time preference and international lending and borrowing in an overlapping generations model two economies represented by diamond type overlapping generations models and differing only in their pure rates of time preference are joined together capital formation balance of payments behavior and welfare are compared under autarky and openness with a positive natural rate of growth the low time preference country runs a current account surplus in the steady state but not necessarily outside it if preexisting capital is not shiftable between countries integration in the world economy makes the high time preference country worse off in the short run the ranking of stationary utility levels under autarky and openness is ambiguous

heckscher ohlin revisited implications of differential population dynamics for trade within an overlapping generations framework abstract this paper investigates the implications of the addition of differential population dynamics to a simple 2 2 2 model of international trade within an overlapping generations framework the two regions considered are assumed to be identical in every respect except for the way their populations evolve over time the effects of these demographic differences are explored by comparing autarky and trade on the basis of i the analytical solutions obtained for the steady state values of key variables and ii the paths of these variables plotted using numerical results from simulation experiments carried out under two different demographic scenarios unequal population dynamics are shown to affect the relative abundance of the factors of production in each region giving rise to differentials in wage rates and rentals for capital under autarky conditions this in turn causes costs of production and relative prices to differ creating the grounds for trade in the sense of heckscher ohlin ho yet the results reveal that static ho results cannot be generalized to hold in a dynamic setting where differences in demographics cause factor proportions to evolve independently of trade over time

formation of inflation expectations in british manufacturing industries over the past decade increasing use has been made of direct information on price expectations in empirical studies of the expectations formation process in the united states livingston s inflation expectation series have been extensively analysed by turnovsky i970 turnovsky and wachter i972 pesando i975 mcguire i976 carlson i977 mullineaux i978 i980 jacobs and jones i980 figlewski and wachter i98i and others in the united kingdom the general public expectations of consumer prices made available in the gallup polls have been studied by carlson and parkin i975 holden and peel i977 smith i982 severn 1983 and evans and gulamani i984 similar studies have also been carried out with respect to surveys conducted in germany france and most other oecd countries however despite the apparent importance of businessmen s expectations for the understanding of the inflationary process the empirical research on inflation expectations in the united kingdom has been mainly concerned with the consumers price expectations the present paper is an attempt to rectify this shortcoming by extending the empirical analysis of the inflation expectation process to british manufacturing industries using the results of the industrial trend surveys conducted by the confederation of british industries cbi the plan of the paper is as follows section i deals with the methodological problems of deriving quantitative inflation expectations series from qualitative responses such as the ones reported in the cbi surveys the subjective probability method due to theil carlson and parkin and the regression method recently proposed by the author pesaran i984 for the conversion of categorical responses to quantitative measures are briefly discussed section ii sets out the alternative models of inflation expectations formation section iii describes the data on inflation expectations in british manufacturing industries and discusses the forecasting value of alternative measures of inflation expectations section iv focuses on the issue of measurement errors in expectations and the econometric problems involved section v reports the results of estimation of alternative models of inflation expectations and investigates the quantitative impact of government policy and general economic conditions on inflation

political economy of public policies insights from distortions to agricultural and food markets the agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational while others have been gradual but persistent this paper reviews and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in market distortions and the political economy explanations that have been advanced based on a rich global data set covering a half century of evidence on commodities countries and policy instruments the paper identifies hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the extent of market distortions and the conditions under which reform may be feasible

the transfer paradox in a one sector overlapping generations model abstract this paper examines the effects of international income transfers on capital accumulation and welfare in a one sector overlapping generations model it is shown that a strong form of the transfer paradox in which the donor country experiences a welfare gain while the recipient country experiences a welfare loss may occur both in and out of steady state in addition it is shown that a weak form of the transfer paradox where either the donor or recipient but not both experiences a paradoxical welfare effect may characterize all segments of the transition path not already characterized by the strong transfer paradox

