monetary policy rules in the open economy effects on welfare and business cycles abstract this paper computes welfare maximizing taylor style interest rate rules in a business cycle model of a small open economy the model assumes staggered price setting and shocks to domestic productivity to the world interest rate to world inflation and to the uncovered interest rate parity condition optimized policy rules have a pronounced anti inflation stance and entail significant nominal and real exchange rate volatility the country responds to an increase in external volatility by holding more foreign assets the policy rule affects the variance and the mean of consumption the effect on the mean matters significantly for welfare

testing the long run implications of the neoclassical growth model abstract the long run implications of the one factor neoclassical growth model are tested by investigating the cointegrating relations between the log of output consumption and investment and the real interest rate with the exceptions of austria and the united kingdom the evidence for the united states and to a lesser extent for canada japan and the federal republic of germany is favorable to the neoclassical growth model a simple extension to a multicountry setting proved however to be unsuccessful national outputs nor consumption series are driven by just one common stochastic trend

optimal growth with many consumers abstract a method is described for constructing all pareto optimal allocations for a dynamic economy with many heterogeneous consumers under certainty in which both the technology and consumer preferences are recursive but preferences need not be additively separable over time optimal perfect foresight competitive equilibrium allocations are obtained through the study of a dynamic program for an economy with one consumption good sufficient conditions are given for the existence of a unique interior stationary distribution of consumption and wealth for a two person exchange economy sufficient conditions are given for the global asymptotic stability of the unique interior stationary point

the consumption real exchange rate anomaly with extensive margins abstract this paper investigates a consumption real exchange rate anomaly from the open macroeconomics literature known as the backus smith puzzle we both analytically and quantitatively examine how an expansion of trade along extensive margins can contribute to the puzzle s resolution our argument is based on 1 a wealth effect due to changes in the number of product varieties 2 statistical inefficiency in measuring the number of product varieties and 3 market incompleteness contrary to complete asset markets which in general feature overly strong risk sharing properties changes in the number of product varieties under incomplete markets may produce a wealth effect under high trade elasticity since statistical agencies systematically fail to capture the welfare impact arising from that changes data consistent terms of trade and real exchange rates tend to appreciate due to this positive wealth effect this provides a realistic correlation between data consistent real exchange rates and consumption

uninsurable risk and financial market puzzles abstract we compare the empirical performances of three risk sharing arrangements involving idiosyncratic skill shocks a where individuals are unable to directly insure their consumption against individual specific shocks b where agents strike long term insurance contract with financial intermediaries involving a truth revelation constraint as in kocherlakota and pistaferri 2009 c full risk sharing based on the widely accepted assumption of cross sectional log normality of individual consumption levels we work out closed form expressions of the pricing kernels for a and b we put these three models to test four financial market anomalies namely the equity premium currency premium risk free rate and consumption real exchange rate puzzles simultaneously in an integrated framework we find that the pricing kernel associated with a outperforms the other two models in terms of the produced estimates of the agent s preference parameters and the model ability to predict the equity and currency premia the risk free rate and the log growth in the exchange rate however the predictive ability is still far from satisfactory for all three models under scrutiny

measuring and decomposing profit inefficiency through the slacks based measure abstract the slacks based measure was introduced by tone 2001 in order to estimate technical efficiency in the input output space by taking into account all sources of technical inefficiency and satisfying at the same time many interesting properties since then the slacks based measure has attracted the interest of numerous researchers and practitioners the slacks based measure has been applied to technical efficiency determination productivity change measurement the analysis of production process performance consisting of networks and so on however so far the slacks based measure has not been directly related to profit inefficiency as a component of the overall economic performance of firms in this note we show how a specific normalized measure of profit inefficiency may be decomposed through the slacks based measure

money interest rates and exchange rates with endogenously segmented markets we analyze the effects of money injections on interest rates and exchange rates when agents must pay a baumol tobin style fixed cost to exchange bonds and money asset markets are endogenously segmented because this fixed cost leads agents to trade bonds and money infrequently when the government injects money through an open market operation only those agents that are currently trading absorb these injections through their impact on these agents consumption these money injections affect real interest rates and real exchange rates the model generates the observed negative relation between expected inflation and real interest rates as well as persistent liquidity effects in interest rates and volatile and persistent exchange rates

