the assessment of households recycling costs the role of personal motives abstract this paper analyzes households perceptions of recycling activities in a municipality in northern sweden pitea the purpose of the paper is to analyze whether moral motives matter for the assessment of households waste sorting costs data were gathered using a mail out survey to 850 randomly chosen individuals in the municipality of pitea sweden we employ an economic model of moral motivation and econometric techniques the main result that follows from the analysis is that the results support the notion that moral motives significantly lower the costs associated with household recycling efforts

nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in propagation of the great depression this paper examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s onthe path of aggregate output during that period our approach is complementary to that of friedman and schwartz who emphasized the monetary impact of the bank failures we focus on non monetary primarily credit related aspects of the financial sector output link and consider the problems of debtors as well as those of the banking system we argue that the financial disruptions of 1930 33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand evidence suggests that effects of this type can help explain the unusual length and depth of the great depression this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

stock returns inflation and the phillips curve in recent years the negative relation between stock returns and inflation has been rigorously investigated studies by lintner 25 bodie 1 jaffee and mandelker 21 nelson 28 fama and schwert 11 and gultekin 17 to name but a few consistently show that stock returns are negatively associated with inflation if associated at all and conclude that the fisher hypothesis does not hold for stocks explanations for this finding are equally abundant for instance fama 10 postulates that the observed negative association is largely a spurious phenomenon a conclusion he justifies by maintaining that it is consistent with a simple money demand quantity theory world geske and roll 15 extend this line of thought by developing a more complex macro economic model that includes such items as unemployment corporate earnings and government financing following a somewhat different approach ram and spencer 32 reexamine fama s work by augmenting the fisher equation to include the phillips curve hypothesis they conclude that there is a positive association between inflation and real activity and a negative relationship between real stock returns and real activity a position that contradicts fama s findings a problem common to the above explanations is that a general equilibrium framework is not employed the purpose of this study therefore is to further develop this work by examining the relationships among real stock returns inflation and unemployment using a general equilibrium model a nonspurious negative relation of real interest and inflation is employed that is based on the levi and makin studies 23 24 it is shown that the natural rate of unemployment phenomenon which causes the phillips curve to shift also simultaneously causes the real interest rate inflation relation to shift using this framework the hypothesis that the real stock return inflation relation shifts concurrently with the phillips curve is empirically tested the hypothesis is not rejected this suggests that the usual simple regression of stock returns on inflation is misspecified so that the slope estimate is not as steep as the true one the plan of the paper is as follows the concurrency of the shift in the real interestinflation relation and the phillips curve is demonstrated in the next section in section iii the shift in the phillips curve is tested by the brown durbin and evans method 3 then using dummy variables to represent the shifting phenomenon of the phillips curve empirical

international coordination in the design of macroeconomic policy rules abstract the paper examines international issues that arise in the design and evaluation of macroeconomic policy rules it begins with a theoretical investigation of the effects of fiscal and monetary policy in a two country rational expectations model with staggered wage and price setting and with perfect capital mobility the results indicate that with the appropriate choice of policies and with flexible exchange rates demand shocks need not give rise to international externalities or coordination issues price shocks however do create an externality and this is the focus of the empirical part of the paper using a simple seven country model consisting of canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states optimal cooperative and non cooperative nash policy rules to minimize the variance of output and inflation in each country are calculated the cooperative policies are computed using standard dynamic stochastic programming techniques and the non cooperative policies are computed using an algorithm developed by finn kydland the central result is that the cooperative policy rules for these countries are more accommodative to inflation than the non cooperative policy rules

a comparison of autoregressive univariate forecasting procedures for macroeconomic time series the actual performance of several automated univariate autoregressive forecasting procedures applied to 150 macroeconomic time series are compared the procedures are the random walk model as a basis for comparison long autoregressions with three alternative rules for lag length selection and a long autoregression estimated by minimizing the sum of absolute deviations the sensitivity of each procedure to preliminary transformations data periodicity forecast horizon loss function employed in parameter estimation and seasonal adjustment procedures is examined the more important conclusions are that akaike s lag length selection criterion works well in a wide variety of situations the modeling of long memory components becomes important for forecast horizons of three or more periods and linear combinations of forecasts do not improve forecast quality appreciably