quantification and characteristics of household inflation expectations in switzerland inflation expectations are a key variable in conducting monetary policy however these expectations are generally unobservable and only certain proxy variables exist such as surveys on inflation expectations this article offers guidance on the appropriate quantification of household inflation expectations in the swiss consumer survey where answers are qualitative in nature we apply and evaluate different variants of the probability approach and the regression approach we demonstrate that models that include answers on perceived inflation and allow for time varying response thresholds yield the best results and we show why the originally proposed approach of fluri and sporndli 1987 has resulted in heavily biased inflation expectations since the mid 1990s furthermore we discuss some of the key features of swiss household inflation expectations i e the fact that there has been a shift in expectation formation since 2000 expectations are better anchored and less adaptive and there is lower disa

determinacy of equilibrium in stationary economies with both finite and infinite lived consumers abstract we consider the determinacy of perfect foresight equilibrium near steady state equilibria of stationary infinite horizon economies the work of t j kehoe and d k levine econometrica 53 1985 433 453 is generalized by the inclusion of both infinite lived agents and overlapping generations of finite lived agents and the inclusion of production and non depreciating pure rents we show that indeterminacy is possible in robust examples and that the dimension of the indeterminacy can be as large as the number of goods per period we also discuss extreme cases in which determinacy is guaranteed

the savings multiplier we develop a theory of macroeconomic development based on the novel concept of savings multiplier capital accumulation changes relative prices and income shares between generations creating further incentives to accumulate and thereby rising saving rates as the economy develops the savings multiplier hinges on two mechanisms first accumulation raises wages and leads to redistribution from the consuming old to the saving young second higher wages raise the price of services consumed by the old and the anticipation of such price rise prompts the young to increase their savings our theory captures important aspects of china s development and suggests new channels through which the one child policy and the dismantling of cradle to grave social benefits have fuelled china s savings and accumulation rates

implications of domestic price insulation for global food price behavior abstract rapid changes in global food prices in recent years are widely viewed as a serious threat to global development while various sources of price instability in agriculture have been identified little attention appears to have been given to the importance of changes in trade policies that insulate domestic prices from world markets as a source of volatility in world prices a contribution of this paper is to show that these interventions are dynamically more complex than simple proportional insulation insulation against an initial price increase in world prices increases the magnitude of that increase while subsequent adjustments to the level of protection change the fundamental nature of price volatility we find such policies are widespread and increase the volatility of world prices while not reducing the volatility of domestic prices because of the collective action problem involved in this form of policy intervention

cyclical co movements of output and trade in the world economy an intertemporal maximization general equilibrium model of an industrial block and an ldc resource rich block is constructed and used to examine the cyclical behaviour of trade flows investment and output in the world economy it is demonstrated that supply disturbances originating in the raw materials market lead to positive across economic zones and persistent over time co movements in trade investment and output if the world real interest rate moves counter cyclically it is also shown that the sign of the response of the current account to a supply shock depends on the size of the distribution of gains from trade

search unemployment in an overlapping generations setting this paper constructs an overlapping generations model in which the steady state equilibrium is characterized by the existence of search unemployment this dynamic general equilibrium model captures the possible existence of search unemployment in the long run despite the absence of exogenous shocks furthermore it allows for the wage offers distribution to be determined endogenously the effect of partial revelation of information on the existence of search unemployment in the long run is examined it is shown that search unemployment may be eliminated in the long run despite the persistence of the state of imperfect information this paper develops an overlapping generations model in which the steady state equilibrium is characterized by search unemployment 2 unemployment is created via a rational rejection of available wage offers in favor of further search for potentially more attractive offers the proposed dynamic general equilibrium model allows for the existence of long run search unemployment despite the absence of exogenous shocks and permits the presence of an endogenously determined nondegenerate wage offer distribution 3 the paper analyzes the trade off between revelation of information and the level of search unemployment in the long run in the absence of external disturbances the level of search unemployment would be expected to decrease as information becomes available in particular if information is fully revealed search unemployment is naturally eliminated exploring the likelihood of the existence of long run search unemployment in a deterministic world this study provides an example of partial revelation of information which eliminates search unemployment in the long run despite the persistence of the state of imperfect information 4 the proposed model presents a discrete infinite time horizon world where economic activity is conducted under imperfect information in every period a single homogeneous good is produced using two factors capital and labor in the production process the aggregate endowment of labor is exogenously given in

