optimal inflation tax under precommitment theory and evidence the authors develop and test the orthogonality conditions implied by a dynamic model of the inflation tax a distinguishing feature of the analysis is that the welfare loss from inflation the money demand function and the time path of inflation are jointly derived from first principles of government and private sector intertemporal optimization quarterly data for argentina brazil and israel are used in implementing the model although the overidentifying restrictions of the model are not rejected in most cases there are several data points characterized by higher rates of inflation than the optimal rates under precommitment copyright 1992 by american economic association

money demand and seigniorage maximizing inflation conventional estimates of the seigniorage maximizing inflation rate often make use of the cagan form which implies a constant semielasticity of money demand with respect to inflation this paper shows that the elasticity of substitution in transactions between money and bonds determines how the inflation semielasticity of money demand changes as inflation rises allowing for a variable semielasticity estimates of seigniorage maximizing inflation for a panel of eleven high inflation countries are lower than those obtained by using the cagan form estimates based on the correct measure of the opportunity cost of money also differ sharply from those obtained when using conventional inflation measures copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

toward a reconstruction of keynesian economics expectations and constrained equilibria a two period model of temporary equilibrium with rationing is presented paying particular attention to agents expectations of future constraints it is shown that with arbitrary constraint expectations many different types of current equilibrium may be consistent with the same set of current and expected future wages and prices and that constraint expectations exhibit bootstraps properties e g a higher expectation of keynesian unemployment tomorrow increases the probability that it will prevail today in addition the concept of rational constraint expectations i e perfect foresight of future constraints is introduced and shown to enhance rather than reduce the effectiveness of government policy

government capital and the production function for u s private output abstract theoretical and policy discussions make unsupported assumptions about the productivity of capital which governments own estimates of an aggregate production function for u s private business 1949 1973 show government capital to be significant statistically and in economic terms

policy watch infrastructure investment and economic growth in the late 1980s david aschauer 1989 triggered a long overdue dialogue among economists and political leaders when he published a study arguing that much of the decline in u s productivity that occurred in the 1970s was precipitated by declining rates of public capital investment my own work confirmed these results munnell 1990a spending advocates seized on these findings as support for increased public investment the enthusiasm among policymakers for the early aschauer results was matched if not surpassed by skepticism on the part of many economists critics of these studies charged that the methodology was flawed that the direction of causation between public investment and output growth is unclear and that even if the historical empirical relationships were estimated correctly they provide no clear indications for current policy who s right what do we know and not know about the link between public infrastructure and productivity and what are the implications of these results for policy

monetary policy matters abstract this paper addresses hoover and perez s comments on our 1989 paper we first show that the estimated impact of monetary policy shifts remains large and ranges from marginally to strongly significant when oil shocks are controlled for we then extend our previous work by expanding the sample period and identifying an additional policy shift in december 1988 with this extension the estimated effects of monetary policy shifts are large and highly significant for all reasonable specifications of oil shocks we also demonstrate that hoover and perez s other objections have little bearing on our conclusions

public infrastructure and productivity growth in greek agriculture recent research has focused on the effect of public infrastructure on economic performance in this paper a model of greek agriculture s technology and behaviour is constructed based on the dual cost function framework the model provides a decomposition of productivity growth into the components technical change returns to scale and public infrastructure the empirical estimates indicate that public infrastructure investment provides a significant return to agriculture and augments productivity growth over the period 1960 1995 the impact of public infrastructure on productivity growth in livestock and crop production is found to be positive although it has been declining since the late 1970s these results strongly suggest that a decline in public infrastructure investment can partly explain the observed decline in the productivity growth of greek agriculture in the 1980s

inflation before and after central bank independence the case of colombia abstract in this paper we model the colombian inflation rate in terms of excess demand effects from asset goods and factor markets in contrast to previous results for a group of industrial economies we find that domestic factors are a far more powerful influence on inflation than are external factors the paper pays particular attention to the potential effects of the constitutional reform of 1991 which created a central bank independent from other parts of government we find that the creation of an independent central bank did change some of the parameters of the model as the disequilibria in goods and monetary markets were found to have a smaller effect on inflation after central bank independence was granted

the role of public capital in production the impact of the stock of public capital on costs of production in the private sector is examined using annual data over the period 1958 89 a translog cost function is estimated and public capital is found to be a significant input the estimates indicate that public capital has positive marginal product and that private and public capital are complements in production rather than substitutes copyright 1992 by mit press

the demand for money in developing countries assessing the role of financial innovation traditional specifications of money demand have commonly been plagued by persistent overprediction implausible parameter estimates and highly autocorrelated errors the authors argue that some of these problems stem from the failure to account for the impact of financial innovation they estimate money demand for ten developing countries using various proxies for financial innovations they also assess the relative importance of this variable finding financial innovation can be better modeled as a stochastic random walk trend rather than a deterministic time trend financial innovation plays an important role in determining fluctuations of the demand for money the importance of this role increases with the rate of inflation

ppp exchange rate rules macroeconomic in stability and learning in order to maintain competitiveness governments in developing economies seem to have pursued purchasing power parity ppp exchange rate rules by adjusting the nominal devaluation rate in response to real exchange rate deviations from an intermediate target this article shows that these rules are likely to induce macroeconomic instability as they generate sunspot driven fluctuations that are in fact learnable by agents in the expectational stability sense it finds that the existence of these learnable sunspots depends among others on open economy features including the degree of openness and the degree of exchange rate pass through to consumer s import prices