recycling in multifamily dwellings does convenience matter factors that decrease the the cost of recycling have significant positive correlations with recycling rates in multifamily dwellings mfds waste management experts have previously used anecdotes to infer a link between convenience and waste diversion rates in mfd recycling programs this article confirms and quantifies that link by applying probit and double censored to bit analysis to survey data from 214 households in urbana illinois we find a strong connection between recycling rates and the perceived presence of adequate interior space for processing recyclables and distance to recycling bins affects container recycling intensity the results have implications for cost effective design of mfd recycling programs jel di q2 i introduction statistics from the u s environmental protection agency epa show that from 1960 to 1997 u s recycling rates rose from 6 4 to 28 and 9 000 curbside recycling programs were established epa 1998 such programs have traditionally been geared toward single family dwellings sfds conventional doctrine has been that recycling activity is likely to be limited in multifamily dwellings mfds however as residential recycling rates for sfds plateau in the united states solid waste managers and policy makers are becoming increasingly interested in mfd recycling programs by now at least half of all mfds may have access to a curbside recycling program epa 2001 stevens 1999 and the epa 1999 2001 show that waste diversion rates the fraction of a household s waste that is recycled instead of discarded as refuse tend to be slightly lower in mfds than in sfds but some mfd recycling programs have yielded diversion rates as high as 60 what factors influence the recycling rates chosen by residents of mfds in a detailed nationwide study the epa 2001 found that successful 20 or higher diversion rate mfd recycling programs tended to have large and numerous containers provided by the recycling service waste management experts emphasize the importance of convenience in yielding high waste diversion rates in mfd recycling programs with some record setting programs using strategies like doorstep pickup of recyclables in high rise apartment buildings epa 1999 such anecdotes are intriguing however although much work has studied sfd recycling behavior little has been done to explore mfd recycling in a rigorous statistical fashion a number of economists have studied the sensitivity of recycling behavior to pricing policies that alter the costs and benefits of recycling relative to disposal 1 another body of work has investigated the influence of nonpecuniary policies and variables on recycling in sfds work by vining and ebreo 1990 and ebreo and vining 2000 supports the notion that convenience may increase the number of people that identify themselves as recyclers however their data are strictly qualitative the earlier study dates from a time when only community drop off recycling was available and the later study is focused on public attitudes toward and expectations regarding changes in recycling policy jakus et al 1996 1997 use economic models and rigorous empirical analysis to study the influence on actual recycling behavior of recycling promotional campaigns and policies to alter the time cost of recycling they find evidence that recycling participation is not a function of home ownership or renting status per se however these articles do not delve into the details of mfd recycling because the data were collected in the context of rural drop off recycling a few studies have turned their attention to mfd recycling stevens 1999 finds that programs with high aggregate diversion rates are likely to have a relatively large ratio of collection bins to households mcquaid and murdoch 1996 conduct a qualitative analysis of mfd recycling in edinburgh that suggests that housing characteristics such as floor level presence of an elevator and household size may influence recycling rates

stock returns inflation and real activity in canada this paper finds evidence that as for the united states there exists an inverse relation between real stock returns and inflation i n canada such a relation if nonspurious could signify a nonneutralit y of money the authors causality tests suggest however that inflation does not cause real stock returns instead their empirical results support e f fama s proxy effect hypothesis according to which the observed inverse relation is proxying for fundamental relations between real stock returns and anticipated real activity and between inflation and real activity the authors therefore cannot reject the fisherian hypothesis that variations in anticipated inflation have no effect on real stock returns

does real u k gdp have a unit root evidence from a multi century perspective we employ linear and nonlinear unit root tests to examine the stationarity of five multi century historical u k series of real output compiled by the bank of england three series span 1270 to 201

financial factors in the great depression eginning with irving fisher 1933 and john maynard keynes 1931 b 1963 macroeconomists have argued that financial markets were important sources and propagators of decline during the great depression turning points during the depression often coincided with or were preceded by dramatic events in financial markets stock market collapse waves of bankruptcy and bank failure and contractions in the money stock but the mechanism through which financial factors contributed to the depression has been a source of controversy as has been the relative importance of financial factors in explaining the origins and persistence of the depression this essay reviews the literature on the role of financial factors in the depression and draws some lessons that have more general relevance for the study of the depression and for macroeconomics i argue that much of the recent progress that has been made in understanding some of the most important and puzzling aspects of financial real links in the depression followed a paradigm shift in economics a central neglected theoretical piece of the story for financial factors was the allocative effects of imperfections in capital markets which can imply links between disruptions in financial markets and subsequent economic activity also the increasing emphasis on learning and path dependence in economics has helped to explain why financial shocks during the 1930s were so severe and why policy makers failed to prevent the depression

