most empirical estimates of the nkpc typically based on generalized method of moments gmm estimation have found a significant role for lagged inflation producing a hybrid nkpc using u s quarterly data this article examines whether the role of lagged inflation in the nkpc might be due to the spurious outcome of specification biases like previous investigators we employ gmm estimation and like those investigators we find a significant effect for lagged inflation we also use time varying coefficient tvc estimation a procedure that produces consistency under a variety of sources of misspecification using two separate measures of expected inflation we find strong support for the view that under tvc estimation the coefficient on expected inflation is near unity and that the role of lagged inflation in the nkpc is spurious

political losers as a barrier to economic development per capita income in many sub saharan african countries such as chad and niger is less than 1 30th of that of the united states most economists and social scientists suspect that this is in part due to institutional failures that stop these societies from adopting the best technologies a particularly interesting historical example comes from the diffusion of railways in the 19th century while railways are regarded as a key technology driving the industrial revolution there were large lags in their diffusion for example in 1850 the united states had 14 518 km of track britain 9 797 km and germany 5 856 km in the russian and hapsburg empires there were just 501 km and 1 357 kim respectively all data from brian r mitchell 1993 why do societies as in this example fail to adopt the best available technologies one answer is that existing powerful interest groups block the introduction of new technologies in order to protect their economic rents and societies are able to make technological advances only if they can defeat such groups economic monopolies may be one example a monopolist might wish to block the introduction of a new technology by a rival that will capture the market this idea which we call the economic losers hypothesis was discussed by simon kuznets 1968 developed at length by joel mokyr 1990 in the context of technology adoption and formalized by per krusell and jose victor rios rull 1996 and stephen l parente and edward c prescott 1997 related ideas are widely discussed in the literature on international trade policy with many formal models e g gene m grossman and elhanan helpman 1994 there are problems with this story however first despite the intuitive appeal of the idea there are relatively few instances where major economic change was blocked by economic losers mokyr 1990 emphasizes the attempts of many skilled artisans to block the introduction of new machines the most famous example is the luddites skilled weavers who were thrown out of work by mechanization interestingly however many of these groups including the luddites were ultimately unable to block economic progress equally important the economic losers hypothesis relies on the presumption that certain groups have the political power to block innovation but if so why not use this power to simply tax the gains generated by the introduction of the new technology this might be because there are limits on the nature of fiscal instruments though it seems plausible that groups with sufficient political power to block innovation would be able subsequently to lobby effectively for redistribution a more important reason however may be that the introduction of new technology and economic change more generally may simultaneously affect the distribution of political power we argue that the effect of economic change on political power is a key factor in determining whether technological advances and beneficial economic changes will be blocked in other words we propose a political loser hypothesis we argue that it is groups whose political power not economic rents is eroded who will block technological advances if agents are economic losers but have no political power they cannot impede technological progress if they have and maintain political power i e are not political losers then they have no incentive to block progress it is therefore agents who have t discussant gene grossman princeton university

information rigidity and the expectations formation process a simple framework and new facts we propose a new approach to test the full information rational expectations hypothesis which can identify whether rejections of the null arise from irrationality or limited information this approach quantifies the economic significance of departures from the null by quantifying the underlying degree of information rigidity applying this approach to u s and international data of professional forecasters and other agents yields pervasive evidence consistent with models of imperfect information furthermore the proposed approach sheds new light on policies such as inflation targeting and those leading to the great moderation affecting expectations finally we document evidence of state dependence in the expectations formation process

trend inflation and monetary policy regimes in japan abstract this paper examines the dynamics of trend inflation in japan over the last three decades based on the smooth transition phillips curve model we find that there is a strong connection between the trend inflation and monetary policy regimes the results also suggest that the introduction of the inflation targeting policy and quantitative and qualitative easing in the beginning of 2013 successfully escaped from the deflationary regime but were not enough to achieve the 2 inflation target finally our results indicate the significance of exchange rates in explaining the recent fluctuations of inflation and the importance of oil and stock prices in maintaining the positive trend inflation regime

the genesis of inflation and the costs of disinflation this essay asks how high inflation arises and why it is costly to eliminate specifically the paper discusses the roles of price rigidity and credibility problems in explaining the costs of disinflation the puzzle of persistent inflation triggered by onetime macroeconomic shocks and the case for returning to adaptive expectations in theories of inflation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