the public capital stock needs trends and performance the condition of america s roads bridges mass transit systems and water and sewer facilities has become an issue of increasing controversy one view holds that deterioration of this public infrastructure capital has reached alarming proportions and that a significant fraction of future national savings will be needed to reverse the damage of past neglect another view argues that there has been no sudden acceleration of decay in capital stock performance that better facility management can often substitute for capital investment and that attempts to greatly increase the size and condition of the public capital stock would place unsustainable pressure on financial markets state and local government budgets and the federal system of grants in aid how extensive is the capital infrastructure problem how did it arise given the many federal government subsidies available for state local capital expenditure how much of the national capacity for capital formation should be allocated to solving the problem if there is a divergence between actual and desired infrastructure capital can the gap be closed without disrupting the growth of other sectors and governmental objectives these questions are unfortunately much easier to pose than to answer there is only limited information about the size and condition of the stock of public infrastructure capital and much of the available information has been assembled from the perspective of engineering or planning needs standards needs assessments typically indicate the fraction of the infrastructure stock that falls below a specified and somewhat arbitrary level of performance or indicate how much spending would be required to bring the existing stock up to the specified standard while sometimes appropriate as a management tool infrastructure needs estimates are formulated in isolation from other public and private capital needs and are thus ill suited to the policy debate over national priorities despite significant data problems some general conclusions about the infrastructure dilemma are possible as a backdrop for these conclusions the first section of this paper presents an overview of the historical trends in public sector capital formation and infrastructure condition the following section discusses the factors shaping these trends with particular attention to the supply and demand components of the capital spending decision we then consider the question of whether existing trends will insure an adequate supply of public capital and address the issue of whether a reduced quantity and quality of infrastructure capital may be expected to reduce private sector productivity growth

targeting nominal income in a dynamic model the author analyzes the choice of monetary policy rule in a perfect foresight planning model maximizing agents plan their lifetime consumption decisions in the face of two rigidities first households hold money to aid trade second today s price level is inherited from past contracting decisions so that changes in nominal aggregate demand fall on output in the short run given these rigidities the central bank can set real balances in the short run and the author compares two mu percent rules his theoretical results suggest that the choice between fixed money growth and fixed nominal income growth rules is an empirical assessment that depends on the distribution of shocks to the economy copyright 1990 by ohio state university press

public capital and the demand for private inputs abstract this paper investigates the impact the provision of public capital has on the demand for private inputs using a cost function with public capital included as a fixed unpaid factor of production the productivity effects of public capital provision are recovered by using duality theory the model is applied to a panel of 31 two digit industries of the west german manufacturing industry it is shown that private and public capital are complements whereas a substitutive relation emerges for labour the empirical evidence suggests that the provision of public capital has a stabilizing but steadily decreasing impact on private input demand

money demand and exchange rate determination under hyperinflation conceptual issues and evidence from yugoslavia a modified monetary model of exchange rate determination is advanced and tested for the yugoslav hyperinflation of 1992 94 stating that the exchange rate is determined directly in the money market thus implying that private agents due to dollarization denominate their real money holdings in foreign currency empirical evidence supports the advanced model apart from the last seven months of the yugoslav hyperinflation the exact re present value model of the exchange rate is accepted while that of the price level is rejected for the whole period of hyperinflation the modified money demand schedule with money holdings denominated in foreign currency is nonlinear with decreasing semielasticity of money demand

an examination of the effects of government purchases in an open economy this paper examines the effects of permanent and transitory changes in government purchases in the context of a model of a small open economy that produces and consumes both traded and nontraded goods the model incorporates an equilibrium interpretation of the business cycle that emphasizes the responsiveness of agents to intertemporal relative price changes it is demonstrated that transitory increases in government purchases lead to an appreciation of the real exchange rate and an ambiguous change although a likely worsening in the current account while permanent increases have an ambiguous impact on the real exchange rate and no effect on the current account when agents do not know whether a given increase in government purchases is permanent or transitory the effect is a weighted average of these separate effects the weights depend on the relative variances of the transitory and permanent components of government purchases in the past few years a considerable amount of effort has been devoted to examining the effects of macroeconomic policy in an open economy such issues as exchange rate overshooting deviations from purchasing power parity sterilization and monetary control the effectiveness of monetary policy and the choice between alternative exchange rate regimes have been at center stage the models that have been employed to study these issues have run the spectrum from variants of the mundell fleming model such as dornbusch 1976 turnovsky 1981 and kimbrough 1983a to wage contracting and indexing models like bhandari 1982b and flood and marion 1982 to equilibrium models of the business cycle along the lines of bhandari 1982a saidi 1982 and kimbrough 1983b to the closely related intertemporal utility maximization models with money of helpman 1981 and stockman 1980 1983 one common thread that in a sense unifies all of these and other recent contributions is that they are concerned primarily with the effects of alternative monetary and exchange rate policies that the central bank might enact in light of the development and refinement during this period of the monetary approach to the balance of payments and the exchange rate it is not surprising i would like to thank phil brock jeremy greenwood gary zarkin and two anonymous

balanced growth and public capital an empirical analysis the balanced growth restrictions implied by the neoclassical growth model imply that output the private capital stock and the public capital stock share the same stochastic trend we analyse the postwar us data on real output real private capital stock and real public capital stock and find that the balanced growth restrictions cannot be rejected by the data removing the common stochastic trend from each series allows the estimation of output elasticities that is free from the spurious regression problem the results support aschauer s 1989 claim that at the margin public capital is more productive than private capital