analysing the risk premium in the italian stock market arch m models versus non parametric models this paper investigates the variability of the risk premium in the italian stock market over the period 1978 89 we have modelled voatility using two different approaches arch m models and non parametric models the estimate of the arch m models confirm the existence of both an arch process in the variance and a time varying risk premium also the non parametric specification confirms the existence of a time varying risk premium moreover in both models the acceleration in the inflation rate has a negative effect on stock prices

stock returns and inflation with supply and demand disturbances we account for the relation between stock returns and inflation with two independent disturbances supply shocks and demand shocks supply shocks reflect real output shocks and cause a negative relation between stock returns and inflation while demand shocks are mainly due to monetary shocks and generate a positive relation between stock returns and inflation we show both theoretically and empirically that the stock return inflation relation varies over time and across countries depending on the relative importance of the two types of shocks our empirical evidence is based on pre and postwar periods in the united states as well as the postwar period in the united kingdom japan germany article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

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

fundamentals panics and bank distress during the depression we assemble bank level and other data for fed member banks to model determinants of bank failure fundamentals explain bank failure risk well the first two friedman schwartz crises are not associated with positive unexplained residual failure risk or increased importance of bank illiquidity for forecasting failure the third friedman schwartz crisis is more ambiguous but increased residual failure risk is small in the aggregate the final crisis early 1933 saw a large unexplained increase in bank failure risk local contagion and illiquidity may have played a role in pre 1933 bank failures even though those effects were not large in their aggregate impact

garbage recycling and illicit burning or dumping abstract with garbage and recycling as the only two disposal options we confirm prior results that the optimal curbside fee for garbage collection equals the direct resource cost plus external environment cost when illicit burning or dumping is a third disposal option that cannot be taxed directly the optimal curbside tax on garbage changes sign the optimal fee structure is a deposit refund system a tax on all output plus a rebate on proper disposal through either recycling or garbage collection the output tax helps achieve the first best allocation even though it affects the choice between consumption and untaxed leisure

monetary policy options for mitigating the impact of the global financial crisis on emerging market economies though the hypothesis that exchange rate regimes fully predetermine monetary policy in the face of external shocks hardly finds any advocates on theoretical ground it has crept in the most of empirical research this study adopts a more discerning empirical approach that looks at monetary policy tools used in order to accommodate the recent financial crisis we investigated the gdp growth in 45 emerging market economies in the most intense phase of the crisis and found out that there is no clear difference in the growth performance between countries at the opposite poles of the exchange rate regime spectrum depreciation cum international reserve depletion outperforms the other policy options especially the rise in the interest rate spread we discovered certain complementarities between the information on the policy option and on exchange rate regime taking into account non gaussian settings we decided to use quantile regression which provide in addition more complete picture of relationship between the covariates and the distribution of the gdp growth

the dynamic effects of aggregate demand and supply disturbances we interpret fluctuations in gnp and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not we interpret the first as supply disturbances the second as demand disturbances demand disturbances have a hump shaped mirror image effect on output and unemployment the effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time peaking after two years and reaching a plateau after five years

capital reallocation and liquidity this paper studies the cyclical properties of capital reallocation and the frictions which inhibit such reallocation we show that the amount of capital reallocation and the benefits to reallocation vary at the business cycle frequency the amount of capital reallocation is procyclical in contrast the benefits to capital reallocation appear countercyclical we measure the amount of reallocation using data on flows of capital across firms and the benefits to capital reallocation using several measures of the cross sectional dispersion of the productivity of capital we then study a calibrated model of an economy where capital reallocation is costly and impute the cost of reallocation which is consistent with the amount of and benefits to reallocation in the data we find that the cost of reallocation needs to be substantially countercyclical to be consistent with the observed joint cyclical properties of reallocation and productivity dispersion the cyclical variation in this cost is interpreted as variation in the liquidity of capital broadly defined since physical costs are unlikely to vary countercyclically

