taking stock monetary policy transmission to equity markets this paper analyses the effects of u s monetary policy on stock markets we present evidence that individual stocks react in a highly heterogeneous fashion to u s monetary policy shocks and relate this heterogeneity to financial constraints and tobin s q first we show that there are strong industry specific effects of u s monetary policy second we also find that for the 500 individual stocks comprising the s p500 the firms with low cash flows small size poor credit ratings low debt to capital ratios high price earnings ratios or a high tobin s q are affected significantly more by monetary policy

an optimization approach for managing fresh food quality throughout the supply chain one of the most challenging tasks in today s food industry is controlling the product quality throughout the food supply chain in this paper we integrate food quality in decision making on production and distribution in a food supply chain we provide a methodology to model food quality degradation in such a way that it can be integrated in a mixed integer linear programming model used for production and distribution planning the resulting model is applied in an illustrative case study and can be used to design and operate food distribution systems using both food quality and cost criteria

measuring ecological efficiency with data envelopment analysis dea abstract the measurement of ecological efficiency provides some important information for the companies environmental management ecological efficiency is usually measured by comparing environmental performance indicators data envelopment analysis dea shows a high potential to support such comparisons as no explicit weights are needed to aggregate the indicators in general dea assumes that inputs and outputs are goods but from an ecological perspective also bads have to be considered in the literature bads are treated in different and sometimes arbitrarily chosen ways this article aims at the systematic derivation of ecologically extended dea models starting from the assumptions of dea in production theory and activity analysis a generalisation of basic dea models is derived by incorporating a multi dimensional value function f extended preference structures can be considered by different specifications of f e g specifications for ecologically motivated applications of dea

note ranking dmus with infeasible super efficiency dea models it has been suggested in the data envelopment analysis dea literature that it is impossible to obtain a full ranking of decision making units dmus when infeasible subproblems arise in the so called super efficiency dea models under different returns to scale rts assumptions other than constant returns to scale crs andconsequently the application of the super efficiency dea models under different rts conditions other than crs should be restricted the implications of the infeasibility in super efficiency dea models with respect to the efficiency ranking of the dmus is explored based on the analysis we show that it is still possible to obtain the full ranking of the entire observation set when infeasibilities arise in super efficiency dea models

interpreting the macroeconomic time series facts the effects of monetary policy existing theory and evidence on the effects of monetary policy are reviewed substantial room for disagreement among economists remains new evidence based on multivariate time series studies of several countries is presented while certain patterns in the data consistent with effective monetary policy are strikingly similar across countries others particularly the tendency of interest rate increases to predict high inflation are harder to reconcile with effective monetary policy

share green growth regional evaluation of green output performance in china abstract reducing carbon emissions is much more difficult than reducing other pollutants through current technology promoting the efficiency of energy use and developing clean energy are the only two economically feasible approaches for the future however without low carbon technology pursuing green growth could negatively affect production activities in this study we develop a directional distance function ddf model based on the slacks of the output oriented slack based measure along an endogenously determined directional vector we can calculate the efficiency scores by reducing the undesirable output and expanding desirable output simultaneously the global malmquist index is integrated with the ddf model to capture the dynamic change of output performance based on the output performance of green growth we use counterfactual thinking to evaluate gdp losses caused by limiting carbon emissions the empirical study using the provincial data of china shows that technological progress not efficiency change pushes green growth in china we also find that pursuing green growth in china would lead to a gdp loss of 7 8 furthermore a sub regional analysis shows that the eastern regions were almost immune to the strict carbon control policy while the midwestern regions were affected severely to alleviate the gdp loss we offer suggestion on setting up a green growth sharing mechanism among regions

improving the impact of quantitative analysis on supply chain policy making abstract the phenomenon of formulating and bringing in a set of a new way to operate a policy into the supply chain environment is examined the general change management research findings are applied to the supply chain environment to identify the phases of policy making the different roles of quantitative analysis in the process are identified using a multiple case study of eight policy making processes the study points out that the impact of quantitative analysis on supply chain policy making can be improved by adapting the different roles of the analysis in the different stages of the policy making process