portfolio behaviour in a flow of funds model for the household sector in india we estimate a flow of funds model for the household sector in india within the almost ideal demand system aids framework and examine the demand for money and the substitution effects between money and other financial assets the restricted long run model obtained using cointegration techniques provides stable equilibrium relationship between i 1 variables and broadly satisfies the axioms of rational choice in consumer demand theory we find that financial sector reform exerts a significant impact on the interest rate structure and household portfolio preferences specifically there is strong substitutability among risk free assets and a possible speculative effect in the stock market while the exchange rate strongly influences the demand for money these findings all have important policy implications

business cycle models aggregation and real wage cyclicality a substantial literature has developed to estimate the true cyclicality of real wages that is composition bias free two major issues are addressed in this article aggregation of heterogeneous workers and potential bias in the measurement of the labor input a general analysis of the biases is presented and alternative approaches in the literature are nested in a single framework estimates based on an efficiency units concept that avoids the usual aggregation problems are presented composition bias underestimates the usual parameters of interest unless both the price and the quantity of the labor input are adjusted appropriately

the optimal inflation tax when money reduces transactions costs abstract it has been argued that if money acts as an intermediate good the optimal inflation tax is zero this paper reexamines such a claim in the context of a model in which money reduces transactions costs it is shown that modeling money as an intermediate good does not necessarily imply that the optimal inflation tax is zero the optimality of a zero inflation tax depends on the properties of the transactions costs technology in particular if the transactions costs technology does not exhibit constant returns to scale it is optimal to resort to the inflation tax

the economic benefits of public infrastructure the impact of the provision of public infrastructure on private economic activity is examined using a flexible functional form of a cost function with public infrastructure as an additional extern

government capital and private output in the united states additional evidence abstract aggregate production functions for private output are estimated from annual u s data for the period 1948 1985 the estimates indicate government capital has an important positive effect on private output the effect of state and local governments capital is large and significant whereas the effect of federal capital appears small and statistically insignificant

infrastructure investment a review essay economists try not to be faddists but they often cannot help themselves while work on a topic should mirror the prospective importance of the topic that situation seems to occur with disappointing frequency instead the usual pattern is that some reasonably important topic will be totally ignored for the longest time then recognized and then the subject of a flurry of work all out of proportion to its likely long run importance nowhere has this speculative bubble of economic research been more clearly illustrated than with infrastructure investment macroeconomists havelong felt that the stock of public capital is an important factor input in the production of total output macroeconomists have known that u s productivity growth slowed dramatically in about 1973 and macroeconomists should have known that united states investment in public capital has been down since the late 1960s yet analysis of the u s productivity slowdown completely ignored infrastructure investment for the first fifteen years of this slowdown concentrating instead on energy prices social regulation the composition of the work force research and development different rates of obsolescence of the private capital stock and any number of other matters the public capital stock was hardly ever even mentioned as a potential factor in the productivity slowdown aschauer changed all that he wrote a series of papers 1989a 1989b 1989c that put these two movements together econometrically infrastructure investment turned down and aggregate productivity turned down slightly later both in the united states and in some other developed countries his work hit the magic button those who had worried about the productivity puzzle for fifteen years welcomed a new suspect those who were worried about low rates of u s national saving welcomed a new way to make their argument even more forcefully than with official figures on saving and investment which do not count infrastructure investment as investment political liberals and liberal politicians saw a way to rescue government spending and projects from the assaults of reaganism and even a way to avoid oth

government deficits private investment and the current account an intertemporal disequilibrium analysis this paper uses a model with full intertemporal optimization and fischer gray type short run real wage rigidities to demonstrate effects of deficit spending in different employment regimes this study attempts to bring the two strands of short run aggregate demand effects and certain intertemporal aspects together it analyses fiscal policy in the context of a model with full intertemporal optimization underlying private behavior which allows the paper to deal with the intertemporal aspects but it also explicitly incorporates the possibility of short run labour and goods market disequilibrium caused by fischer 1977 gray 1978 type contract based real wage rigidities and within period downward price inflexibility prices are however assumed to be flexible upward in a departure of the standard disequilibrium literature in section 2 the basic model is presented the paper uses a two period full optimization set up where wages and prices are set at the beginning of each period using all available information fiscal policy effects under keynesian unemployment are analyzed in section 3 while section 4 looks at the case of classical unemployment section 5 concludes

productive government expenditures and long run growth the purpose of this paper is to review some of the recent developments in endogenous growth models specifically our focus is on the growth effects of productive government spending in dynamic general equilibrium models we use a simple overlapping generations model as our basic framework and illustrate the role of taxes and spending we then examine several related issues nonrivalry in publicly provided goods existence and uniqueness of competitive equilibrium endogenous public policy ways of financing public expenditures composition of publicly provided goods and services and private alternatives finally we review some empirical results related to output elasticity of public capital and educational expenditures

public infrastructure and wages public capital s role as a productive input and household amenity production function studies typically conclude that public capital plays little role in enhancing productivity however others have found that infrastructure and employment growth are positively related these apparently conflicting results can be reconciled if public capital serves as a household amenity that increases labor supply without dramatically increasing productivity this study examines the impact of public capital on wages in order to assess whether productivity or amenity effects dominate for the economy as a whole the results suggest that highway s strongest role is as a household amenity however for the manufacturing sector the productivity effect of highways appears to dominate