short run models and long run forecasts a note on the permanence of output fluctuations suppose that real gnp falls 1 percent lower than one would have expected from its past history how much should one change one s forecast of gnp for ten or twenty quarters ahead that is the question which has recently been addressed by campbell and mankiw 1987 and clark 1987 both of these papers estimate a parsimonious representation of the time series and then compute the implied long run response of gnp to an innovation while clark estimates that the long run impact of an innovation is less than two thirds of the initial impact campbell and mankiw present evidence that shocks persist and even grow over time the goal of this paper is to develop tests of the goodness of fit of specific time series models which are powerful against alternatives that imply different long run impulse responses with postwar quarterly data these tests favor models in which innovations are largely temporary over models in which innovations persist

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

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

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

explaining the variation in household recycling rates across the uk household waste recycling rates vary significantly both across and within regions of the uk this paper attempts to explain the variation by using a new data set of waste recycling rates and policy determinants for all of the uk s 434 local authorities over the period 2006q2 to 2008q4 our results suggest that the method of recycling collection chosen by policy makers is an important factor influencing the recycling rate we also find an inverse relationship between the frequency of the residual waste collection and the recycling rate

curbside recycling in the presence of alternatives we measure the extent to which curbside access affects quantity recycled we use novel data to distinguish between new recycling and material diverted from other recycling modes we find that the marginal impact of expanding curbside programs on total recycled quantities is small in part because curbside programs significantly cannibalize returns from drop off recycling centers failure to account for cannibalization from other modes may substantially over estimate the benefits of curbside programs we conclude with simple cost effectiveness comparisons results suggest that incremental expansion of curbside access may not be cost effective

should central banks respond to movements in asset prices in recent decades asset booms and busts have been important factors in macroeconomic fluctuations in both industrial and developing countries in light of this experience how if at all should central bankers respond to asset price volatility we have addressed this issue in previous work bernanke and gertler 1999 the context of our earlier study was the relatively new but increasingly popular monetary policy framework known as inflation targeting see e g bernanke and frederic mishkin 1997 in an inflation targeting framework publicly announced medium term inflation targets provide a nominal anchor for monetary policy while allowing the central bank some flexibility to help stabilize the real economy in the short run the inflation targeting approach gives a specific answer to the question of how central bankers should respond to asset prices changes in asset prices should affect monetary policy only to the extent that they affect the central bank s forecast of inflation to a first approximation once the predictive content of asset prices for inflation has been accounted for there should be no additional response of monetary policy to assetprice fluctuations in use now for about a decade inflationtargeting has generally performed well in practice however so far this approach has not often been stress tested by large swings in asset prices our earlier research employed simulations of a small calibrated macroeconomic model to examine how an inflation targeting policy defined as one in which the central bank s instrument interest rate responds primarily to changes in expected inflation might fare in the face of a boom and bust cycle in asset prices we found that an aggressive inflationtargeting policy rule in our simulations one in which the coefficient relating the instrument interest rate to expected inflation is 2 0 substantially stabilizes both output and inflation in scenarios in which a bubble in stock prices develops and then collapses as well as in scenarios in which technology shocks drive stock prices intuitively inflation targeting central banks automatically accommodate productivity gains that lift stock prices while offsetting purely speculative increases or decreases in stock values whose primary effects are through aggregate demand conditional on a strong policy response to expected inflation we found little if any additional gains from allowing an independent response of central bank policy to the level of asset prices in our view there are good reasons outside of our formal model to worry about attempts by central banks to influence asset prices including the fact that as history has shown the effects of such attempts on market psychology are dangerously unpredictable hence we concluded that inflationtargeting central banks need not respond to asset prices except insofar as they affect the inflation forecast in the spirit of recent work on robust control the exercises in our earlier paper analyzed the performance of policy rules in worst case discussants robert shiller yale university glenn rudebusch federal reserve bank of san francisco kenneth rogoff harvard university

financial frictions and employment during the great depression abstract we provide new evidence that a disruption in credit supply played a quantitatively significant role in the unprecedented contraction of employment during the great depression using a novel hand collected dataset of large industrial firms our identification strategy exploits preexisting variation in the need to raise external funds at a time when public bond markets essentially froze local bank failures inhibited firms ability to substitute public debt for private debt which exacerbated financial constraints we estimate a large and negative causal effect of financing frictions on firm employment we find that the lack of access to credit likely accounted for a substantial fraction of the aggregate decline in employment of large firms between 1928 and 1933