low inflation pass through and the pricing power of firms abstract recently there has been a significant decline in the degree to which firms pass through changes in costs to prices a decline that is frequently characterized as a reduction in the pricing power of firms the decline appears to be associated with the decline in inflation in many countries the decline has important implications for monetary policy because it affects both forecasts of inflation and the effects of changes in monetary policy on inflation some have argued that the decline in pricing power helped to keep inflation low in the face of apparently strong demand pressures in the united states in the late 1990s this paper puts forth the view that the decline in pass through or pricing power is due to the low inflation environment that has recently been achieved in many countries first a microeconomic model of price setting is used to show that lower pass through is caused by lower perceived persistence of cost changes evidence is then presented showing that inflation is positively correlated with persistence of inflation suggesting that the low inflation itself has caused the low pass through an economy wide model consistent with the micromodel is then presented to illustrate how such changes in pricing power affect output and inflation dynamics in favorable ways but can disappear quickly if monetary policy and expectations change

a decision support framework for exploring supply chain tradeoffs abstract producers of retail products continually need to determine how much of a particular product to produce the difficulty of judging correctly is compounded when the product has a short production sales interval and is made primarily for sale during the big winter shopping season e g around christmas holiday in an effort to minimize production and distribution costs decision makers would like to produce as early as possible but doing so would increase the risk of producing the wrong quantity good forecasting mitigates this problem and the use of agile supply chains allows the firm to produce later in the production sales interval both however add to the cost of production if the external environment is volatile then there would be increased uncertainty as to a desirable course of action this paper presents a simulation based decision support framework for exploring the tradeoffs in producing different quantities under a variety of supply chain configurations and alternate forecasting options given uncertain demand environments we provide an illustrative example to highlight these tradeoffs

what s different about banks abstract negotiable certificates of deposit cd s trade in the capital market in competition with other securities like commercial paper and bankers acceptances if cd s must pay lenders competitive monetary interest the reserve tax on cd s is borne by bank borrowers viability of the tax means there must be something special about bank loans that makes some borrowers willing to pay higher interest rates than those on other securities of equivalent risk moreover there must be something special about banks that prevents other intermediaries from competing to assure that it never pays to finance loans with cd s

developing green purchasing relationships for the manufacturing industry an evolutionary game theory perspective abstract green purchasing plays an increasingly significant role in today s supply chain management recycling as a key factor in sustainable development is seriously considered by many manufacturers during the process of procurement in order to establish long term green purchasing relationships between multi stakeholders suppliers and manufacturers in this study the supplier selection concept model suggested by de boer is updated and an evolutionary game model is developed to observe the cooperation tendency of multi stakeholders the newly proposed game model intensively studies the trade behavior which can be realized as strategies and payoff functions of the suppliers and manufacturers in addition a replicator dynamic system is formulated to study evolutionarily stable strategies of multi stakeholders to verify the theoretical results simulation experiments are conducted with meaningful results the manufacturing industry can form the patterns of sustainable development and the recycling capability of suppliers directly determines how green a supply chain is the results can guide stakeholders to make better decisions in the future

measuring macroeconomic performance in the oecd a comparison of european and non european countries abstract we study the macroeconomic performance of 19 oecd countries over the period 1970 1990 performance is defined in terms of the ability of a country s macroeconomic managers to provide four services to their citizens a high level of real gdp per capita a low rate of inflation a low rate of unemployment and a favorable trade balance we use linear programming techniques to construct a best practice macroeconomic performance frontier and to measure the performance of each country in each year relative to the frontier we then add two environmental disamenities carbon and nitrogen emissions to the service list and repeat the analysis to see if the performance rankings change throughout the analysis emphasis is placed on a comparison of the performance of 14 european oecd countries with that of five non european oecd countries we find that performance rankings do change and that the relative performance of the european countries declines when the environmental disamenities are added to the service list