regional productivity variation and the impact of public capital stock an analysis with spatial interaction with reference to spain in this article we examine whether variations in the level of public capital across spain s provinces affected productivity levels over the period 1996 to 2005 the analysis is motivated by contemporary urban economics theory involving a production function for the competitive sector of the economy industry which includes the level of composite services derived from service firms under monopolistic competition the outcome is potentially increasing returns to scale resulting from pecuniary externalities deriving from internal increasing returns in the monopolistic competition sector we extend the production function by also making log labour efficiency a function of log total public capital stock and log human capital stock leading to a simple and empirically tractable reduced form linking productivity level to density of employment human capital and public capital stock the model is further extended to include technological externalities or spillovers across provinces using panel data

money demand and the effects of fiscal policies this paper reexamines the choice of the scale variable in the money demand function a variety of evidence suggests that consumer spending is a better scale variable than gnp changing the money demand specification along these lines can profoundly affect the standard keynesian analysis of a tax cut copyright 1986 by ohio state university press

budget deficits and the current account an intertemporal disequilibrium approach the objective of the present paper is to develop an intertemporal disequilibrium model of a monetary economy to explain the effects of fiscal policy on the current account we wish to emphasize the role of aggregate demand determined output fluctuations and flexible exchange rates within a microtheoretic optimizing framework furthermore the differing effects of monetary versus non monetary i e tax or bond finance of government expenditures are considered

income taxes public investment and welfare in a growing economy abstract in a growth model with public capital and a spillover externality from private capital we find that income taxes as part of an optimal fiscal policy is a more common result than usually thought the commitment to finance an exogenous component of public expenditures in the form of an exogenous fraction of output may lead to the optimality of positive income taxes this result is robust to alternative assumptions on depreciation rates and preferences we show that welfare losses from deviations from the optimal policy are always smaller when compensated with changes in income taxes than when adjusting lump sum taxes

public capital and the factor intensity of the manufacturing sector numerous studies have examined the effect of local fiscal policy on business activity few have emphasised local public services and fewer still have examined the effect of local fiscal policy on the composition of business activity using newly derived estimates of regional public infrastructure the effect of public capital on the factor intensity of the manufacturing sector of 36 smsas during the 1970 78 period is examined the findings of this study indicate that public investment can play an important role in determining the composition of a region s industrial sector

public capital and total factor productivity this paper examines the impact of the stock of public capital on output levels and productivity growth rates in the united states the analysis is based on the estimation of parameters in a translog profit function prices of intermediate goods are introduced into a quasiproduction function for value added recently developed econometric techniques for dealing with nonstationary time series are used in the estimation the authors find that the services of public capital are an important part of the production process and that about 40 percent of the productivity decline is explained by a fall in the public capital labor ratio copyright 1993 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the search for a stable money demand function a survey of the post 1973 literature phe question of whether the demnand function for money is stable is one of the most important recurring issues in the theory and application of macroeconomic policy what is being sought in a stable demand function is a set of necessary conditions for money to exert a predictable influence on the economy so that the central bank s control of the money supply can be a useful instrument of economic policy as such the notion of a stable demand function appears to involve three key elements e g john t boorman 1976 p 317 and david e w laidler 1977 pp 34 35 first the demand for money relation should be highly predictable in a statistical sense as measured by the usual goodness of fit statistics precision of estimated coefficients and presumably its ability to forecast accurately out of sample second a stable demand function for money has relatively few arguments a relationship that requires knowledge about a large number of variables in order to pin it down is in effect not predictable finally the variables that appear as arguments in the function should represent significant links to spending and economic activity in the real sector in sum a stable demand function for money means that the quantity of money is predictably related to a small set of key variables linking money to the real sector of the economy the importance of a stable money demand function for monetary policy can be illustrated with the standard is lm model in which interest rates and gnp are the endogenous variables in this context a stable demand function for money translates into a well defined relationship between money interest rates and gnp

endogenous structural breaks public investment in agriculture and agricultural land productivity in taiwan using time series data for taiwan s agricultural sector and with the government s public investment in the agricultural sector serving as a proxy variable for nonfarm current inputs aside from the original labour and capital input variables usually taken into consideration this article examines the relationship between public investment in agriculture public investment land and agricultural land productivity output land in taiwan our main findings are as follows first the cointegration test reveals that public investment in agriculture and the productivity of agricultural land exhibit a significant positive relationship in the long run where the elasticity of land productivity in relation to public investment in agriculture is 0 55 second when controlling for endogenous structural breaks the long run equilibrium relationship for the productivity of the agricultural land model is still supported third the results of the weak exogeneity test indicate that a causal relationship exists in the lo

how stable is the demand for money in emerging economies one of the key elements of implementing the monetary policy is stability of the demand for money the literature includes a large number of studies that have tested the stability of the money demand in developed as well as less developed countries but not in emerging economies of eastern europe as market based data becomes available from these countries there is an urgency to test old theories for these modern market oriented economies in this article we consider the experiences of armenia bulgaria the czech republic hungary poland russia and the slovak republic using the bounds testing approach to error correction modelling and cointegration we show that money demand is stable in these countries

