the effects of decision making on futures price volatility existing literature on commodity futures price volatility emphasizes time to expiration and the resolution of uncertainty in this paper we stress the supply and demand inflexibilities arising from decision making a decision made on the supply demand side makes future supply demand responses less elastic therefore a shock arising after a decision is made is more effective in changing the futures price than a shock before the decision is made the results support the time to maturity hypothesis but do not conflict with the state variable hypotheses of futures price volatility evidence supporting the impacts of inflexibilities are presented for corn soybean and wheat contracts

the behavior of foreign exchange rates the analysis of the distribution of foreign exchange rate changes provides a description of the behavior of foreign exchange rates and its determining underlying process the application of empirical methodologies or further theoretical developments is limited by the nature of this distribution in this paper the empirical analysis of major currencies during the flexible exchange rate period suggests that there is no unique distribution representing the behavior of the foreign exchange rate this however is determined both by foreign exchange management policies and the fundamental economic forces

pricing free bank notes abstract during the pre civil war period us banks issued distinct private monies called bank notes a bank note is a perpetual risky non interest bearing debt claim with the right to redeem on demand at par in specie this paper investigates the pricing of this private money taking into account the enormous changes in technology during the period namely the introduction and rapid diffusion of the railroad a contingent claims pricing model for bank notes is proposed and tested using monthly bank note prices for all banks in north america together with indices of the durations and costs of trips back to issuing banks constructed from pre civil war travelers guides evidence is produced that market participants properly priced the risks inherent in these securities suggesting that wildcat banking was not common because of market discipline

can currency competition work abstract can competition among privately issued fiat currencies work only sometimes and partially to show this we build a model of competition among privately issued fiat currencies a purely private arrangement fails to implement an efficient allocation even though it can deliver price stability under certain technological conditions although currency competition creates problems for monetary policy it is possible to design a policy rule that uniquely implements an efficient allocation

live cattle futures response to cattle on feed reports knight ridder surveys provide prerelease expectations of the information in the cattle on feed reports the knight ridder information is employed here in accordance with the efficient markets hypothesis to identify the unanticipated information provided in cattle on feed reports rational expectations theory is used to test knight ridder forecasts for unbiasedness efficiency and forecast performance the forecasts mostly satisfy rationality conditions live cattle futures prices respond to unanticipated information about placements and marketings contained in cattle on feed releases however report information is absorbed quickly

on the economics of private money abstract the application of laissez faire to the monetary system is a key ingredient of important proposals for monetary reform both new and old that seek to discipline government creation of money through competition this paper provides an overview of issues to be encountered in the construction of theoretical models of private monetary economies including consideration of market imperfections that have been hypothesized to arise in these systems further some descriptive history of the less regulated monetary systems of 19th century new york is undertaken with an emphasis on discussing the nature of market generated banking and monetary institutions in light of these critiques

currency competition a hayekian perspective on international monetary integration currency internationalization is examined from the vantage point of friedrich hayek s contributions in the 1970s compared with received commentaries in which only an idealized case for private money is attributed to hayek this paper underscores other dimensions of hayek s work on money and currency hayek s case for choice in currency draws on his theory of competition anticipates competition between government suppliers of fiat money accommodates many aspects of international monetary integration and embodies a distinctive approach to monetary independence choice of exchange rate regime and the transnationalization of currency hayekian predictions are outlined for future developments in currency competition

the distribution of foreign exchange price changes trading day effects and risk measurement this study investigates the nature of price changes in a variety of major and minor foreign exchange markets the results suggest that the log of price changes over one trading day intervals seems to follow a non normal stable distribution function different measures of location and to lesser extent scale are present for different days of the week dollar denominated price changes are high on mondays and wednesdays and low on thursdays and fridays for all currencies the wednesday thursday result is consistent with the settlement procedures used in foreign exchange transactions in the dollar the friday monday result is consistent with an increase in demand for the dollar prior to the weekend this study offers some previously unavailable results on the nature of price changes in a certain set of speculative markets in particular this is a study of the distributional characteristics of daily and weekly price changes for a number of major and minor foreign exchange markets the results document the existence of non normal stable distributions for price changes in foreign exchange markets these price change distributions differ by day of the week in ways that are only partly attributable to the institutional structure of the market the results of the study are interpreted within the context of understanding how foreign exchange markets operate and within the context of prior studies of stock market data concerned with summarizing the probability distribution of price changes for different intervals including days of the week since bachelier s 1 original treatise that contained the proposition that speculative market prices follow a process that could be described by a normal distribution there have been numerous alternative attempts to describe the stochastic processes which characterize speculative market prices these studies have not resulted in any generalized description of the probability distribution of price changes in such markets indeed the evidence suggests substantial differences in the process among various types of financial instruments the failure to achieve consensus can be traced to the lack of robustness in the statistical procedures employed to estimate processes and to differences in the underlying institutional or economic arrangements which are unique to that market the possibility of differences in the information set used to assess value or differences in technology for transmitting information makes it important to secure additional