inflation dynamics and the cost channel of monetary transmission evidence from vector autoregressions indicates that the impact of interest rate shocks on macroeconomic aggregates can substantially be affected by the so called cost channel of monetary transmission in this paper we apply a structural approach to examine the relevance of the cost channel for inflation dynamics in g7 countries we augment the so called hybrid new keynesian philips curve by letting firms costs for external funds rise with the short run nominal interest rate our estimates reveal that the magnitude of this cost channel strongly varies between countries including member countries of the emu in accordance with differences in their financial systems simulations of a new keynesian model further show that the presence of the cost channel substantially affects the transmission of monetary policy shocks in particular the inflation response

monetary transmission mechanism in central and eastern europe surveying the surveyable this paper surveys recent advances in empirical studies of the monetary transmission mechanism mtm with special attention to central and eastern europe cee our results indicate that the strength of the exchange rate pass through substantially declined over time mainly due to a fall in inflation rates and to some extent due to the so called composition effect the asset price channel is weak and is likely to remain weak because of shallow stock and private bond markets and because of low stock and bond holdings of domestic household house prices may become an exception with higher levels mortgage lending and with high owner occupancy ratios while the credit channel could be a powerful channel of monetary transmission as new funds raised on capital markets are close to zero in cee it is actually not as both commercial banks and non financial corporations can escape domestic monetary conditions by borrowing from their foreign mother companies the moderately good news is however that those banks and firms are influenced by monetary policy in the euro area because their parent institutions are themselves subjected to the credit channel in the euro area

central bank communication and monetary policy a survey of theory and evidence over the last two decades communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy these real world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication mostly empirical and almost all of it written in this decade we survey this ever growing literature the evidence suggests that communication can be an important and powerful part of the central bank s toolkit since it has the ability to move financial markets to enhance the predictability of monetary policy decisions and potentially to help achieve central banks macroeconomic objectives however the large variation in communication strategies across central banks suggests that a consensus has yet to emerge on what constitutes an optimal communication strategy

understanding the soft budget constraint we propose a clarification of the notion of a soft budget constraint a concept widely used in the analysis of socialist transitional and market economies our interpretation is broad enough to embrace most existing approaches to soft budget constraint phenomena and provides a classification of their causes and consequences in light of this interpretation we then review the theoretical literature on the subject and compare it with those on other dynamic commitment problems in economics

macroeconomic impacts of climate change mitigation in latin america a cross model comparison abstract in this paper we analyse macroeconomic consequences of greenhouse gas emission mitigation in latin america up to 2050 through a multi model comparison approach undertaken in the context of the climacap lamp research project we compare two carbon tax scenarios with a business as usual scenario of anticipated future energy demand in the short term with carbon prices reaching around 15 tco 2 by 2030 most models agree that the reduction in consumer spending as a proxy for welfare is limited to about 0 3 by 2050 at carbon prices of 165 tco 2 there is much more divergence in the estimated impact on consumer spending as well as gdp across models and regions which reflects uncertainties about technology costs and substitution opportunities between technologies we observe that the consequences of increasingly higher carbon prices in terms of reduced consumer spending and gdp tend to be fairly linear with the carbon price in our cge models however the consequences are divergent and nonlinear in our econometric model that is linked to an energy system model that simulates step changes in technology substitution the results of one model show that climate policy measures can have positive effects on consumer spending and gdp which results from an investment stimulus and the redistribution of carbon price revenues to consumers

how to solve the price puzzle a meta analysis the short run increase in prices following an unexpected tightening of monetary policy constitutes a frequently reported puzzle yet the puzzle is surprisingly easy to explain away when all published models are quantitatively reviewed we collect about 1 000 point estimates of impulse responses from 70 articles using vector autoregressive models and present a simple method of research synthesis for graphical results our ndings indicate publication selection in favor of the intuitive response of prices to a tightening the estimates depend systematically on study design when misspecications are