a quantitative comparison of sticky price and sticky information models of price setting i estimate sticky price and sticky information models of price setting for the united states via maximum likelihood techniques reaching several conclusions first the sticky price model fits best and captures inflation dynamics as well as reduced form equations once hybrid behavior is allowed second the importance of hybrid behavior in sticky price models is potentially consistent with a role for some information imperfections such as sticky information as a complement to nominal price rigidities finally the favorable results herein for the hybrid sticky price model when evaluated by statistics that summarize the relative fit of different models is consistent with the existing literature that is both supportive and dismissive of such models as this literature has largely ignored fit in evaluating such models many previous studies have focused on ancillary issues such as the standard errors associated with certain parameters or granger causality tests that may not provide much information about sticky price models

inflation dynamics when inflation is near zero this paper discusses the likely evolution of u s inflation in the near and medium term on the basis of 1 past u s experience with very low levels of inflation 2 the most recent japanese experience with deflation and 3 recent u s micro evidence on downward nominal wage rigidity our findings question the view that stable long run inflation expectations and downward nominal wage rigidity will provide sufficient support to prices such that deflation can be avoided we show that an inflation model fitted on japanese data over the past 20 years which accounts for both short and long run inflation expectations matches the recent u s inflation experience quite well while the model indicates that u s inflation might be subject to a lower bound it does not rule out a prolonged period of mild deflation going forward in addition our micro evidence on wages suggests no obvious downward rigidity in the firm s wage costs downward rigidity in individual wages notwithstanding as a consequence downward nominal wage rigidity may provide little offset to deflationary pressures in the current u s situation despite some circumstantial evidence that this channel might have been at work in the past

habit formation in consumption and its implications for monetary policy models this paper explores a monetary policy model with habit formation for consumers in which consumers utility depends in part on current consumption relative to past consumption the empirical tests developed in the paper show that one can reject the hypothesis of no habit formation with tremendous condence largely because the habit formation model captures the gradual hump shaped response of real spending to various shocks the paper then embeds the habit consumption specication in a monetary policy model and nds that the responses of both spending and inflation to monetary policy actions are signicantly improved by this modication jel d12 e52 e43

the forecasting properties of survey based wage growth expectations weevaluate survey based wage growth expectations and find that they are neither unbiased nor efficient forecasts concerning out of sample forecast precision survey participants generally perform

is inflation sticky abstract new keynesian sticky price models predict that monetary policy can affect real variables however they also predict that inflation can be reduced without depressing output or employment in fact bringing down inflation is costly presenting a challenge to the new keynesian model two departures from the new keynesian model predict costly disinflation one assumes sticky inflation rather than sticky prices while the other assumes less than perfectly rational expectations taking into account information from surveys of inflation expectations i find the evidence suggests that inflation is not sticky and that inflation expectations are less than perfectly rational

menu costs and the neutrality of money a model of endogenous price adjustment under money growth is presented firms follow s s pricing policies and price revisions are imperfectly synchronized in the aggregate price stickiness disappears and money is neutral the connection between firm price adjustment and relative price variability in the presence of monetary growth is also investigated the results contrast with those obtained in models with exogenous fixed timing of price adjustment

real and nominal propagation of nominal shocks the role of real and nominal propagation mechanisms in generating persistent real effects of nominal shocks is analysed analytically in a fully specified intertemporal general equilibrium model while neither a real propagation mechanism capital acccumulation with one period nominal contracts nor nominal propagation staggered nominal contracts in the absence of any real propagation can generate plausible impulse responses with strong persistence it is shown that the two mechanisms interact so as to strengthen persistence possibly unit roots and generate more plausible impulse responses

term structure movements and pricing interest rate contingent claims this paper derives an arbitrage free interest rate movements model ar model this model takes the complete term structure as given and derives the subsequent stochastic movement of the term structure such that the movement is arbitrage free we then show that the ar model can be used to price interest rate contingent claims relative to the observed complete term structure of interest rates this paper also studies the behavior and the economics of the model our approach can be used to price a broad range of interest rate contingent claims including bond options and callable bonds