the ban on indexed bonds 1933 77 in a recent article in this review nissan liviatan and david levhari attempt to explain the phenomenon that in spite of recent marked inflationary trends the important capital markets have not developed a significant free private enterprise market for cost of living linked bonds p 366 they note that the familiar theoretical complete dominance of indexed bonds over nonindexed bonds holds unambiguously only in an economy in which there are no nominal assets they demonstrate that borrowers may in theory insist on hedging the inflation risk on their nonindexed cash balances by issuing some nonindexed bonds at a discount that makes them attractive in spite of the risk they impose on lenders their model leads them to conclude that indexed bonds might not completely dominate nonindexed bonds however they do not claim that their model explains the phenomenon they set out to explain why is it that the free market to use their expression has come up with virtually no indexed bonds at all fortunately a simple explanation for the nonexistence of indexed bonds in the united states was provided two years

information learning and the stability of fiat money abstract we analyze the stability of monetary regimes in an economy where fiat money is endogenously created by the government information about its value is imperfect and learning is decentralized we show that monetary stability depends crucially on the speed of information transmission in the economy our model generates a dynamic on the acceptability of fiat money that resembles historical accounts of the rise and eventual collapse of overissued paper money it also provides an explanation of the fact that despite its obvious advantages the widespread use of fiat money is only a recent development

the rationality and price effects of u s department of agriculture forecasts of oranges this article examines the effect of public information on the orange juice market we investigate the rationality information content and price effects of u s department of agriculture forecasts of the production of oranges u s department of agriculture forecasts are found to be unbiased and efficient the first forecast contains the most new information and subsequent reports become valuable only when freezes occur significant price movements occur in response to announced production in both florida and california however the majority of price variations cannot be explained by these movements in supply

financial futures markets and tabular standards the goal of a monetary system that provides assurance against fluctuations in purchasing power is ancient one frequently suggested and repeatedly rediscovered proposal is to attain that result by linking the currency unit to a price index that device was proposed in the nineteenth century by w stanley jevons and by alfred marshall who named it a tabular standard it has been repeatedly rediscovered in marshall s version it required no governmental action except the issuance of a price index number something which has of course become widely prevalent individuals would simply in their own interest be led to make contracts specified not in terms of the nominal number of monetary units the number of dollars but in terms of the purchasing power equivalent of the present number of monetary units that is the contract would call for paying a given number of dollars multiplied by the ratio of a price index as of that date to the date on which the contract was entered into despite the theoretical attractiveness of this idea and the absence of any effective hindrance to its adoption it has never become popular it is a particular version of the generally attractive idea of widespread indexation yet indexation has been extensive only when inflation has been extremely high and variable as in some south american countries and israel and has generally fallen into disuse when inflation has been conquered the only area in which there are any large number of indexed contracts is the area of labor contracts and even here the use of indexation is by no means dominant and tends to rise and decline as inflation rises and declines

pre harvest price expectations for corn the information content of usda reports and new crop futures this article examines the puzzle of why futures prices continue to react to usda crop reports despite the fact that reports appear to be no longer newsworthy that is provide no better production estimates than private forecasts the information value of reports is measured in terms of their influence on rational agents harvest time corn price expectations which are uncovered using a hamilton type modeling approach results show that reports are still newsworthy as they would contribute to agents price expectations if released a day early thus futures price reactions which closely reflect price expectations are rational and consistent with efficient markets hypothesis copyright 2008 oxford university press

the reaction of live hog futures prices to usda hogs and pigs reports strong concerns about how efficiently live hog futures prices react to u s department of agriculture hogs and pigs reports have been raised by livestock producer groups using market survey data direct tests of the efficient markets hypothesis are performed for the live hog futures market two limit tobit models account for institutional price limits results support the efficient market hypothesis in that live hog futures prices a do not react to anticipated changes in reported information b do react significantly and in the expected direction to unanticipated changes in reported information and c generally adjust to unanticipated information on the day following release of the reports