the nation in depression t he economic cataclysm of the 1930s was an international phenomenon experienced by countries in all parts of the globe countries as diverse as the united states germany chile and japan all experienced significant depressions in the 1930s thus the title of charles kindleberger s classic book the world in depression 1973 captures an important feature of the great depression these international aspects especially the importance of the gold standard in causing the downturn and transmitting depression from one country to another have been emphasized in recent years in excellent books by peter temin 1989 and barry eichengreen 1992 these books have rightly received widespread attention and have successfully changed the focus of much analysis of the great depression from the united states to the world economy while such a change from american provincialism is surely healthy and warranted adopting an international perspective on the great depression risks losing sight of the many ways in which the u s depression differed in timing and severity from depressions elsewhere more important it may obscure the many uniquely american causes of america s great depression this paper examines the ways in which the u s experience during the 1930s resembled that of other countries in some regards and fundamentally differed in other aspects i also evaluate the evidence on the causes of the great depression in the united states and the sources of the eventual recovery i suggest that the path of american output and unemployment before 1931 can be explained quite well with only domestic factors even after 1931

capital structure and debt structure using a novel dataset that records individual debt issues on the balance sheets of public firms we demonstrate that traditional capital structure studies that ignore debt heterogeneity miss substantial capital structure variation relative to high credit quality firms lowcredit quality firms are more likely to have a multi tiered capital structure consisting of both secured bank debt with tight covenants and subordinated non bank debt with loose covenants we discuss the extent to which these findings are consistent with existing theoretical models of debt structure in which firms simultaneously use multiple debt types to reduce incentive conflicts jel g32

are output fluctuations transitory according to the conventional view of the business cycle fluctuations in output represent temporary deviations from trend the purpose of this paper is to question this conventional view if fluctuations in output are dominated by temporary deviations from the natural rate of output then an unexpected change in output today should not substantially change one s forecast of output in say five or ten years our examination of quarterly postwar united states data leads us to be skeptical about this implication the data suggest that an unexpected change in real gnp of 1 percent should change one s forecast by over 1 percent over a long horizon

monetary intervention mitigated banking panics during the great depression quasi experimental evidence from a federal reserve district border 1929 1933 the federal reserve act divided mississippi between the 6th atlanta and 8th st louis districts during the great depression these districts policies differed atlanta championed monetary activism and the extension of aid to ailing banks st louis eschewed expansionary initiatives during a banking crisis in 1930 atlanta expedited lending to banks in need st louis did not outcomes differed across districts in atlanta banks survived at higher rates lending continued at higher levels commerce contracted less and recovery began earlier these patterns indicate that central bank intervention influenced bank health credit availability and business activity

could the global financial crisis improve the performance of the g7 stocks markets abstractfinancial crises are normally associated with negative effects on financial markets in this article we investigate whether the most recent global financial crisis gfc had any positive impact on the g7 canada france germany italy japan the united kingdom and the united states indices to conduct the analysis we employ the mean variance mv analysis capm statistics hurst exponent runs test multiple variation ratio test and stochastic dominance sd tests our mv and capm results conclude that most of the g7 stock indices are significantly less volatile the results from hurst exponent run tests and multiple variation ratio confirm that efficiency improved in the post gfc period finally our sd results conclude that there is no arbitrage opportunity and the markets are efficient due to the gfc and in general investors prefer investing in the indices after the gfc overall we conclude that the gfc led to markets that are more efficient and mature confirming that crises can also

distance and private information in lending we study the effects of physical distance on the acquisition and use of private information in informationally opaque credit markets using a unique data set of all loan applications by small firms to a large bank we show that borrower proximity facilitates the collection of soft information leading to a trade off in the availability and pricing of credit which is more readily accessible to nearby firms albeit at higher interest rates ceteris paribus analyzing loan rates and firms decision to switch lenders provides further evidence for banks strategic use of private information however distance erodes our lender s ability to collect proprietary intelligence and to carve out local captive markets suggesting that the requisite soft information is primarily local the author 2010 published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies all rights reserved for permissions please e mail journals permissions oxfordjournals org oxford university press