a near rational model of the business cycle with wage and price inertia this paper presents a model in which insignificantly suboptimal behavior causes aggregate demand shocks to have significant real effects the individual loss to agents with inertial price wage behavior is second order in terms of the parameter describing the shock while the effect on real economic variables is first order thus significant changes in business activity can be generated by anticipated money supply changes provided that some agents are willing to engage in nonmaximizing behavior which results in small losses

what can survey forecasts tell us about information rigidities a lot we derive common and conflicting predictions from models in which agents face information constraints and then assess their validity using surveys of consumers firms central bankers and professional forecasters we document that mean forecasts fail to completely adjust on impact to shocks leading to statistically and economically significant deviations from the null of full information the dynamics of forecast errors after shocks are consistent with the predictions of models with information rigidities the conditional responses of forecast errors and disagreement among agents can also be used to differentiate between some of the most prominent models of information rigidities

public information and inflation expectations microeconometric evidence from a natural experiment abstract governments provide public information to reduce information imperfections do households rely on public signals to inform themselves about market conditions to identify the importance of public information in households price expectations we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in ecuador where the published inflation rate had been different from the correct rate over a period of fourteen months due to a software error we find that the public signal about prices plays an important role in households price expectations and the change in price expectations affects their savings choices the effect is stronger for better educated and older people

the rise and decline of mancur olson s view of the rise and decline of nations author affiliation j barkley rosser jr department of economics msc 0204 james madison university harrisonburg va 22807 usa rosserjb jmu edu acknowledgment the author thanks roger r betancourt and thomas c schelling for providing either useful comments or materials and dennis coates and jac c heckelman for careful editing of earlier drafts of this paper the author is responsible for any remaining errors or misinterpretations 1 introductionalthough the first book by mancur lloyd olson jr 1the logic of collective action 1965 has been cited more often and can be viewed as more fundamentally innovative at the theoretical level its successor the rise and decline of nations 1982 has been more widely translated and is arguably the magnum opus of his career the grand application of his earlier ideas to the world and history at large 2 the earlier work laid out the problems that groups have in their collective goals as they grow larger with a greater disjuncture arising between the interests of the individual and of the collective group in the final chapter of this work he suggested that his argument could lead to an overturning of the orthodox theory of pressure groups that saw them as a positive force for democracy and efficiency luce 1924 commons 1950 special interest groups representing small numbers of firms in oligopolistic industries could support monopolistic or protectionist legislation such legislation could damage the broader economy especially groups unable to organize themselves that would then have to suffer in silence although olson rarely used the term this argument can be seen as foreshadowing the later theory of rent seeking and in his later works he more openly recognized the affinity of his ideas with the public choice school of thought 3although olson added a number of arguments two crucial innovations appear in rise and decline that underlie its central thesis one is the distinction between distributional coalitions which are seen as leading to outcomes inimical to economic growth and encompassing coalitions which are seen as potentially aiding economic growth in a society because of their greater size the latter are seen as having trouble organizing themselves and achieving influence although they might have a better chance of doing so in a smaller and more homogeneous society such as sweden olson s other innovation was his argument that over time a stable democracy will tend to create more and more distributional coalitions whose political power will accumulate thus gradually impeding the economic growth of the society this becomes the key to his most famous argument in rise and decline he especially focused on the post world war ii performance of germany and japan compared with the united kingdom he argued that the defeat of germany and japan in the war led to the overthrow of the power of narrow special interest groups that impeded growth whereas in the united kingdom such groups reached a peak of power that was responsible for the relatively weak performance of the british economy he emphasized that this was not a sudden development but that after leading the world in economic growth during the industrial revolution during the long eighteenth century 1688 1834 britain began to fall behind in the mid 19th century compared with such rising powers as germany and the united states this deceleration and relative decline only worsening in the aftermath of world war ii although he discussed a variety of other examples this was the book s central inspiring case of course even as rise and decline was being published the united kingdom began to undergo a substantial political and economic transformation during the period of rule by margaret thatcher that triggered a global movement to privatization and marketization even though britain was not invaded and did not experience a violently revolutionary upheaval

efficiency and formation of expectations evidence from the european investment survey the european commission conducts an annual survey regarding planned and realized business fixed investment across various manufacturing sectors in euroland in this study we investigate the predictive content of survey based expectations on investment in addition we empirically test the rationality of respondents both in a time series as well as in a panel context according to our results based on pooling the data efficiency is rejected since expectations are biased predictors of actual outcomes furthermore expectations revisions are found to be correlated with components of the information set known at the time of decision making finally our results qualify regressive expectations as the mechanism that more adequately describes the formation of expectations