foreign exchange rationing and employment in industrializing countries abstract this paper analyzes the interaction of two constraints foreign currency controls and a minimum wage on the behavior of a small industrializing country the latter is characterized by the large proportion of intermediate inputs in total imports the main results are the following 1 the two distortions magnify the adverse effects on employment of a minimum wage 2 the rationing policy is self defeating on its own terms 3 devaluation is almost inevitable despite the political considerations that make it so difficult and 4 black markets may be tolerated so openly because they help undo some of the harmful effects noted above

endogenous supply of fiat money abstract we consider whether reputation concerns can discipline the behavior of a long lived self interested agent who has a monopoly over the provision of fiat money we obtain that when this agent can commit to a choice of money supply there is a monetary equilibrium where it never overissues we show however that monetary equilibria with no overissue do not exist when there is no commitment this happens because the incentives this agent has to maintain a reputation for providing valuable currency disappear once its reputation is high enough more generally we prove that in the absence of commitment overissue happens infinitely often in any monetary equilibrium we conclude by showing that imperfect memory can restore the positive result obtained with commitment

has government any role in money abstract recent interest in monetary reform has been sparked by the emergence of a world irredeemable paper money system in light of this interest we review the current validity of four good reasons friedman advanced in 1960 to rationalize government intervention we conclude that the forces that produced government involvement in the past will persist deregulation of financial intermediaries is desirable on grounds of market efficiency though it is an open question whether government should continue as lender of last resort we expect that the present world fiat money standard will neither degenerate into hyperinflation nor revert to a commodity standard

distribution of parallel exchange rates in african countries abstract this paper investigates the distribution of parallel exchange rates in african countries using exploratory data analysis techniques and model fitting stable laws are fitted to empirical distributions using the maximum likelihood estimation method empirical evidence supports the stable hypothesis these distributions are positively skewed and have tails that are much heavier than gaussian counterparts the stable hypothesis is further supported by the converging variance test which suggests that these distributions have infinite variance

the value of public information in commodity futures markets abstract the informational value of u s department of agriculture usda corn and soybean production forecasts is investigated for the period 1971 1992 three tests of informational content are applied overall the results suggest usda corn and soybean forecasts provide valuable information to participants in commodity futures markets this value does appear to have declined especially since the mid 1980s

exchange rate rules black market premia and fiscal deficits the bolivian hyperinflation with dual exchange rates where a managed official exchange rate co exists with a floating black market rate a given budget deficit may be consistent with many different inflation rates rather than two which is the normal result in closed economy systems further all these inflation equilibria are saddle point stable a policy of adjusting the official exchange rate towards the black market rate may cause the economy to converge to a high inflation saddle point stable equilibrium where money inflation elasticity exceeds unity the analytics are motivated and illustrated by the bolivian hyperinflation of 1984 1985

quantifying the wasde announcement effect this article uses a two stage gls model to quantify the world agricultural supply and demand estimates wasde announcement effect for cotton soybeans and hard winter wheat controlling for important factors associated with commodity price volatility the information presented by the overlapping nature of futures contracts is exploited to estimate conditional effects by month inventory conditions and delivery horizon results in this article show that the wasde announcement effect persists across contract positions is not limited to months that include nass crop survey data is amplified during low carryover periods for soybeans and wheat and is rapidly incorporated into futures prices

interpreting new evidence about china and u s silver purchases abstract this paper offers a reinterpretation of the influence on china of america s silver policy in the early 1930 s recently compiled evidence about events in china are described and interpreted in light of a model of free banking under a commodity standard our interpretation is that the u s silver purchase program did not set off a chain of bad economic events which eventually forced china off silver and onto a fiat standard rather china was forced off silver by its own government which wanted to make itself the beneficiary of the capital gain associated with the appreciation of silver and to relieve itself of the restrictions that are imposed on government finance by a commodity standard

the characteristics of a monetary economy a keynes schumpeter approach mainstream monetary theory considers money only as an instrument meant to facilitate trading without having any effect on income or on the evolution of the economic system the aim of this paper is to elaborate a monetary theory capable of supporting the thesis of money non neutrality based on the arguments developed by keynes and schumpeter the synthesis of the theories of these two great economists will be formulated starting from the two points which are common in the views of keynes and schumpeter first in contrast with mainstream theory keynes and schumpeter state that the diffusion of a fiat money induces a radical modification into the way in which the economic system works second when keynes and schumpeter describe the reasons why money and financial aggregates are not neutral they highlight the fundamental role of the credit market and of banks in contrast with the mainstream theory they do not consider the credit market as the mirror image of the goods market