some models for estimating technical and scale inefficiencies in data envelopment analysis in management contexts mathematical programming is usually used to evaluate a collection of possible alternative courses of action en route to selecting one which is best in this capacity mathematical programming serves as a planning aid to management data envelopment analysis reverses this role and employs mathematical programming to obtain ex post facto evaluations of the relative efficiency of management accomplishments however they may have been planned or executed mathematical programming is thereby extended for use as a tool for control and evaluation of past accomplishments as well as a tool to aid in planning future activities the ccr ratio form introduced by charnes cooper and rhodes as part of their data envelopment analysis approach comprehends both technical and scale inefficiencies via the optimal value of the ratio form as obtained directly from the data without requiring a priori specification of weights and or explicit delineation of assumed functional forms of relations between inputs and outputs a separation into technical and scale efficiencies is accomplished by the methods developed in this paper without altering the latter conditions for use of dea directly on observational data technical inefficiencies are identified with failures to achieve best possible output levels and or usage of excessive amounts of inputs methods for identifying and correcting the magnitudes of these inefficiencies as supplied in prior work are illustrated in the present paper a new separate variable is introduced which makes it possible to determine whether operations were conducted in regions of increasing constant or decreasing returns to scale in multiple input and multiple output situations the results are discussed and related not only to classical single output economics but also to more modern versions of economics which are identified with contestable market theories

on savings and investment dynamics in a small open economy abstract this paper constructs a stochastic overlapping generations two country model of savings and investment under conditions of perfect international capital mobility the focus of the analysis is on the relationship between savings and investment dynamics in a small open economy in response to stochastic variations in domestic and or foreign production technologies the model is simulated under alternative specifications of the stochastic distribution governing both technologies this provides insight into the very complicated nature and rich diversity of possible relationships between savings and investment dynamics

risk sharing and real exchange rates the role of non tradable sector and trend shocks abstract in this paper we show that the tradable and non tradable total factor productivity tfp processes of the us and europe have unit roots and can be modeled by a vector error correction model vecm then we develop a standard two country and two good tradable and non tradable dsge model our model implies that using cointegrated tfp processes and including non tradables help solve the real exchange rate rer volatility and risk sharing puzzles cointegrated tfp shocks or trend shocks generate significant income effects and amplify the mechanisms that produce high rer volatility moreover trend shocks can break the tight link between relative consumption and rer for low and high values of trade elasticity parameters the non tradable sector in the model improves the results for the risk sharing significantly

international risk sharing with endogenously segmented asset markets abstract asset price data imply a large degree of international risk sharing while aggregate consumption data do not we show that a model with trade in goods and endogenously segmented asset markets can account for this puzzling discrepancy active households who pay a fixed cost to transfer money into or out of assets share risk within and across countries and their marginal utility growth prices assets so asset prices imply high risk sharing inactive households consume their current income and do not share risk so aggregate consumption which averages across all households reflects lower risk sharing the model also provides a resolution to the backus smith kollmann puzzle

integration of inventory and pricing decisions with costly price adjustments motivated by the widespread adoption of dynamic pricing in industry and the empirical evidence of costly price adjustments in this paper we consider a periodic review inventory model with price adjustment costs that consist of both fixed and variable components in each period demand is stochastic and price dependent the firm needs to coordinate the pricing and inventory replenishment decisions in each period to maximize its total discounted profit over a finite planning horizon we develop the general model and characterize the optimal policies for two special scenarios namely a model with inventory carryover and no fixed price change costs and a model with fixed price change costs and no inventory carryover finally we propose an intuitive heuristic policy to tackle the general system whose optimal policy is expected to be very complicated our numerical studies show that this heuristic policy performs well

growth and the international transmission of business cycles two country single good real business cycle models predict that the cross country correlation of output is smaller than the cross country correlations of consumption and productivity in contrast to the evidence in historical samples the objective of this paper is to reproduce the observed empirical evidence in a two country real business cycle model with endogenous growth central features of the model include a nonmarket sector and international externalities in production the model generates realistic cross country correlations for output consumption and productivity with standard parameter values copyright 1996 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

current real business cycle theories and aggregate labor market fluctuations hours worked and the return to working are weakly correlated traditionally the ability to account for this fact has been a litmus test for macroeconomic models existing real business cycle models fail this test dramatically we modify prototypical real business cycle models by allowing government consumption shocks to influence labor market dynamics this modification can in principle bring the models into closer conformity with the data our empirical results indicate that it does