new keynesian economics and the phillips curve models with sticky prices are an important part of new keynesian economics the author shows that several of the new keynesian models imply a formulation that is similar to the expectations augmented phillips curve of milton friedman and edmund phelps he then presents new estimates of the new keynesian phillips curve the author uses two proxies for price expectations survey based measures and an econometric based measure originally developed by bennett mccallum 1976 overall the results are consistent with the model but the survey based results are more precise suggesting that the surveys may be better measures of actual expectations copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

biases in macroeconomic forecasts irrationality or asymmetric loss empirical studies using survey data on expectations have frequently observed that forecasts are biased and have concluded that agents are not rational we establish that existing rationality tests are not robust to even small deviations from symmetric loss and hence have little ability to tell whether the forecaster is irrational or the loss function is asymmetric we quantify the exact trade off between forecast inefficiency and asymmetric loss leading to identical outcomes of standard rationality tests and explore new and more general methods for testing forecast rationality jointly with flexible families of loss functions that embed quadratic loss as a special case an empirical application to survey data on forecasts of nominal output growth demonstrates the empirical significance of our results and finds that rejections of rationality may largely have been driven by the assumption of symmetric loss

imperfect credibility and inflation persistence in this paper we formulate a dynamic general equilibrium model with staggered nominal contracts in which households and rms use optimal ltering to disentangle persistent and transitory shifts in the monetary policy rule the calibrated model accounts quite well for the dynamics of output and insation during the volcker disinsation and implies a sacri ce ratio very close to the estimated value our approach indicates that insation persistence and substantial costs of disinsation can be generated in an optimizing agent framework without relaxing the assumption of rational expectations or relying on arbitrary modi cations to the aggregate supply relation jel classi cation e31 e32 e52

testing the rationality of price forecasts new evidence from panel data this paper tests the rationality of individual price forecasts in a panel of professional forecasters here unlike in most previous studies rationality is not rejected the results here differ because 1 using individual forecasts avoids aggregation bias 2 comparison of forecasts to initial data avoids bias due to data revision 3 the professional forecasters have economic incentives to state their expectations accurately and 4 a new covariance matrix estimator consistent when forecast errors are correlated across individuals is used copyright 1990 by american economic association

party connections interest groups and the slow diffusion of infrastructure evidence from britain s first transport revolution economic and political interests often block or delay infrastructure improvements this paper examines their effects by studying britain s river navigation improvements in the early 1700s a subject of intense lobbying in parliament it shows that stronger party connections and influence in neighboring areas likely to oppose or support projects affected whether a town got a river navigation act their estimated effects are comparable to geography and town economic characteristics in magnitude and help explain whether towns were blocked from getting navigation improvements the findings address institutions following the glorious revolution and broader issues concerning infrastructure technology diffusion and political connections this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

wages and productivity growth in the nordic countries abstract the study examines growth in productivity and real wages in four nordic countries viz denmark finland norway and sweden thus extending gordon s 1987 analysis concentrating on the u s japan and europe the results confirm certain key findings of gordon s 1987 study in particular the cyclically adjusted measures of productivity growth confirm the slowdown in productivity growth in the mid 1970s gordon s finding that there are considerable differences across the different sectors of the economy is similarly supported as far as country specific development in productivity growth is concerned the results imply that there are considerable inter country differences which gordon s study fails to reveal in this respect gordon s estimates for europe if taken at face value can be somewhat misleading furthermore contrary to gordon the results suggest that the decline in the underlying productivity trend in the 1970s was not permanent but showed a recovery in the 1980s

money s role in the monetary business cycle a small structural model of the monetary business cycle implies that real money balances enter into a correctly specified forward looking is curve if and only if they enter into a correctly specified forward looking phillips curve the model also implies that empirical measures of real balances must be adjusted for shifts in money demand to accurately isolate and quantify the dynamic effects of money on output and inflation maximum likelihood estimates of the modelos parameters take both these considerations into account but still suggest that money plays a minimal role in the monetary business cycle