aggregate spending and the terms of trade is there a laursen metzler effect this paper investigates the spending and current account effects of terms of trade shifts in a model where households maximize utility over an infinite planning period in the framework developed here an economy specialized in production must experience a fall in aggregate spending and a current surplus as a result of an unanticipated permanent worsening in its terms of trade the paper s model thus provides a setting in which the current account deficit predicted by laursen and metzier harberger and others fails to materialize

multiple bgps in a growth model with habit persistence this paper establishes multiple balanced growth paths in an otherwise standard competitive growth model without externality or distortions and with households preference dependent upon how his her consumption compares to a habit stock formed by his her own past consumption the key feature in our model is that consumption forms habits in combination with existing habits this model establishes multiple equilibria because habit persistence induces an internal intertemporal complementarity effect among consumption flows with current consumption reinforcing future consumption as a result there exist two balanced growth paths with one path exhibiting low consumption and habits and high economic growth and the other path exhibiting high consumption and habits and low growth that is not necessarily a development trap both steady states are saddles but global indeterminacy arises where a high balanced growth path co exists with a low balanced growth path where the two equilibrium paths cannot be pareto ranked and history need not matter for the selection of the equilibrium path

the terms of trade and the current account the harberger laursen metzler effect the paper examines the effect of terms of trade changes on a small country s spending and current account assuming optimizing behavior in an intertemporal framework with perfect international capital mobility a temporary future terms of trade deterioration implies a deterioration improvement of the trade balance whereas a permanent terms of trade deterioration has an ambiguous effect depending on the rate of time preference nominal and real variables are considered via exact price indexes two periods and an infinite horizon are examined

current account dynamics and the terms of trade harberger laursen metzler two generations later this is a study of the current account dynamics resulting from the savings and investment dynamics in a small open economy which is subject to exogenous changes in its terms of trade and in world interest rates anticipated and unanticipated as well as temporary and permanent terms of trade changes have very different effects there is however a general tendency towards cycles in both savings and investment which gives rise to cycles in the current account it is shown that the classic harberger laursen metzler effect on saving of a terms of trade deterioration can have any sign for plausible parameter values both for temporary and permanent disturbances

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

comparative statics and perfect foresight in infinite horizon economies does a pure exchange economy with an infinite time horizon have determinate perfect foresight equilibria when there is a finite number of infinitely lived agents equilibria are generically determinate this is not true with overlapping generations of finitely lived agents we ask whether the initial conditions together with the requirement of convergence to a steady state locally determine an equilibrium price path in this framework there are many economies with isolated equilibria many with continua of equilibria and many with no equilibria at all with two or more goods in every period not only can the price level be indeterminate but relative prices as well furthermore such indeterminacy can occur whether or not there is fiat money and whether or not the equilibria are pareto efficient this paper considers whether infinite horizon economies have determinate perfect foresight equilibria this question is of crucial importance if instead equilibria are locally indeterminate not only are we unable to make comparative static predictions but the agents in the model are unable to determine the consequences of unanticipated shocks the idea underlying perfect foresight is that agents expectations should be the actual future sequence predicted by the model if the model does not make determinate predictions the concept of perfect foresight is meaningless we consider two extreme cases the first with a finite number of infinitely lived consumers and the second with an infinite number of finitely lived consumers an overlapping generations model both are models of stationary pure exchange economies no production including the storage of goods between periods can occur these models are unrealistic but are the easiest to study extensions of the results of this paper to models with production infinitely lived assets and mixtures of the two types of consumers are presented by muller and woodford 29 when there is a finite number of infinitely lived consumers we argue that equilibria are generically determinate this is because the effective number of equations determining equilibria is not infinite but equal to the number of agents minus one and must determine the marginal utility of income for all but one agent generically near an equilibrium these equations are independent and exactly determine the unknowns when there are infinitely many overlapping generations this reasoning breaks down an infinite number of equations is not necessarily sufficient to determine