the price consumption puzzle of currency pegs abstract a defining stylized fact associated with exchange rate based stabilization programs is that their initial phase is characterized by several years of continuous expansion in private consumption and a gradual appreciation of the real exchange rate this paper shows that a large class of standard optimizing models is unable to account for this empirical regularity in particular models in this class predict that a gradual appreciation of the real exchange rate must necessarily be accompanied by a declining path of consumption the paper suggests several possible solutions to this problem and develops one in detail namely the relaxation of the assumption of time separability in preferences specifically it shows that under habit formation currency pegs induce a positive comovement between consumption and the real exchange rate the paper also establishes that habit formation provides an explanation for why in failed currency pegs a contraction in aggregate demand sets in before the collapse of the program

the economics of schooling production and efficiency in public schools n recent years public and professional interest in schools has been heightened by a spate of reports many of them critical of current school policy these policy documents have added to persistent and long standing concerns about the cost effectiveness and fairness of the current school structure and have made schooling once again a serious public issue as in the past however any renewed interest in education is likely to be short lived doomed to dissipate as frustration over the inability of policy to improve school practice sets in this frustration about school policy relates directly to knowledge about the educational production process and in turn to underlying research on schools although the educational process has been extensively researched clear policy prescriptions flowing from this research have been difficult to derive 2 there exists however a consistency to the research findings that does have an immediate application to school policy schools differ dramatically in quality

empirical studies on the relationship between public and private investment and gdp growth this study performs empirical studies on the interaction between public and private investment and gdp growth for japan and the usa since the data for each country used show features that are quite different from each other empirical methods of gmm generalized method of moments and ols ordinary least squares are accordingly applied to japan and the usa respectively the empirical results suggest that both public and private investment make great contributions to japanese economic growth while the us private investment seems to play a much more significant role than public investment

long run income and interest elasticities of money demand in the united states econometric techniques designed to accommodate nonstationary data are used to reexamine the stability of interest and income elasticities of money demand in the united states estimates based on postwar monthly data reveal a stable relationship between m1 velocity and various measures of interest rates that proxy the opportunity cost of holding money balances tests for the existence of cointegration and methods used to estimate the income and interest elasticities are based on procedures prescribed by soren johansen 1988 corresponding error correction estimates offer insight as to the dynamics of the process that maintains the equilibrium relation between velocity and interest rates copyright 1991 by mit press

the productivity slowdown the oil shocks and the real cycle f ive facts stand out about economic performance in the united states since world war ii the first is that for most of the postwar period the u s has had a slower rate of economic growth than the other major developed democracies except great britain and much lower rates of growth than germany japan and italy the gap between the growth of per capita income of the united states and comparable countries has however tended to diminish over time and the united states has lately grown at about the same rate as most other developed countries the second outstanding fact is that the united states has fallen far behind in many mass production industries in which it used to lead the world whereas it is ahead of other nations in many new and especially high technology industries in automobiles steel tires household appliances and earth moving and farm equipment for example u s production has fallen dramatically in relation to output in most comparable countries and the country has become a net importer of most such products by contrast in newer industries such as computers jet aircraft sophisticated weaponry and high technology in general the united states is often dominant both as producer and exporter the third outstanding fact is that most of the older heartland of american industry roughly the area north and east of an arc drawn from baltimore to st louis to milwaukee has declined dramatically in comparison with the south and the west this change in regional fortunes has been due in large part to migration motivated by differences in economic prospects from the declining to the advancing

symposium on the slowdown in productivity growth tthe growth slowdown that began in the late 1960s or early 1970s is the most significant macroeconomic development of the last two decades table 1 presents the basic facts for the big seven members of the oecd the significance of the slowdown derives from the power of compound interest when per capita income is growing at 4 percent it doubles every 18 years when it grows at only 2 percent it doubles every 35 years the permanent income defined as the annuity value of expected income of a 25 year old german citizen basing her expectations of income growth on average performance in the period 1955 73 would be 80 percent above her current income that of a 25 year old basing her expectations on the growth rate of income in the 1973 1986 period would be only 22 percent above her current income equivalently taking a generation as 33 years children in italy who might have expected to start out with a standard of living nearly five times the level at which their parents began would on the basis of the lower output growth from 1973 to 1986 expect to start out at less than double the material standard at which their parents began the four papers in this symposium address the question of the causes of the growth slowdown and to a lesser extent what might be done about it the classic empirical result in this area for which among other results robert solow received the 1987 nobel prize in economic science is that technological progress accounts for about half the growth of per capita output correspondingly most of the growth

asset portfolios and credit rationing evidence from kenya this paper presents a model of the private sector s demand for financial and real assets in kenya for the period 1973 90 the private sector is assumed to hold its wealth in terms of five assets but is quantity rationed in the credit market the model is estimated as a co integrated demand system based on the almost ideal demand system of deaton and muellbauer 1980 the model highlights the role of real asset accumulation in offering a hedge against inflation and the role of credit rationing in the composition of wealth asset markets in developing countries and particularly those of sub saharan africa have typically been subject to controls on prices through interest rate controls and quantities through credit rationing it is natural to ask how these controls affect the level composition and evolution of private sector wealth for example how does the wealth portfolio respond to changes in the level of credit rationing how do controls on nominal interest rates determine the private sector s response to inflation since these questions are not readily addressed using conventional single equation models of money demand this paper examines them within a more general model of portfolio choice in which relative asset price effects and quantity rationing in the market for domestic credit are made explicit the econometric model which is similar to that of taylor and clements 1983 perraudin 1987 and barr and cuthbertson 1991 1992 1994 is based on a dynamic representation of the almost ideal demand system adapted to handle rationing using aggregate time series data for kenya the model characterizes the asset portfolio chosen by a representative private sec tor agent facing a two stage budgeting problem in the first stage the represen tative agent chooses his or her labour supply and consumption and hence the net addition to wealth at the second stage the new stock of wealth adjusted for capital and exchange rate gains or losses is allocated across different assets which in this case consist of money bank deposits and loans the latter being treated as negative assets real assets in the form of equity claims and govern ment securities the demand shares for the components of the portfolio are then estimated within an error correction system of equations the model is estimated on quarterly data for the period 1973 90 2 there are a number of reasons for adopting this particular approach first and most obviously the demand system provides for a more comprehensive description of the evolution of the overall portfolio composition than is poss ible using traditional single equation approaches this is particularly true in