cyclicality of credit supply firm level evidence abstract we quantify fluctuations in bank loan supply in the time series by studying firms substitution between loans and bonds using firm level data any firm that raises new debt must have a positive demand for external funds conditional on the issuance of new debt we interpret firms switching from loans to bonds as a contraction in bank credit supply we find strong evidence of this substitution at times that are characterized by tight lending standards depressed aggregate lending poor bank performance and tight monetary policy we show that this substitution behavior has strong predictive power for bank borrowing and investments by small firms

recycling social norms and warm glow revisited we examine the role of social norms and warm glow in a theoretical framework and establish that improving the quality of recycling facilities for example through kerbside collection will elicit more recycling effort if warm glow is present drawing on the literature we model the role of social norms with reference to age profile ethnicity and geographical location of the reference group using english local authority data we show that a social norm for recycling does exist we find the expected relationship between the quality of kerbside provision and recycling activity if the household derives warm glow from the activity however it is insignificant amongst the control variables we find evidence that multifamily dwellings recycle less

macroeconomic shocks and stock market returns the case of korea abstractthis study examines the effects of macroeconomic shocks on key macro variables including stock market returns in korea using the structural vector autoregression svar model we suggest a three variable svar model incorporating inflation output growth and stock returns we adopt a nonzero z ratio restriction for the long run identifying assumption to allow for economically meaningful relationships among variables while our results support the negative positive relation of demand supply shocks to stock returns we also find that demand shocks influence stock market variance more significantly than supply shocks do the sub period analysis finds that global market fluctuations during the global financial crisis have relatively little effect on korean stock market performance we also examine a generalized five variable model that includes the foreign exchange rate and interest rate confirming the results from the three variable case

employment and unemployment in the 1930s the great depression is to economics what the big bang is to physics as an event the depression is largely synonymous with the birth of modern macroeconomics and it continues to haunt successive generations of economists with respect to labor and labor markets these facts evidently include wage rigidity persistently high unemployment rates and long term joblessness traditionally aggregate time series have provided the econometric grist for distinguishing explanations of the great depression recent research on labor markets in the 1930s however has shifted attention from aggregate to disaggregate time series and towards microeconomic evidence this shift in focus is motivated by two factors first disaggregated data provide many more degrees of freedom than the decade or so of annual observations associated with the depression and thus may prove helpful in distinguishin g macroeconomic explanations second disaggregation has revealed aspects of economic behavior hidden in the time series that may be essential to their proper interpretation and in any case are worthy of study in their own right although the substantive findings of recent research are too new to judge their permanent significance i believe that the shift towards disaggregated analysis is an important contribution the paper begins by reviewing the conventional statistics of the united states labor market during the great depression and the paradigms to explain them it then turns to recent studies of employment and unemployment using disaggregated data of various types the paper concludes with discussions of

stock volatility and the great depression stock return volatility during the great depression has been labeled a volatility puzzle because the standard deviation of stock returns was 2 to 3 times higher than any other period in american history we investigate this puzzle using a new series of building permits and leverage our results suggest that volatility in building permit growth and financial leverage largely explain the high level of stock volatility during the great depression markets factored in the possibility of a forthcoming economic disaster received september 30 2017 editorial decision august 27 2018 by editor philip e strahan authors have furnished an internet appendix which is available on the oxford university press web site next to the link to the final published paper online

the employment effects of credit market disruptions firm level evidence from the 2008 9 financial crisis this article investigates the effect of bank lending frictions on employment outcomes i construct a new data set that combines information on banking relationships and employment at 2 000 nonfinancial firms during the 2008 9 crisis the article first verifies empirically the importance of banking relationships which imply a cost to borrowers who switch lenders i then use the dispersion in lender health following the lehman crisis as a source of exogenous variation in the availability of credit to borrowers i find that credit matters firms that had precrisis relationships with less healthy lenders had a lower likelihood of obtaining a loan following the lehman bankruptcy paid a higher interest rate if they did borrow and reduced employment by more compared to precrisis clients of healthier lenders consistent with frictions deriving from asymmetric information the effects vary by firm type lender health has an economically and statistically significant effect on employment at small and medium firms but the data cannot reject the hypothesis of no effect at the largest or most transparent firms abstracting from general equilibrium effects i find that the withdrawal of credit accounts for between one third and one half of the employment decline at small and medium firms in the sample in the year