existence uniqueness and stability of equilibrium in an overlapping generations model with productive capital abstract this paper analyzes the existence uniqueness and stability of a steady state equilibrium in an overlapping generations model with productive capital it is shown that for any feasible set of well behaved preferences there exists a production function that satisfies the inada conditions under which the economy experiences global contraction and the steady state equilibrium is characterized by the absence of production and consumption the study establishes a strengthened inada condition which is necessary to preclude global contraction and sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique and globally stable non trivial steady state equilibrium

estimating a nonlinear rational expectations commodity price model with unobservable state variables this paper is concerned with the estimation of a model in which a possibly serially correlated stochastic process the harvest of an agricultural commodity generates a competitive price in a market comprising both final consumers and risk neutral speculators who can store the commodity at a cost in the anticipation of profit because storage cannot be negative the relationship between prices and harvests is inherently nonlinear and is an unpromising candidate for a linear quadratic model or for linearization more generally instead we calculate numerically a policy function in which price is a function of two unobservable state variables the harvest and current availability and we use the result to fit the price data

a comparative study of alternative methods of quantifying qualitative survey responses using napm data this article examines the effectiveness of a subjective probability approach to quantify three category qualitative responses from expectations surveys since one cannot make a judgment on the validity of estimated expectations by comparing them with ex post outcomes we use the national association of purchasing managers survey data on materials buying prices and compare them with the producer price index for intermediate materials and components for manufacturing we experimented with normal logistic and scaled f distributions and found that the approach could explain approximately 60 of the variation in the monthly series marginal improvement in the explanatory power of the procedure was noted when the imperceptible parameter was allowed to be asymmetric and variable over time

food versus fuel what do prices tell us abstract sorting out the impacts of biofuels on global agricultural commodity prices is impossible without turning to data and distinguishing between the short run versus the long run impacts using time series prices on fuels and agricultural commodities the aim is to investigate the long run cointegration of these prices simultaneously with their multivariate short run interactions results indicate no direct long run price relations between fuel and agricultural commodity prices and limited if any direct short run relationships in terms of short run price movements sugar prices are influencing all the other agricultural commodity prices except rice with sugar the number one world input for ethanol results indicate increased ethanol production is potentially influencing short run agricultural commodity prices overall results support the effect of agricultural commodity prices as market signals which restore commodity markets to their equilibria after a demand or supply event shock

are the representative agent s beliefs based on efficient econometric models abstract no they are not at least not in the uk by examining gdp dynamics we find that over a time span of two decades an easy to perform adaptive expectations model systematically outperforms other standard predictors in terms of squared forecasting errors this should reduce model uncertainty and thereby lead to increased homogeneity in expectations however data collected in surveys show that great variety in expectations persists even in this situation moreover granger tests indicate that the forecasting fitness of the best predictor can be further enhanced by the use of information provided by survey expectations these results based on real time data and robust to both several predictors and nonlinearities weaken the general validity of approaches assuming predictions based on efficient econometric models

confidence and the real value of money in an overlapping generations economy we demonstrate that stochastic bubbles which have a constant exogenous probability of collapsing may exist in general equilibrium on an intrinsically useless and unbacked asset money this may happen provided that the probability q that the bubble will persist next period is large enough and exceeds a threshold level q which we call the minimum rate of confidence this condition is always violated when the economy without bubble is dynamically efficient it is more likely to be satisfied in dynamically inefficient economies the larger the size of the inefficiency as measured by the excess of the growth rate over the no bubble interest rate we study both exchange and production economies

will you marry me a perspective on the gender gap abstract this paper develops a general equilibrium model of the gender wage gap the difference in earnings is a consequence of a demographic regularity that men tend to marry younger women which may limit women s labor mobility and hence their average earnings however couples are always free not to marry and do so only if it is in each s self interest the intrafamily allocation of resources is determined via non cooperative bargaining this leads to interesting interactions between the game played by husband and wife on the one hand and the competitive environment in which they are immersed on the other the predictions resulting from this model s interplay between locational choice and family bargaining are consistent with the observation that the increasing stress put by women on their careers over the past 30 years has been contemporaneous with reductions in both marriage rates and the gender gap the model provides insight into the consequences of this for the relative welfare of men and women as well as exploring its wider economic implications