union wage settlements during a disinflation this paper examines the role of union wage contracts in the persistence of inflation and the implication of these contracts for the problem of disinflation in the united states a quantitative model of overlapping con tracts explicitly oriented toward the major union sector is developed the model takes account of expectations of future wage price and employment conditions as in more aggregated models that have been used in macroeconomic research in addition the distribution of workers according to contract length as well as deferred wage increases and escalator clauses are explicitly used in the model the main aim of the model is to determine the constraints which these contracts impose on disinflation paths the model indicates that the maximum speed of disinflation is extremely slow in the early phases if a rise in unemployment is to be avoided but increases considerably before the new lower rate of inflation is reached the disinflation path is considerably slower than that observed after hyperinflation periods however the existence of a path of inflation reduction raises questions about whether the institution of union wage con tracts is really the direct cause of costly disinflations or whether their influence works indirectly by raising credibility problems about a monetary disinflation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

small menu costs and large business cycles a macroeconomic model of monopoly i introduction the conflict between modern neoclassical and traditional keynesian theories of the business cycle centers upon the pricing mechanism in neoclassical models prices are fully flexible they represent the continuous optimization of economic agents and the continuous intersection of supply and demand in keynesian models prices are often assumed to be sticky they do not necessarily equilibrate all markets at all times one of the reasons for the resurgence of the equilibrium approach to macroeconomics has been the absence of a theoretical underpinning for this keynesian price stickiness this note shows that sticky prices can be both privately efficient and socially inefficient the business cycle results from the suboptimal adjustment of prices in response to a demand shock to the extent that policy can stabilize aggregate demand it can mitigate the social loss due to this suboptimal adjustment in some keynesian models prices are simply exogenously fixed 2 in others agents must set their prices in advance of the transaction date the act of altering a posted price is certainly costly these costs include such items as printing new catalogs and informing salesmen of the new price yet these menu costs are small and therefore generally perceived as providing only a weak foundation for these fixed price models however this inference is flawed small menu costs can cause large welfare losses the claim that price adjustment costs are small does not rebut the claim that they are central to understanding economic fluctuations

inflation dynamics and subjective expectations in the united states i introduction this paper analyzes the ability of sticky price models to explain the dynamics of u s inflation when using survey data as proxies for inflation expectations testing sticky price models with survey expectations is attractive since to the extent that survey data correctly capture agents expectations they allow to disregard issues related to the specification of agents expectations functions one neither has to impose untested orthogonality restrictions as required when estimating under the assumption of rational expectations nor has to make restrictive assumptions about the precise form of nonrationality present in agents forecast functions this allows to focus on the question whether the economic models under consideration are correctly specified previous tests of sticky price models performed under the assumption that agents hold rational expectations have generated mixed results prominently fuhrer and moore 1995 have reported that sticky price models do not generate sufficient stickiness for inflation when the output gap is used as a measure of real marginal costs recent evidence however has shown that the empirical performance depends crucially on how one measures real marginal costs the main determinant of inflation according to sticky price models for instance gall and gertler 1999 and sbordone 2002 show that sticky price models perform well once marginal costs are approximated by average unit labor costs 1 it makes an important difference whether sticky price models successfully explain inflation dynamics as a function of output behavior or they relate inflation dynamics to the behavior of unit labor costs given that the ultimate objective is a model explaining the joint behavior of output and inflation the latter case would require an additional empirically plausible theory linking the dynamics of unit labor costs to the behavior of output this paper studies whether the currently popular new keynesian phillips curve nkpc which can be derived from calvo 1983 style sticky price models is able to explain a relationship between inflation on the one hand and output or unit labor costs on the other hand thus we let the data speak whether a theory linking output to costs is warranted once expectations are approximated by data reported in the survey of professional forecasters our main finding is that the nkpc performs equally well with both measures of marginal costs output and unit labor costs whatever measure is used the estimate of the quarterly discount factor is close to one and the point estimate of the degree of price stickiness implies that firms reset their prices roughly every five quarters on average these results suggest that potential nonrationalities in expectations as they show up in surveys have biased previous estimates using output as a measure for marginal costs quite surprisingly the same nonrationalities do not seem to play a role when using unit labor costs here our estimates confirm the results obtained by gall and gertler 1999 and sbordone 2002 who assumed rational expectations we show that the reason for this finding is that approximating the agents information set using the unit labor cost variable rests on more solid grounds than approximating it using the output variable in particular the survey data suggest that the hypothesis of rational expectations implies a too high correlation between lagged output and future inflation expectations we show that this causes the coefficient estimate for output to become negative contrary to what is implied by theory these results suggest that once one takes account of potentially nonrational expectations via survey expectations sticky price models are able to establish a close link between output dynamics and the behavior of inflation to assess the robustness of this finding we include into the price equation lags of various variables and test for their significance