does gnp have a unit root a re evaluation abstract stock and watson 1986 test the hypothesis that real per capita gnp has a unit root by using a test statistic due to phillips 1985 which incorporates a non parametric correction for the serial correlation induced by system and error dynamics the version of this test that is used by stock and watson does not accomodate the presence of a drift and to compensate they detrend the series by extracting a 1 5 annual trend growth we use a version of this class of non parametric tests developed by phillips and perron 1986 which allows for an estimated drift and reassess the stock and watson findings

garbage and recycling with endogenous local policy abstract this paper estimates the impact of garbage fees and curbside recycling programs on garbage and recycling amounts without correction for endogenous policy a price per bag of garbage has a negative effect on garbage and a positive cross price effect on recycling correction for endogenous local policy increases the effect of the user fee on garbage and the effect of curbside recycling collection on recycling introducing a fee of 1 per bag is estimated to reduce garbage by 412 pounds per person per year 44 but to increase recycling by only 30 pounds per person per year

a model of imperfect competition with keynesian features the recent literature on the reappraisal of keynes has viewed keynesian equilibria as arising when prices are fixed and effective demands and supplies are equilibrated through the adjustment of quantities one problem with this approach is that it lacks a theory of price determination in particular of why prices are fixed in the present paper we show that a number of keynesian features arise in a model in which prices are fully flexible but where agents have some monopoly power one advantage of this approach is that it provides a theory of the determination of both prices and quantities

the cyclical component of u s economic activity quarterly data on industrial production and deflated gross national product in the united states from 1947 through 1985 are decomposed into independent nonstationary trend and stationary cycle components using kalman filtering and smoothing techniques estimates of the model parameters imply that at least half of the quarterly innovation in u s economic activity can be attributed to a stationary cyclical component that persists over periods of time as long as five years this finding is inconsistent with the hypothesis that most of the apparent variation in u s economic activity can be attributed to a nonstationary trend component

solving estimating and testing a nonlinear stochastic equilibrium model with an example of the asset returns and inflation relationship abstract this paper describes a method for solving estimating and testing a fully specified nonlinear stochastic equilibrium model by simulation a nonlinear stochastic asset pricing model with production and money is formulated which aims to explain observed empirical relations between inflation and asset returns complete solution paths to the equilibrium model are generated through a backwards mapping method the parameters of the model are estimated by simulation taking account of the broad range of dynamics of the model and overidentifying restrictions of the model are tested by extending gmm procedures

revisiting the uncertain unit root in gdp and cpi testing for non linear trend reversion we test for the presence of a unit root in u s gdp and cpi allowing for non linear trend reversion under the alternative hypothesis in contrast to most previous results we find evidence in favour of trend stationarity for both variables

testing okun s law theoretical and empirical considerations using fractional integration abstractfull employment remains at the center of any economic policy following okun s conclusion regarding the trade off relation between unemployment and real gross national product growth new s

pareto inefficiency of market economies search and efficiency wage models this paper shows that market economies with search and in which wages are affected by efficiency wage considerations are not constrained pareto efficient wages are not set at pareto efficient levels nor is the level of employment unemployment pareto efficient we identify the nature of the biases and the welfare improving government interventions this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the displacement effect of convenience the case of recycling in light of increasingly ambitious recycling targets it is important to analyse the potential displacement effect of improving access to kerbside provision on other forms of recycling do households view the different modes of recycling as substitutes or complements of each other does this perceived relationship depend on the type of material recycled using data for all of the uk s local governments from 2004q2 to 2013q3 we analyse the nature of the relationship between the two main channels of recycling in the case of dry recycling the empirical findings are ambiguous on the trade off between kerbside and non kerbside recycling on the one hand the findings suggest that there is no trade off when considering the effect of expanding kerbside provision on the other hand the findings also suggest that there is a trade off when we focus on the effect of expanding non kerbside provision however putting together the empirical findings with theory in particular the symmetry property of the hicksian substitution effect suggests that there is a trade off irrespective of whether we consider expansion of kerbside or non kerbside provision in the case of green compost recycling the empirical findings on their own or together with theory unambiguously suggest that there is a trade off