terms of trade and current account dynamics a methodological critique this paper suggests that the recent intertemporal studies concerning the implications of terms of trade deterioration on the current account of a small open economy may suffer from significant methodological deficiencies the study demonstrates that while the assumption of a small open economy represents a legitimate modeling simplification the analysis of the impact of perturbation of the terms of trade on the current account of this small open economy is methodologically erroneous in particular the paper demonstrates that a given pattern of terms of trade deterioration may be associated with opposing evolutionary patterns of the current account of this small economy this paper argues that the methodology employed by several influential intertemporal studies concerning the relationship between the terms of trade and the current account of a small economy suffers from critical deficiencies it demonstrates that while the assumption of a small open economy confronting exogenously determined terms of trade represents a legitimate modeling simplification the analysis of the impact of perturbations of this terms of trade on the small open economy and on its current account is methodologically erroneous in particular the paper demonstrates that a small economy may experience diametrically opposing evolutionary patterns of the current account in association with a given pattern of terms of trade deterioration the paper suggests therefore that predictions based on this literature are in need of reassessment these intertemporal studies of the relationship between the terms of trade and the current account of a small economy have been conducted under the simplifying assumption that perturbations in the terms of trade are exogenous and do not affect the world interest rate 2 this approach may reflect a valid simplification as long as the study is concerned with exportable goods whose prices are insignificant in the determination of the general price level in the world economy however if the focus of the analysis is a small country that exports a group of commodities such as agricultural goods or industrial goods a change in the terms of trade for the small economy may reflect fundamental changes in the world relative prices that are

a family production overlapping generations economy abstract this paper provides a theoretical analysis of an overlapping generations economy in which production decisions and input output allocations are all carried out at the family level i consider a single class of output allocation schemes and various degrees of knowledge about the production technology under complete knowledge i show that a family organizational structure in which everyone receives his marginal contribution to output invests less in physical capital than under a perfectly competitive equilibrium environment under incomplete knowledge i analyze and compare how beliefs about the input output relationship affect the physical capital accumulation dynamics and the long run standards of living

competitive storage and commodity price dynamics by buying cheap and selling dear risk neutral commodity speculators can smooth commodity prices and induce serial dependence in price even when none would exist under a simple process of supply and demand commodity prices are variable and strongly positively correlated from one year to the next the variability is often explained by supply factors and the autocorrelation by the activities of speculators we show that this explanation is not consistent with the evidence speculation can substantially increase autocorrelation for prices that are weakly autocorrelated in its absence but not to the high levels that are observed in the data

intergenerational altruism and the environment we construct an overlapping generations model of pollution externality in which individuals are altruistically linked to their offspring as in barro 1974 it is shown that steady state consumption may be a decreasing function of the intergenerational degree of altruism despite individuals altruism the competitive equilibrium is not optimal we thus study the social optimum and show that it can be decentralized

real interest rates home goods and optimal external borrowing the paper investigates the optimal time path of consumption and external borrowing in the dependent economy model the small country faces given world prices and a given world real interest rate the presence of a home goods sector implies that the relevant real interest rate appropriate to consumption decisions depends on the rate of change of the real price of home goods the paper shows how transitory disturbances in output or in the world real interest rate affect the time profile of consumption and the trade balance in particular it is shown that the presence of a home goods sector dampens the consumption effects of changes in the world interest rate

export restrictions and price insulation during commodity price booms for individual countries variable trade barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic relative to world prices if this is done by countries accounting for a large share of the market its effect is offset by increases in world price volatility this study shows the nature of the resulting collective action problem with the policy being ineffective on average in stabilizing domestic prices while increasing the volatility of the income transfers from terms of trade changes a simple approach to assessing the contribution of insulation to the price increases is developed and used with new estimates of agricultural distortions to assess its contribution to the price spikes in 1972 74 and 2006 08 for rice and wheat the analysis suggests that 45 percent of the increase in rice prices in 2006 08 and 30 percent of the increase in wheat prices was due to insulating behavior one sign of progress since 1972 74 was a substantial reduction in the extent of price insulating behavior by the industrial countries this provides little stabilizing benefit in the rice market because countries not classifying themselves at the world trade organization as developing account for only 3 percent of world rice consumption but it does offer some benefit for the wheat market where non developing countries account for 27 percent of consumption