monetary policy rules and the indicator properties of asset prices abstract we investigate relationships between asset prices and inflation in a modern keynesian model in which monetary policy controls inflation by manipulating the federal funds rate the indicator properties of asset prices are quite sensitive to the monetary policy rule including the asset prices themselves in the reaction function can invert the sense of the indicator properties targeting the asset prices is tantamount to targeting the real interest rate when all of the weight in the reaction function is placed on asset prices the real rate converges so rapidly that policy loses control of inflation

on the precision of calvo parameter estimates in structural nkpc models abstract we study the extent of empirical information that can be obtained from alternative structural new keynesian inflation equations concerning the average duration of prices in the united states given that such specifications may be hard to identify using four different indexation and real wage rigidity based models in conjunction with identification robust econometric methods we evaluate the precision of calvo parameter estimates while results are sensitive to calibration and instrument selection we find confidence bounds on the average duration of prices that line up with available micro founded studies statistically significant coefficients for the forcing variables and non zero estimates on the coefficient of lagged inflation

robust monetary policy with imperfect knowledge we examine the performance and robustness properties of monetary policy rules in an estimated macroeconomic model in which the economy undergoes structural change and where private agents and the central bank possess imperfect knowledge about the true structure of the economy private agents rely on an adaptive learning technology to form expectations and update their beliefs based on incoming data policymakers follow an interest rate rule aiming to maintain price stability and to minimize uctuations of unemployment around its natural rate but are uncertain about the economy s natural rates of interest and unemployment we show that in this environment the scope for economic stabilization is signiflcantly reduced relative to an economy under rational expectations with perfect knowledge furthermore policies that would be optimal under perfect knowledge can perform very poorly when knowledge is imperfect e cient policies that take account of private learning and misperceptions of natural rates call for more aggressive responses to in ation that would be optimal under perfect knowledge we show that such policies not only improve performance in our baseline model but are also quite robust to potential misspeciflcation of private sector learning and the magnitude of variation in natural rates

price inertia and policy ineffectiveness in the united states 1890 1980 this paper introduces a new approach to the empirical testing of the lucas sargent wallace lsw policy ineffectiveness proposition which compares the lsw hypothesis with an alternative that states that prices respond fully in the long run but only gradually in the short run to nominal aggregate demand disturbances the empirical equations estimated for a new set of quarterly data extending back to 1890 exhibit uniformly high responses of real output and low responses of price changes to anticipated changes in nominal gnp the paper compares and tests three alternative methods of introducing persistence effects into the lsw framework

heterogeneity learning and information stickiness in inflation expectations in this paper we propose novel techniques for the empirical analysis of adaptive learning and sticky information in inflation expectations these methodologies are applied to the distribution of households inflation expectations collected by the university of michigan survey research center to account for the evolution of the cross section of inflation forecasts over time and measure the degree of heterogeneity in private agents forecasts we explore time series of percentiles from the empirical distribution our results show that heterogeneity is pervasive in the process of inflation expectation formation we identify three regions of the distribution that correspond to different underlying mechanisms of expectation formation a static or highly autoregressive region on the left hand side of the median a nearly rational region around the median and a fraction of forecasts on the right hand side of the median formed in accordance with adaptive learning and sticky information

models of inflation expectations formation a comparison of household and economist forecasts comment in the third section of his paper models of inflation expectations formation a comparison of household and economist forecasts gramlich 1983 presents statistics suggesting that two survey measures of inflation expectations are biased and inefficient in this comment we show that the main results presented in his table 1 are generated using a misspecified model when the specification error is corrected we find that the michigan survey of household inflation expectations passes the standard tests for unbiasedness and weak tests for efficiency 1 however there remains doubt about the properties of the inflation expectation series derived from the livingston survey of professional economists 2 the particular results we review were presumably generated from ordinary leastsquares ols estimation of the following equation equation 2 in gramlich