cost efficiency of electric grid utilities in china a comparison of estimates from sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls with the purpose of estimating the range of cost efficiency levels of the power grid sector in china we assembled a data set including 23 provincial power grid companies spanning from 2005 to 2009 and conducted an empirical study based on the sfa mle sfa bayes and stoned cnls methodologies empirical results show that the average values of efficiency from different models vary from 0 85 to 0 92 depending especially on the assumptions underlying inefficiency content further results demonstrate that there is exogenous technical progress during the sample period and per capita gdp of the province is negatively related to the costs of the electric grid company located in the corresponding province we hope this empirical study will contribute to the debate on an efficiency based regulation scheme which was introduced to the chinese electric grid sector on a pilot base in 2014

exchange rate pass through in emu acceding countries empirical analysis and policy implications abstract countries that joined the european union in 2004 have to decide when to adopt the euro this decision depends on the evaluation of the relative costs and benefits associated with giving up the exchange rate instrument recent empirical work on several new eu members has questioned the role of the exchange rate as a shock absorber thus downplaying the potential costs in terms of macroeconomic stabilization in this paper we address the issue from a different perspective emphasizing the role of pass through from exchange rate to domestic inflation in new eu members the focus is on four countries czech republic hungary poland and slovenia nm 4 that have adopted some form of floating or managed exchange rate regimes the paper reports empirical results indicating high pass through coefficients and links them to the degree of policy accommodation high exchange rate pass through in nm 4 indicates that stabilization of nominal exchange rates would lower inflationary pressures and help fulfill criteria to enter the emu

innovation and diffusion of clean green technology can patent commons help abstract this paper explores the characteristics of 238 patents on 90 inventions contributed by major multinational innovators to the eco patent commons which provides royalty free access to third parties to patented innovations on green technologies we compare the pledged patents to other patents in the same technologies or held by the same multinationals to investigate the motives of the contributing firms as well as the potential for such commons to encourage innovation and diffusion of climate change related technologies we find pledged patents to protect environmentally friendly technologies and to be of similar value as the average patent in a pledging firm s patent portfolio but of lower value than other patents in their class our analysis of the impact of the patent commons on diffusion of patented technologies suggests that making patents accessible royalty free did not result in any significant increase in diffusion as measured by citing patents this study therefore indirectly provides evidence on the role of patents in the development and diffusion of green technologies

an alternative explanation of the price puzzle abstract this paper proposes an explanation for the frequent appearance of a price puzzle in vars designed for monetary policy analysis it assumes that the data are generated by a model in which output and output gap are not equivalent while an econometrician follows the common practice of including only output in the var the omission of the output gap is shown to spuriously produce a price puzzle and several other incorrect conclusions in a class of commonly used models this can happen even if the model admits a triangular identification and if the forecasts produced by the misspecified var are optimal when the model is tested on us data all predictions are supported a commodity price index is not needed to solve the puzzle

the price puzzle reconsidered abstract a large literature has employed structural vector autoregressive svar models to investigate the empirical effects of u s monetary policy many of these models regularly produce a price puzzle a rise in the aggregate price level in response to a contractionary innovation to monetary policy unless commodity prices are included conventional wisdom maintains that commodity prices resolve the price puzzle because they contain information that helps the federal reserve forecast inflation i examine a number of plausible alternative indicator variables and find little correlation between an ability to forecast inflation and an ability to resolve the price puzzle additionally a sub sample investigation reveals that evidence of a price puzzle is associated primarily with the 1959 1979 sample period and that most indicators including commodity prices cannot resolve the puzzle over this period

a sequential malmquist luenberger productivity index environmentally sensitive productivity growth considering the progressive nature of technology this study proposes an index for measuring environmentally sensitive productivity growth which appropriately considers the nature of technical change the rationale of this methodology is to exclud