expectations output and inflation the european experience abstract this paper introduces new measures of the mean and variance of inflation and growth expectations based on tendency survey data from four major european economies the expectations measures are technically irrational but more accurate than naive alternatives expectations errors do not persist for more than a year unexpected inflation and uncertainties about inflation and growth play the roles assigned them by new classical macroeconomic theory respectively raising and lowering real activity all the expectations uncertainties and errors appear more closely correlated across countries than experience would justify suggesting that unpredictable disturbances typically have an internal rather than an international origin

long term substitutability between environmental and man made goods abstract substitutability between environmental and man made goods plays a major role in the sustainability debate the notion of substitutability covers a continuous spectrum with perfect substitutability at one end and poor substitutability at the other in this paper it is shown that if economic growth sustains a sharp distinction emerges between perfect and poor substitutability without any intermediate interpretation of substitutability if poor substitutability prevails environmental resources will eventually constitute the major part of total consumption value we relate our results to baumol s disease and assess the implications of this phenomenon for the compensation of environmental losses

do oil price increases cause higher food prices us retail food price increases in recent years may seem large in nominal terms but after adjusting for inflation have been quite modest even after the change in us biofuel policies in 2006 in contrast increases in the real prices of corn soybeans wheat and rice received by us farmers have been more substantial and can be linked in part to increases in the real price of oil that link however appears largely driven by common macroeconomic determinants of the prices of oil and of agricultural commodities rather than the pass through from higher oil prices we show that there is no evidence that corn ethanol mandates have created a tight link between oil and agricultural markets moreover increases in agricultural commodity prices have contributed little to us retail food price increases because of the small cost share of agricultural products in food prices in short there is no evidence that oil price shocks have been associated with more than a negligible increase in us retail food prices in recent years nor is there evidence for the prevailing wisdom that oil price driven increases in the cost of food processing packaging transportation and distribution have been responsible for higher retail food prices similar results hold for other industrialized countries there is reason however to expect food commodity prices to be more tightly linked to retail food prices in developing countries christiane baumeister and lutz kilian

real business cycles in this paper we demonstrate how certain very ordinary economic principles lead maximizing individuals to choose consumption production plans that display many of the characteristics commonly associated with business cycles our explanation is entirely consistent with i rational expectations ii complete current information iii stable preferences iv no technological change v no long lived commodities vi no frictions or adjustment costs vii no government viii no money and ix no serial dependence in the stochastic elements of the environment we also provide a completely worked out example of the type of artificial economy we have in mind the time series properties of the example exhibit some major features of observed business cycles although this type of model may not be capable of explaining all of the regularities in actual business cycles we believe that it provides a useful well defined benchmark for assessing the relative importance of factors e g monetary disturbances

trading off volatility and distortions food policy during price spikes this paper analyses the trade off between price distortions and reduced volatility when governments intervened in agricultural and food markets during the recent food price spikes we develop a model to derive how much distortions a government would introduce when it cares about price stability in a situation with limited policy options we show that there is a trade off and identify the optimal combination of distortions and stability for given international price shocks and interest groups preferences for stability we compare these theoretical findings with empirical indicators on actual government interventions in staple food markets we find that several countries have been able to reduce short run price volatility in the domestic markets while at the same time allowing structural medium and long term price changes to pass through to producers and consumers however this is not the general case for many countries even when explicitly taking into account the trade off and the benefits of reducing volatility government policies appear far removed from the optimal trade off and there appears to be much room for policy improvement

terms of trade factor intensities and the current account in a life cycle model this paper examines the effects of terms of trade changes on the external adjustment of a small open economy where each consumer has a life cycle saving function the supply side of the economy is given by the standard two sector model with two primary factors labour and capital it is shown that when both commodities are produced a terms of trade deterioration leads to a current account deficit surplus if the export import sector is more labour intensive