real exchange rates preferences and incomplete markets evidence 1961 2001 many international macroeconomic models link the real exchange rate to a ratio of marginal utilities we examine this link empirically allowing the marginal utility of consumption to depend on government expenditure real money balances or external habit we also consider two environments with incomplete asset markets one with exogenously missing markets but an endogenous discount rate that anchors the distribution of wealth and one with endogenous market segmentation although none of these satisfies theoretical and over identifying restrictions for every country utility with external habit persistence provides the best match with real exchange rates for oecd countries between 1961 and 2001 jel classification f41 taux de change reels preferences et marches incomplets resultats 1961 2001 plusieurs modeles macroeconomiques internationaux lient le taux de change reel a un ratio des utilites marginales on examine ce lien empiriquement en permettant a l utilite marginale de la consommation de dependre des depenses du gouvernement des encaisses monetaires reelles ou des habitudes donnees on considere aussi deux environnements avec des marches incomplets pour les actifs l un avec des marches exogenes manquants mais un taux d escompte endogene qui ancre bien la repartition des revenus et l autre avec des marches segmentes endogenes bien que ni l un ni l autre ne satisfasse les imperatifs theoriques et les restrictions sur identifiees pour chaque pays l utilite avec les persistances d habitudes externes engendre l ajustement le meilleur avec les taux de change reels des pays de l ocde entre 1961 et 2001

can government purchases explain the recent u s net export deficits abstract this paper investigates the role of u s government purchases in explaining recent u s net export behavior i develop a two country neoclassical model that emphasizes linkages from government purchases to consumption i compare the model s implications for the movements and co movements of net exports against their data counterparts a parameterization in which government purchases and private consumption are complements and in which expectations of future government purchases are revised downward can account for much of the time path and co movements of net exports i conclude that u s government purchases play some role in explaining recent u s net export behavior

hyperbolic efficiency and return to the dollar abstract this paper after establishing the relations between hyperbolic graph measure of technical efficiency and the radial measures of technical efficiency shows that the dual cost and revenue interpretation of the hyperbolic efficiency measure is related to georgescu roegen s notion of return to the dollar n georgescu roegen in koopmans t ed activity analysis of production and allocation wiley new york 1951 pp 98 115 once this relation is established it leads to a derivation of an allocative efficiency index which measures the price distortions using data on observed costs and revenues without requiring information on prices

international risk sharing and capital mobility another look in a recent article brennan and solnik 1989 attempt to quantify numerically the welfare benefits of risk sharing by a group of oecd economies the result of their calculation is striking in their words p 371 the estimated welfare loss due to impairment of efficient risk sharing if capital flows were eliminated is of the order of 448 per cent of the level of consumption prevailing in the early 1970s this note argues that the brennan solnik welfare measure is faulty and leads to a substantial overstatement of the potential welfare benefits of international risk sharing within their sample of countries for standard levels of risk aversion the brennan solnik measure may overstate these benefits by as much as two orders of magnitude this is true even if one accepts as valid the empirical assumptions the authors make in calculating the consumption variability estimates that underlie their welfare conclusions

a real model of the world business cycle abstract in this paper a stochastic two country log linear infinite horizon model is used to analyze the generation and transmission of economic fluctuations across countries it is argued that following a country specific supply disturbance production interdependence and unitary elasticities in consumption and production are sufficient to generate comovements in aggregate economic activity investment and trade that are persistent over time and positively correlated across countries however the empirical analysis carried out for the usa japan germany and uk for the 1960 82 period suggests that common shocks rather than trade links are responsible for this pattern of comovements

international portfolios capital accumulation and foreign assets dynamics despite the liberalization of capital ows among oecd countries equity home bias remains sizable we depart from the two familiar explanations of equity home bias transaction costs that impede international diversi cation and terms of trade responses to supply shocks that provide risk sharing so that there is little incentive to hold diversi ed portfolios we show that the interaction of the following ingredients generates a realistic equity home bias capital accumulation shocks to the e ciency of physical investment as well as international trade in stocks and bonds in our model domestic stocks are used to hedge uctuations in local wage income terms of trade risk is hedged using bonds denominated in local goods and in foreign goods in contrast to related models the low level of international diversi cation does not depend on strongly countercyclical terms of trade the model also reproduces the cyclical dynamics of foreign asset positions and of international capital ows