financial innovation and money demand application to chile and mexico this paper reexamines one estimation of money demand equations using quarterly data for chile and mexico the authors find no evidence of cointegration of traditional long run money demand equations in light of this evidence they argue that there is an important permanent component of the demand for money not captured by traditional variables interest rates and income the authors call this phenomenon financial innovation and they include it in the traditional specification by assuming that it follows a random walk copyright 1993 by mit press

dollarization in post hyperinflationary argentina abstract this paper analyzes the continued dollarization of the argentine economy which experienced a rapid decline in inflation following its hyperinflations of the 1980s first a measure of dollar currency circulating in argentina is developed thereby improving upon previous studies of dollarization and currency substitution that focused on dollar deposit holdings only second cointegration analysis of peso money demand in argentina finds a negative ratchet effect from inflation the reduction in peso money demand attributable to the ratchet mirrors the estimated stock of all dollar assets held domestically by argentine residents consistent with the hypothesis of irreversible dollarization

currency substitution and financial innovation this paper explores the domestic effects as well as the international transmission of financial innovation the analysis is carried out in a cash in advance model with two currencies and tw o goods in which income velocity is variable because of inventory type considerations in the determination of the demand for money the discussion emphasizes the role of currency substitution which occur s through the interaction between the two monies in affecting the tota l amount of time devoted to transaction activities the role of cross border transfers of seigniorage in determining the general equilibrium effects of financial innovation is discussed copyright 1993 by ohio state university press

inventories in the open economy macro model a disequilibrium analysis this study examines a disequilibrium model of a small open economy with explicit links between periods due to inventory accumulation as well as the more conventional channels through current account imbalances and the government budget constraint the key features of the model are that agents have perfect foresight with neutral public debt and that inventories adjust to smooth production intertemporarily the paper explores the extent to which fiscal policy can be used selectively for coping with an export slump without running into a balance of payments constraint

resurrecting the weak credibility hypothesis in models of exchange rate based stabilization abstract we analyze how weak credibility affects the volatility of consumption spending in a model of exchange rate based stabilization that allows for both durable and nondurable goods the inclusion of durables greatly improves the explanatory power of the weak credibility hypothesis the hypothesis can account for the main qualitative properties of the boom bust cycle provided the elasticity of durables expenditure with respect to tobin s q is greater than the intertemporal elasticity of substitution moreover the quantitative effects are very large in numerical simulations based on conservative assumptions about the expenditure share of durables 20 and wealth effects none aggregate consumption increases 17 22 and the real exchange rate appreciates 24 26 when the crawl decreases from 100 to zero for 3 years in variants of the model that incorporate supply effects the consumption boom is equally strong but appreciation of the real exchange rate rises to 30 40

is public capital really productive a methodological reappraisal abstract we present an evaluation of the main empirical approaches used in the literature to estimate the contribution of public capital stock to growth and private factors productivity based on a simple stochastic general equilibrium model built as to reproduce the main long run relations observed in us post war historical data we show that the production function approach may not be reliable to estimate this contribution our analysis reveals that this approach largely overestimates the public capital elasticity given the presence of a common stochastic trend shared by all non stationary inputs

dual exchange rates capital controls and sticky prices abstract it is often argued that capital controls are an appropriate policy response to the exchange rate overshooting which occurs when asset markets adjust more rapidly than goods markets in this paper an intertemporal disequilibrium model of an open economy is developed in which the effect of capital controls is examined the results are contrasted with recent studies by adams and greenwood 1985 and obstfeld 1986 in which capital controls are evaluated within a purely equilibrium framework and thus inevitably take the form of a welfare reducing distortion

consumer credit in an era of financial liberalization an overreaction to repressed demand in this article we empirically analyse the factors which determined consumer credit in greece in the period before and after the financial liberalization while accounting for significant changes in structure due to the lifting of credit restrictions and the subsequent impressive boom of consumer loans we use multivariate cointegration techniques to estimate a vector error correction model vecm and identify separate demand and supply relationships for consumer loans we introduce demand and supply related shifts in parameters through the inclusion of appropriate dummy variables and trends in the long run relationships we partly deviate from the typical johansen procedure and estimate the model in two steps we find that the theoretical exclusion and coefficient size restrictions on the demand and supply cointegrating vectors are valid our results are consistent with the operation of a bank lending channel in greece we also find that the supply side was mostly responsible for the acceleration of con

the demand for money in brazil what happened in the 1980s abstract some of cardoso s 1983 money demand specifications are used here the estimates are based on quarterly data for the period 1966 1985 it is shown that due to financial innovation the money demand function shifted downwards in the 1980 s also a comparison is made between the actual demand for money and that predicted by the model during the period in which the economic reforms of the cruzado plan were in force