explaining the exchange rate pass through in different prices abstract this paper examines the performance of a variety of new open economy macroeconomic models in explaining the exchange rate pass through in a wide range of prices quantitative versions of different models are used to derive the dynamic response of various prices to an exchange rate shock predicted responses are compared with the evidence based on var models to examine how well different models fit the data the results show that the best fitting model incorporates a number of features highlighted by different strands of the literature sticky prices sticky wages distribution costs and a combination of local lcp and producer currency pricing pcp

trade credit and monetary policy transmission recently an increasing number of papers have investigated the role of trade credit as an external source of finance when analyzing the monetary transmission mechanism these works support the balance sheet channel view and at the same time explain the difficulties encountered when looking for evidence in favor of the bank lending channel this paper presents a survey of the emerging literature on the role of trade credit in the transmission of monetary policy trying to link it with the well established credit channel literature copyright blackwell publishers ltd 2005

brics how important is the exchange rate pass through this paper analyses the exchange rate pass through erpt into domestic consumer prices in brics brazil russia india china and south africa countries from mid 1990s onwards by using three different econometric approaches i e the single equation approach the var approach and the time varying parameter approach it is also studied the role of macroeconomic determinants in erpt our results suggest that a erpt is higher for the emerging markets with mostly floating exchange rates brazil russia and south africa than for the other brics countries b exchange rate explains on average around the 40 of the price variance for brazil russia and south africa and c inflation volatility exchange rate volatility and openness seem to be the key macroeconomic determinants in brics countries

green growth degrowth and the commons the concepts of green growth and degrowth occupy central positions in the public debate on the relationship between economic growth and the environment while proponents of the former approach claim that environmental measures can promote growth by for example more efficient use of natural resources proponents of the latter maintain that environmental integrity can only be upheld by slowing down growth this paper argues that both approaches constitute inadequate foundations for public policy as they fail to appropriately conceptualize social welfare we show how policy aimed at social welfare can be understood as managing a portfolio of capital stocks some of which exhibit the characteristics of commons i e common pool resources and public goods we then propose a programme of welfare diagnostics which aims at establishing minimum thresholds for capital stocks essential to welfare as a guide for real world policy formulation and discuss the role of appropriation of natural resource rents for its practical implementation we conclude by highlighting the central role of scientific policy advice in determining how different conceptions of welfare would be reflected in setting targets and choosing the means to achieve them

the impact of exchange rate volatility on international trade flows despite the best efforts of economists a basic paradox as to the impact of exchange rate volatility on trade flows remains unresolved at both the theoretical and empirical level this paper surveys the vast literature in the area in an attempt to identify major issues which have contributed to the development of the debate and examine whether any general direction for consensus may be found

equilibrium exchange rates in transition economies taking stock of the issues in this paper we present an overview of a number of issues relating to the equilibrium exchange rates of transition economies of the former soviet bloc in particular we present a critical overview of the various methods available for calculating equilibrium exchange rates and discuss how useful they are likely to be for the transition economies amongst our findings is the result that the trend appreciation usually observed for the exchange rates of these economies is affected by factors other than the usual balassa samuelson effect such as the behaviour of the real exchange rate of the open sector and regulated prices we then consider three main sources of uncertainty relating to the implementation of an equilibrium exchange rate model namely differences in the theoretical underpinnings differences in the econometric estimation techniques and differences relating to the time series and cross sectional dimensions of the data the ensuing three dimensional space of real misalignments is probably a useful tool in determining the direction of a possible misalignment rather than its precise size copyright blackwell publishers ltd 2006

non parametric frontier approach to modelling the relationships among population gdp energy consumption and co2 emissions abstract in this paper a non parametric approach based in data envelopment analysis dea is proposed as an alternative to the kaya identity a k a impact this frontier method identifies and extends existing best practices population and gdp are considered as input and output respectively both primary energy consumption and greenhouse gas ghg emissions are considered as undesirable outputs several linear programming models are formulated with different aims namely a determine efficiency levels b estimate maximum gdp compatible with given levels of population energy intensity and carbonization intensity and c estimate the minimum level of ghg emissions compatible with given levels of population gdp energy intensity or carbonization index the united states of america case is used as illustration of the proposed approach