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

international dynamic risk sharing in this paper we examine the implications of international risk sharing among a set of countries in the presence of market frictions which complicate the instantaneous adjustment to the first order conditions we suggest approximating the consumption streams of countries belonging to the risk sharing coalition in terms of a disequilibrium dynamic model embodying forward looking adjustment econometric methods for estimating and testing the model are discussed empirical analysis of a set of core european countries suggests that once preference parameters are allowed to vary across countries we are able to identify a group of nations that share risks against idiosyncratic permanent income shocks the equilibrium position however is reached after a long adjustment period copyright 2008 john wiley sons ltd

us trade balance dynamics the role of fiscal policy and productivity shocks and of financial market linkages abstract this paper examines whether domestic and foreign productivity and fiscal policy changes can account for the wide swings in us net exports during the period 1975 1991 a two country real business cycle model is used for that purpose the model is simulated using data on productivity government purchases and taxes for the g7 countries a version of the model with incomplete asset markets in which only bonds can be used for international capital flows tracks the us trade balance fairly closely provided permanent country specific productivity shifts are assumed the simulations suggest that us productivity changes were the main source of fluctuations in us net exports

explaining saving investment correlations national saving and investment rates are highly positively correlated in virtually all countries this is puzzling as it apparently implies a low degree of international capital mobility this paper shows that the observed positive correlation between national saving and investment rates arises naturally within a quantitatively restricted equilibrium model with perfect mobility of financial and physical capital the model is consistent with the fact that saving investment correlations are larger for larger countries but are still substantial for small countries further the model is consistent with the finding that current account deficits tend to be associated with investment booms copyright 1993 by american economic association

business cycles and the relationship between concentration and price cost margins using a newly constructed panel data base we examine changes in price cost margins in 284 manufacturing industries between 1958 and 1981 a key finding is a dramatic narrowing of the spread between the margins of concentrated and unconcentrated industries over this period we provide evidence that this narrowing is a result of the greater sensitivity of price cost margins in more concentrated industries to demand fluctuations this finding is robust to the inclusion of other industry variables and to measures of import competition the results indicate that cross sectional estimates of the concentration margins relationship are likely to be both biased and misleading

inventories as factors of production and economic fluctuations this paper presents a theory of inventory investment by stage of processing and uses it to examine the role of inventory investment in economic fluctuations the model in which inventories are treated as factors of production is estimated for four durable goods industries three conclusions emerge from the estimation first the estimates generally satisfy the theoretical restrictions second the elasticity of inventory demand with respect to output is high indicating an important accelerator effect finally the estimates suggest that shifts in the demand for inventories are an important source of economic fluctuations copyright 1989 by american economic association

home bias in open economy financial macroeconomics standard theory would predict that investors hold a well diversified portfolio of equities across the world but despite the process of financial globalization investors still hold a disproportionate share of local equities in their portfolio the equity home bias french and poterba 1991 we review the various explanations of this puzzling phenomenon in the context of recent developments in macroeconomic modelling that have allowed to incorporate sophisticated international portfolio choices in standard two country general equilibrium models we refer to this literature as open economy financial macroeconomics we focus on three broad classes of explanations i hedging motives in frictionless financial markets real exchange rate and non tradable income risk ii asset trade costs in international financial markets such as transaction costs differences in tax treatments between national and foreign assets iii informational frictions and behavioural biases these recent developments raise the need for new portfolio facts beyond the equity home bias and we will present some new evidence on cross border asset holdings across different types of assets equities bonds and bank lending we also present some new micro data on institutional holdings of equity at the fund level these data should inform macroeconomic modelling of the open economy and a growing literature of models of delegated investment

output growth the real wage and employment fluctuations this paper is an attempt to contribute to the integration of business cycle analysis with long term growth a real business cycle model with endogenous growth is developed and estimated with u s data in the present framework wage movements do not have to be transitory to generate fluctuations in labor effort the reduced form is a constrained bivariate output hours or real wage hours vector autoregressive process the bivariate setup provides a useful framework for analyzing the persistence of output fluctuations given that the theory implies that hours of work contain information about future output movement copyright 1991 by american economic association