income velocity and institutional change some new time series evidence 1870 1986 this paper applies tests of cointegration to assess whether institutional factors in addition to income and an interest rate explain the long run behavior of velocity over a century of annual data from five industrialized countries are used institutional characteristics make a significant contribution to the determination of velocity in all the countries considered one generally rejects the hypothesis of cointegration between velocity and its traditional determinants but the same hypothesis cannot be rejected when velocity is also a function of institutional change proxies tests of coefficient stability also reinforce the validity of the institutional change hypothesis of velocity copyright 1993 by ohio state university press

anticipated inflation and the capital stock in a cash in advance economy abstract an economy is constructed in which the steady state capital stock is inversely related to the rate of inflation as a result that is directly opposite the usual conclusion

the demand for money in argentina 1978 1987 before and after the austral program in this study a monthly money demand function for argentina is estimated for a period that ends one month before the austral program may 1985 the performance of the traditional econometric approach is compared with the new cointegration approach to time series econometrics the comparison is carried out by a postsample forecast of the demand for money for a period of two years after the stabilization until july 1987 the cointegration approach is found superior to the traditional approach the first produces a relatively stable money demand whereas the second yields an unstable one

is public expenditure productive abstract this paper considers the relationship between aggregate productivity and stock and flow government spending variables the empirical results indicate that i the nonmilitary public capital stock is dramatically more important in determining productivity than is either the flow of nonmilitary or military spending ii military capital bears little relation to productivity and iii a core infrastructure of streets highways airports mass transit sewers water systems etc has most explanatory power for productivity the paper also suggests an important role for the net public capital stock in the productivity slowdown of the last fifteen years

energy prices and the aggregate production function abstract this paper tests the hypothesis that the effects of increases and decreases in relative energy prices on output are symmetrical alternative ratchet specifications are embedded in an aggregate production function for private sector output and estimated using us data the major finding is that the relationship between relative energy prices and output is highly asymmetrical increases in relative energy prices above previous peak levels have a substantial deleterious effect on output decreases in relative energy prices and increases below the previous peak have no effect on output

financial services cointegration and the demand for money in israel the main hypothesis of this study is that ignoring the state of the financial services in the demand for money is a theoretical misspecification and is an important reason for the instability of the money demand as traditionally estimated a measurement approach for the state of the financial services is developed and applied to estimation of the demand for money in israel the approach presented in melnick 1990 is further developed by analyzing the lack of cointegration between real balances and their determinants according to theory as a case of omitted variables in a nonstationary time series set up when our measure for the state of the financial services is included it yields a stable cointegrated long run demand far money relationship the validity of steady state inflation tax analysis is questioned and a negative recommendation for the use of quantitative money targets is given copyright 1995 by ohio state university press

the persistence of interest rate effects on the demand for currency note since the end of world war ii there has been a trend decline in the demand for real currency balances part of the decrease is due to the rise in interest rates to unprecedented heights yet this is not the complete answer since a trend term included in a simple and conventional currency demand equation that already includes an interest rate still emerges with a significant negative coefficient for example using quarterly data from 1950 i to 1981 iii a demand for currency equation can be estimated as

oil price shocks unemployement investment and the current account an intertemporal disequilibrium analysis recent work on macroeconomics of price increases of intermediate imports while theoretical rigorous and elegant is still unable to explain the stylized facts this paper attempts to remedy the shortcomings of earlier papers by using a two period model to properly analyse investment and savings behaviour and hence the current account this model also incorporates disequilibrium in first period labour and goods markets to compare the response of countries in different disequilibrium regimes to shocks in intermediate input prices

efficiency adjusted public capital and growth summary this paper constructs an efficiency adjusted public capital stock series and re examines the public capital and growth relationship the paper also examines the effects of four specific stages of the public investment process appraisal selection implementation and evaluation on capital accumulation and growth the results show that public capital is a significant contributor to economic growth the quality of public investment as measured by variables capturing the adequacy of project selection and implementation is statistically significant in explaining variations in economic growth a result mainly driven by low income countries

measuring the contribution of public infrastructure capital in sweden the authors purpose is to examine ways of evaluating and measuring the contribution of public infrastructure capital to private sector output and productivity growth in sweden they do this by specifying and implementing empirically a number of alternative econometric models using annual data for sweden from 1960 to 1988 applying a dual cost function approach they find that increases in public infrastructure capital ceteris paribus reduce private sector costs the authors compute that amount of public infrastructure capital that would rationalize the cost savings incurred by the private business and manufacturing sectors and find that the amount that can be rationalized in this manner is less than what was in fact available in 1988 but that the extent of excess public infrastructure capital has been falling in the 1980s copyright 1992 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

tax policy and economic growth lessons from the 1980s the past seven years of u s economic policy and performance constitute a truly remarkable if confusing experiment few would have guessed in 1980 that inflation would fall rapidly to 4 percent and hold pretty steady during a lengthy recovery that productivity growth would partially rebound the national debt more than double capital imports reach 150 billion in a single year or that employment would continue to expand at rates envied by other advanced economies perhaps fewer still would have predicted two major and two minor tax reforms would be passed in six years a flip flop in depreciation schedules and a top personal tax rate below 30 percent while it is always easier to draw inferences concerning economic growth its determinants and policies affecting the determinants with long historical hindsight this paper will attempt to provide information evaluation and conjecture to draw some tentative lessons about the effects of tax policies in the 1980s on long run economic growth the good news from the 1980s is the remarkable achievement of substantially lower marginal tax rates making the government a much smaller silent partner in many economic decisions for example the tax advantage of debt finance is reduced substantially with the much lower marginal tax rates the bad news is that the nation could not afford all of the good news the very large budget deficits add to the instability in the tax code in addition to whatever other problems they cause moreover in a country with the lowest saving and investment rates in the advanced world the consequence of which may be to decrease our long run growth potential and short run trade competitiveness the remaining anti saving and investment features of our tax law while probably less important in the long run than the u s