are harvest forecasts news usda announcements and futures market reactions futures market price data for maize and soyabeans are used to examine reactions to us department of agriculture harvest forecasts these forecasts are widely known and reasonably accurate so failure to find significant reaction would indicate that the usda did not contribute additional news relative to information already possessed by traders various t tests f tests and nonparametric chi square tests indicate rejection of the null hypothesis of no significant difference between means of absolute values or variances of changes in closing prices on days following a usda announcement and other days thus the data indicate that significant information is contained in the forecasts

milton friedman s monetary economics and the quantity theory tradition abstract this article provides a selective review of milton friedman s contributions to monetary economics focusing on five areas in particular the demand for money the joint historical and empirical work with anna j schwartz the theoretical and empirical analyses of the phillips curve monetary policy and monetary dynamics

financial structure and aggregate economic activity an overview this paper surveys literature that explores the possible links between the financial system and aggregate economic behavior the survey is in two parts the first reviews the traditional work and the second discusses new research copyright 1988 by ohio state university press

distribution properties of latin american black market exchange rates abstract this paper conducts a statistical analysis of the distribution properties of black market exchange rate changes for 12 latin american currencies the infinite variance stable law hypothesis is tested using a regression type technique to estimate the parameters of the stable paretian distribution strong evidence is found supporting this hypothesis a separate analysis of extreme observations using a robust statistical procedure further supports these findings

private production of scrip money in the isolated community this paper examines the appearance of one type of privately produced currency which had the generic label scrip this money appeared at widely different times and places in the united states between 1820 and 1940 in spite of federal laws prohibiting its issue the most sophistic ated and best developed example of scrip seems to have occurred in th e coal mining regions of appalachia especially in west virginia thi s experience and its implications for monetary behavior are examined here copyright 1987 by ohio state university press

the impact of public and semi public information on cotton futures market abstractthis study estimated the impact of all major public and semi public reports on the cotton futures market from 1995 through 2012 the estimation was based on the event study approach with the events measured by the release of five major reports export sales crop progress world agricultural supply and demand estimates wasde and prospective plantings public reports from us department of agriculture and cotton this month semi public report from international cotton advisory committee the best fitting igarch 1 1 t model that accounted for the day of week seasonality and stock levels was used to measure the report effects on daily nearby cotton close to close futures returns prospective plantings and wasde reports appeared to be the most important sources of information in the cotton markets moving the conditional standard deviation of returns by an average of 14 4 and 9 6 percentage points respectively however significant market reaction was not found for the other three reports our an

emerging markets and heavy tails abstract emerging countries are held to be subject to more frequent and more pronounced external and internal shocks than their developed counter parts this suggests that key variables pertaining to their markets including their exchange rates will be marked by greater likelihood of extreme observations and large fluctuations we focus on the hypothesis that compared to developed country exchange rates emerging country exchange rates will be more pronouncedly heavy tailed we find support for the hypothesis using recently proposed robust tail index estimation methods which in particular perform well under heavy tailed dependent garch processes that are often used for modeling exchange rates according to the estimation results reported in the paper variances may be infinite for several emerging country exchange rates tail index values p 2 6 2 8 appear to be at the dividing boundary between the two sets of countries while the moments of order p 2 6 2 8 are finite for most of the developed country exchange rates they may be or are infinite for most of the emerging country exchange rates we also study the impact of the on going financial and economic crisis and find that heavy tailedness properties of most exchange rates did not change significantly with the onset of the crisis at the same time some foreign exchange markets have experienced structural changes in their heavy tailedness properties during the crisis

the resource cost of irredeemable paper money since 1971 no major currency has a formal link to a commodity for the first time in history every currency is wholly irredeemable not as a temporary expedient but as a permanent matter monetary economists have generally treated irredeemable paper money as involving negligible real resource costs compared with a commodity currency to judge from recent experience that view is clearly false as a result of the decline in long term price predictability a key question for the future is what if any substitute for a commodity standard will emerge as a long term anchor for the price level

the transition from barter to fiat money how did it become possible to exchange apparently valueless pieces of paper for goods this paper provides an equilibrium account of the transition between barter and fiat money regimes the explanation relies on the intervention of a self interested government that must be able to promise credibly to limit the issue of money to achieve credibility the government must offset the benefits of seigniorage by internalizing some of the macroeconomic externalities generated by the issue of fiat money the government s patience and the extent of its involvement in the economy are key determinants of whether the transition can be accomplished copyright 1995 by american economic association

the evolution of monetary policy rules abstract this article examines the evolutionary forces involved in the development of monetary policy rules over time considering in particular how these relate to proposals made by milton friedman and walter bagehot the lines between money and credit and between monetary and fiscal policy are given special focus