borders and nominal exchange rates in risk sharing models of risk sharing predict that relative consumption growth rates are positively related to changes in real exchange rates we investigate this hypothesis using a new multicountry and multiregional data set within countries we find evidence for risk sharing episodes of high relative regional consumption growth are associated with regional real exchange rate depreciation across countries however the association is reversed relative consumption and real exchange rates are negatively correlated we define this reversal as a border effect we find the border effect and show that it accounts for over half of the deviations from full risk sharing since cross border real exchange rates involve different currencies it is natural to ask how much of the border effect is accounted for by movements in exchange rates our measures indicate that a large part of the border effect comes from nominal exchange rate fluctuations we develop a simple open economy model that is consistent with the importance of nominal exchange rate variability in accounting for deviations from cross country risk sharing

measuring and decomposing firm s revenue and cost efficiency the russell measures revisited abstract overall inefficiency measurement and decomposition are important for firms facing a world of changing prices since the resultant loss has implications on managers decision making in this paper we draw attention to some problems within existing approaches to decompose overall inefficiency into its sources and propose new revenue and cost inefficiency measures based on the well known russell measures specifically the technical inefficiency component is calculated by the russell output input measure which is able to incorporate all sources of inefficiency corresponding to the output input side specifically output input slacks whereas allocative inefficiency is retrieved residually all our results are derived from a new fenchel mahler inequality using the theory of convex conjugates this paper has several implications in theory and practice from a theoretical point of view we establish a natural dual relationship between the revenue cost function and the russell output input measure despite the previous unsuccessful attempts in the literature to provide such duality result from a practical point of view we provide a way of decomposing revenue cost inefficiency into allocative inefficiency and a component that measures technical inefficiency in the sense of pareto contrasting with the usual approaches for decomposing revenue cost inefficiency such as those based on shephard s output input distance function and the directional output input distance function

the international transmission of economic fluctuations abstract this paper suggests that for a wide class of international real business cycle models including models with imperfect competition the traditional channels of international transmission of business cycles through world interest rate and terms of trade variations cannot explain the cyclical response of the canadian economy to innovations in u s output empirically testable quantitative models of the effects on canadian economic activity of shocks to the u s economy are developed and their empirical relevance is tested by comparing impulse responses estimated from vector autoregressions to the quantitative predictions of the theoretical models

the dynamics of a small open economy in response to monetary fiscal and productivity shocks abstract this paper evaluates empirically the relative importance of monetary and fiscal versus technology shocks in an open economy characterized by perfect international capital mobility the variance covariance matrix of these shocks is estimated a stochastic model is used to perform numerical simulations the results show that persistent shocks to productivity can reproduce several empirical regularities including the puzzling high correlation between national saving and investment remarkably well and that monetary and fiscal shocks play a minor role

consumption and real exchange rates in dynamic economies with non traded goods abstract we examine the possibility that non traded goods may account for several striking features of international macroeconomic data large persistent deviations from purchasing power parity small correlations of aggregate consumption fluctuations across countries and substantial international real interest rate differentials a dynamic exchange economy is used to show that non traded goods in principle can account for each of these phenomena in the theory there is a close relation between fluctuations in consumption ratios and those in bilateral real exchange rates but we find little evidence for this relation in time series data for eight oecd countries

financial spillover and global risk in a multi region model of the world economy abstract this paper estimates a three region dsge model ea us row with international financial linkages in the form of cross border equity holding and allowing for region specific as well as global financial shocks which match empirical measures of financial tightness and global stock market valuation spillover from financial shocks increases with international financial integration and is practically zero under full home bias in normal times the global risk captures international synchronisation of financial cycles spillover of financial shocks is amplified at the zero lower bound at which investment risk takes on the characteristics of a general uncertainty shock the model results suggest that integrated financial markets should provide a powerful motivation for international policy coordination to prevent financial turmoil

the relation between price and marginal cost in u s industry an examination of data on output and labor input reveals that some u s industries have marginal cost well below price the conclusion rests on the finding that cyclical variations in labor input are small compared with variations in output in booms firms produce substantially more output and sell it for a price that exceeds the costs of the added inputs the paper documents the disparity between price and marginal cost where marginal cost is estimated from annual variations in cost it considers a variety of explanations of the findings that are consistent with competition but none is found to be completely plausible