nominal interest rates consumption booms and lack of credibility a quantitative examination abstract exchange rate based stabilization programs in chronic inflation countries have often been accompanied by an initial expansion of private consumption followed by a contraction this consumption cycle has been attributed to lack of credibility in the sense that the public views the reduction in the devaluation rate as temporary this paper assesses the quantitative relevance of the temporariness hypothesis by comparing the predictions of a simple model to the actual figures for seven major programs the paper concludes that nominal interest rates must fall substantially for the temporariness hypothesis to account for an important fraction of the observed consumption booms

the demand for money in the united states evidence from cointegration tests this paper uses recent cointegration test procedures to investigate the underlying economic relationship between real money balances real income and interest rates for the united states unlike recent studies of money demand the authors analysis uses quarterly data spanning the period 1915 88 thus providing a sample encompassing a wide variety of economic experiences the evidence presented indicates that the broader m2 measure of money is the preferable measure with which to consider the long run effects of monetary policy copyright 1991 by ohio state university press

infrastructure investment and canadian manufacturing productivity this paper examines the relationship between canadian public infrastructure and private output using a constant elasticity and substitution translog ces tl cost model to describe the interaction of the public and private sectors the ces tl was first specified by pollak et al 1984 we find public capital a substitute for private capital within the canadian manufacturing sector additionally the services of public capital enhance the productivity of private capital canadian manufacturing costs are characterized by economies of scale indicating that less than optimal plant sizes dominated canadian manufacturing sector during the study period advances in disembodied technical progress are also indicated

currency substitution new evidence from emerging economies abstract this paper provides new empirical evidence for currency substitution in different emerging market economies estimation results from a money in the utility function framework indicate that foreign currencies are strong substitutes for domestic currency in producing liquidity services

inventories and sticky prices more on the microfoundations of macroeconomics the role of inventories in making prices sticky is studied by analyzing a dynamic linear quadratic model of a monopoly firm facing stochastic demand but able to store its finished goods in inventory it is shown that in contrast to the usual presumption firms that exhibit the smallest output responses to demand fluctuations may also exhibit the smallest price fluctuations specifically firms which have very flexible inventory storage facilities or are subjected to very transitory demand shocks will rely on inventories as buffers and will change neither production nor price very much on the other hand firms which have very inflexible storage facilities or whose demand shocks are quite permanent will display large swings in both price and output the standard assumption about inventory carrying costs that has been used in the literature that they are linear is shown to imply that production is impervious to fluctuations in demand it is also established that prices may respond more strongly to positive demand shocks than to negative ones if it is impossible to hold negative inventories i e to have unfilled orders the model offers an explanation for stickiness in relative prices however under certain circumstances it may help explain the persistence of inflation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

sterilization of short term capital inflows through lower interest rates reductions in international interest rates are a major cause of capital flows to emerging economies increases in domestic interest rates are a frequent policy response to the resulting price increases this is often unsuccessful the paper suggests a theoretical explanation based on distinctive features of emerging financial markets including imperfect asset substitutability and imperfect capital mobility for some sectors of the economy it concludes that the appropriate policy response to capital inflows may be lower interest rates

public capital and private productivity this paper uses three different approaches to investigate whether the declining provision of public capital is a major cause of declining labor productivity the juxtaposition of approaches removes

money demand in a high inflation economy the case of israel money demand plays a central role in recent models of rapid inflation and stabilization which are highly relevant to the israeli economy this paper uses co integration analysis to estimate money demand in israel we find that money demand shifted at the beginning of the 1980s probably as a result of increased use of liquid indexed assets which provide protection against high inflation in the previous two decades the equation was a fairly conventional u s type logarithmic function in the last decade the equation has had a lower constant and has exhibited less sensitivity to interest rate changes in both periods the nominal rate of interest and real private consumption have been co integrated with real m1 balances and interest elasticity has been less than unity copyright 1994 by mit press

what have we learned from three decades of research on the productivity of public capital the last three decades have witnessed a great deal of research effort devoted to measuring the private output elasticity of public capital the wide range of available estimates have precluded any consensus so far however this paper reconciles the empirical findings of the literature by quantitatively analyzing a sample of 578 estimates collected from 68 studies for the 1983 2008 period using meta regression analysis we show how study design characteristics and publication bias can explain a large fraction of the variation across estimates we find a short run output elasticity of public capital supplied at the central government level of 0 083 which increases to 0 122 in the long run if in addition only core infrastructure at a regional local level of government is considered these estimates are almost doubled the average output elasticity of public capital amounts to 0 106 our results suggest that public capital is undersupplied in oecd economies

is public capital provision efficient abstract we examine whether public investment undertaken in australia over the last three decades satisfies conditions for intertemporal efficiency we find that the conditions are satisfied over the sample period but only after allowance for changes in the relative price of public and private capital in contrast to previous research we do not find any evidence of excessive returns to public investment rather the average real investment return for both private and public capital is estimated at about 9 per annum