inflation expectations revisited this paper describes the construction and main features of a new monthly time series for the mean and standard deviation of consumer inflation expectations in the united kingdom in the years 1961 85 based on a number of consumer surveys this involves generalizing to four and five category tendency survey data the method used by j a carlson and m parkin 1975 to quantify the results of a three category tendency survey of inflation expectations the new series exhibit very different time series properties from the original carlson parkin data copyright 1988 by the london school of economics and political science

are perceptions of inflation rational some evidence for sweden this survey paper argues that walrasian markets and monetary exchan ge are alternative not complementary arrangements for coordinating economic activity that if one realizes this many informational anomalies and price rigidities that appear irrational in a walrasia n context can be understood as the outcome of maximizing behavior in a monetary economy and that the precautionary approach to modelin g the demand for money takes on a particular importance in this way of looking at things empirical evidence on the demand for money is cite d in support of this point of view which tends to reinstate the quantity of money as an important economic variable in contrast to the new classical vision of the economy whi ch downgrades money s importance this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

international interdependence and business cycle transmission between turkey and the european union 1 introduction because of globalization and the asian financial crisis interest in the international linkages and economic comovements between different regions of the world has recently heightened one economic relationship of particular interest is the relationship between turkey and its european neighbors this relationship is important because of turkey s european orientation and because of turkey s long held ambition of joining the european union eu in view of this situation we examine the linkages and comovements of outputs prices interest rates and money supplies between turkey and europe the main question we address here is do the turkish and european economies move together through time that is are their business cycles synchronized three related questions are how or why does this synchronization or comovement take place is there any evidence of business cycle transmission between the european economies and turkey have these comovement relationships changed over time to address these questions we gathered statistics on macroeconomic variables trade linkages capital flows and historical economic events for most of the analysis germany turkey s largest trading partner is used as a proxy for the eu nations because of the limited period of availability of the quarterly data we examine the relationship using both annual and quarterly data using annual data for 1956 1998 and quarterly data for a shorter period from the first quarter of 1981 through the fourth quarter of 1998 we calculate correlations between macroeconomic variables for turkey and germany and perform principal components analysis tests of cointegration and granger causality and a structured vector autoregression svar impulse response analysis using the method of bernanke 1986 and sims 1986 the synchronization issue is investigated through the use of the graphs correlations and principal components analysis the transmission issue is investigated through the use of the granger causality tests and svar impulse response analysis our results show that the business cycle patterns of turkey and europe are quite different indeed in some cases they appear to be almost 180 out of phase in many cases the correlations between the real growth rate of turkey and those of the eu countries are statistically insignificant principal components analysis reveals a large difference between fluctuations in turkey and those in the eu countries associated regressions also show a surprisingly insignificant relationship between the real gdp growth rates for turkey and the eu and between those for turkey and germany however the svar impulse response analysis reveals a modest positive transmission from germany to turkey our conclusion is that although turkey and europe will obviously both benefit from participation in a free trade relationship with each other see harrison rutherford and tarr 1997 because of the absence of synchronization between turkey and the eu it appears that turkey would incur serious stabilization costs if it were to participate in the european monetary union in addition to the transaction benefits of participating in an optimal currency area there are economic stability losses incurred by a country joining an optimal currency area economic costs arise because a country joining an optimal currency area loses its ability to implement an independent exchange rate and monetary policy for income and unemployment stabilization see krugman and obstfeld 2000 hence countries out of sync with the rest of the countries in the group will be continuously affected by inappropriate monetary policy turkish business cycle fluctuations do not display the similarity with european business fluctuations that would make it beneficial for turkey to be a part of the european monetary union at this time 1 on the other hand dissimilarity in business cycles might make it profitable for european investors to invest in turkey for purposes of diversification

safe debt risky capital the author extends the diamond 1965 model of national debt in two directions she first introduces technological uncertainty and then she allows the stock of debt to vary the author studies the dynamical equilibria of the resulting stochastic system and she establishes conditions for the existence of stationary states that are expressed in terms of invariant distributions since conditions that ensure the existence of a stochastic stationary state with positive debt are very restrictive in this model financial instability is a pervasive phenomenon and allocations are in general dynamically inefficient copyright 1994 by the london school of economics and political science