testing for linear and nonlinear granger causality in the real exchange rate consumption relation international real business cycle models predict a relationship between real exchange rates and consumption this prediction is not supported by the empirical literature in a new approach we apply nonlinear granger causality tests to data for 14 oecd countries

limited asset market participation and the consumption real exchange rate anomaly under efficient consumption risk sharing as assumed in standard international business cycle models a country s aggregate consumption rises relative to foreign consumption when the country s real exchange rate depreciates yet empirically relative consumption and the real exchange rate are essentially uncorrelated i show that this consumption real exchange rate anomaly can be explained by a simple model in which a subset of households trade in complete financial markets while the remaining households lead hand to mouth htm lives htm behavior also generates greater volatility of the real exchange rate and of net exports which likewise brings the model closer to the data

the exchange rate and purchasing power parity extending the theory and tests abstract this paper analyzes the exchange rate in a no arbitrage or real business cycle equilibrium model and provides empirical evidence for this model vis a vis ppp our contribution is to show based on a generalization of the equilibrium model of exchange rates that i the test equation linking the exchange rate to fundamentals should allow for international heterogeneity in time preferences and risk attitudes as well as noise that is the model should not be tested as an exact relation ii empirical work should use levels of variables rather than first differences and iii tests on the existence of long run relations should be complemented by test on the signs of the coefficients our empirical work shows that as a long run relation the generalized model outperforms ppp moreover under the generalized model quarterly deviations from the estimated long term relation have a half life of only four to five quarters

an overall measure of technical inefficiency at the firm and at the industry level the lost profit on outlay abstract as a measure of overall technical inefficiency the directional distance function ddf introduced by chambers chung and fare ties the potential output expansion and input contraction together through a single parameter by duality the ddf is related to a measure of profit inefficiency which is calculated as the normalized deviation between optimal and actual profit at market prices as we show in the most usual case the associated normalization represents the sum of the actual revenue and the actual cost of the assessed firm consequently the corresponding profit inefficiency measure associated with the ddf has no obvious economic interpretation in contrast in this paper we allow outputs to expand and inputs to contract by different proportions this results in a modified ddf that retains most of the properties of the original ddf the corresponding dual problem has a much simpler interpretation as the lost profit on average outlay that can be decomposed into a technical and an allocative inefficiency component in addition an overall measure of technical inefficiency at the industry level is introduced resorting to the direction corresponding to the average input output bundle

full insurance in the presence of aggregate uncertainty this paper tests implications of full consumption insurance the object is to determine how much mileage can be obtained from a model with complete markets with such features as private information or liquidity constraints omitted the implication exploited is that individual consumption responds to aggregate risk but not to idiosyncratic risk the test involves regressing the change in household consumption onto the change in aggregate consumption and other right hand side variables such as the change in household income and change in employment status all variables other than the change in aggregate consumption are predicted to be insignificant in explaining the change in household consumption with observations on consumption and income for 10 695 households from the consumer expenditure survey the results are mixed the results for one specification exponential utility are mostly consistent with full consumption insurance the results for the other specification power utility are not

evidence on price adjustment costs in u s manufacturing industry this paper investigates the degree of rigidity in prices of manufactured products in the u s conditional on labor costs i extend rotemberg s model of quadratic price adjustment costs and find that prices are costly to adjust after a year about 40 percent of adjustment remains to be completed for aggregate manufacturing while for some industries the adjustment is twice as slow but manufacturing prices are less sluggish than prices in the u s economy as a whole thus nominal rigidity in other markets such as those for services or labor may be important

consumption real exchange rates and the structure of international asset markets abstract international real business cycle irbc models that assume complete asset markets yield strong restrictions for consumption and bilateral real exchange rate series empirical tests with data for the us japan france uk italy canada and sweden suggest that neither the trend behavior nor high frequency movements of consumption and real exchange rates are well explained by irbc models with complete markets it appears however that high frequency fluctuations of consumption and real exchange rates are consistent with unrestricted international trade in risk free bonds

a simple test of consumption insurance are consumers effectively insured against idiosyncratic shocks to income or wealth either by formal institutions such as charities private insurance and government programs or by informal mechanisms such as gifts and loans from relatives friends and neighbors under full insurance consumption growth should be cross sectionally independent of idiosyncratic variables that are exogenous to consumers this proposition is tested by cross sectional regressions of consumption growth on a variety of exogenous variables full insurance is rejected for long illness and involuntary job loss but not for spells of unemployment loss of work due to strike and an involuntary move

dynamic factor demands under rational expectations we model the industrial demands for structures equipment and blue and white collar labor in a manner consistent with rational expectations and stochastic dynamic optimization in the presence of adjustment costs but allowing generality of functional form we represent the technology by a translog input requirement function that specifies the amount of blue collar labor needed to produce an output level given quantities of three quasi fixed factors nonproduction workers equipment and structures a complete description of the production structure is obtained by simultaneously estimating the input requirement function and three stochastic euler equations we find adjustment costs are small in total but large on the margin and differ considerably across factors

the effects of government spending on real exchange rates evidence from military spending panel data abstract using panel data on military spending for 125 countries we document new facts about the effects of changes in government purchases on the real exchange rate consumption and current accounts in both advanced and developing countries while an increase in government purchases causes real exchange rates to appreciate and increases consumption significantly in developing countries it causes real exchange rates to depreciate and decreases consumption in advanced countries the current account decreases in both groups of countries these findings are not consistent with standard international business cycle models we discuss potential sources of the differences between advanced and developing countries in the responses to spending shocks

measurement of input specific productivity growth with an application to the construction industry in spain and portugal abstract decision making in companies requires an assessment of the efficiency and productivity of individual inputs to provide insights into the scope for improvement of inputs use this paper estimates an input specific luenberger productivity growth indicator that can be decomposed to identify the contributions of input specific technological change technical efficiency change and scale efficiency change these components for a specific input sum up to the aggregated indicators which are then compared with the traditional luenberger indicator the application focuses on panel data of spanish and portuguese construction firms over the period 2002 2011 accounting for three inputs materials labor and capital the results show that aggregated productivity change and its components computed from the input specific productivity indicator are different from those obtained using a traditional approach the results also indicate that productivity change is negative for labor and capital for construction firms in both spain and portugal while productivity change of materials is positive for portugal and negative for spain productivity decline is worse for capital in the spanish construction firms and for labor in portugal

consumption and real exchange rates in professional forecasts standard models of international risk sharing with complete asset markets predict a positive association between relative consumption growth and real exchange rate depreciations across countries the striking lack of evidence for this link the consumption realexchange rate anomaly or backus smith puzzle has prompted research on risk sharing indicators with incomplete asset markets that research generally implies that the association holds in forecasts rather than realizations using professional forecasts for 28 countries for 1990 2008 we find no such association thus deepening the puzzle independent evidence on the weak link between forecasts for consumption and real interest rates suggests that the presence of hand to mouth consumers may help to explain the evidence

decomposing profit inefficiency in dea through the weighted additive model abstract an issue that has received little attention in the data envelopment analysis literature is the decomposition of profit inefficiency by means of measures that account all sources of technical inefficiency in this paper we introduce a new way to measure and decompose profit inefficiency through weighted additive models all our results are derived from a new fenchel mahler inequality using duality theory

international risk sharing and capital mobility abstract under certain assumptions pareto efficient risk sharing implies that changes in consumption across nations will be perfectly correlated this result leads to an indicator of the welfare loss due to imperfect sharing of consumption risks across nations this indicator is used to evaluate the welfare implications of restrictions on various components of the international capital flow holding constant other components of the flow and domestic investment we find that variability in national consumption growth rates would have been considerably greater if capital flows had been restricted and that welfare would have been reduced significantly

realistic cross country consumption correlations in a two country equilibrium business cycle model abstract a well known feature of one good multi agent arrow debreu economies with edentical additively separable homothetic preferences is that the consumptions of all agents are perfectly correlated such economies are widely used in interpreting business cycles but seem to be inconsistent with observed cross country correlations of aggregate consumption this paper provides an example of a two country real business cycle model in which preferences are not separable between consumption and labor supply the model has a simple closed form solution closed form solution and allows for fluctuations in labor supply in equilibrium moreover it generates correlations between national consumption rates which are close to some of those observed in historical data jel f41

international real business cycles we ask whether a two country real business cycle model can account simultaneously for domestic and international aspects of business cycles with this question in mind we document a number of discrepancies between theory and data the most striking discrepancy concerns the correlations of consumption and output across countries in the data outputs are generally more highly correlated across countries than consumptions in the model we see the opposite