does it matter how monetary policy is implemented abstract in the u s existing monetary base measures add an adjustment factor for changes in reserve requirement ratios to high powered money implicitly the monetary base assumes that the economic effects of changes in reserve requirements are identical to those due to changes in high powered money theory however does not generally support the prediction that the two policy tools will have the same economic effects structural vars are estimated to compare the short run paths of inflation and output growth under two different types of policy shocks in doing so this analysis gives one a measure of the costs associated with this implicit equivalence assumption the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the federal reserve at least partially offsets reserve requirement changes with open market operations and the hypothesis that dynamic explanations of macroeconomic variables are improved by separating reserve requirement changes from other monetary policy moves

the information value of the fomc policy directive under the new operating procedures the federal reserve s federal open market committee fomc meets every one to two months to determine its monetary policy objectives over the near term at the conclusion of each meeting the fomc issues a policy directive to the system s account manager at the new york federal reserve bank specifying short run money growth targets and a federal funds interest rate tolerance range the policy directive is not disclosed to the public until after the next meeting when a new directive becomes effective in an earlier paper o brien 1981 evidence was presented suggesting that immediate disclosure of the fomc policy directives over the period january 1976 june 1979 would have improved the accuracy of market expectations of near term interest rate levels by no more than minor amounts in this paper we examine the information value of the fomc policy directives in predicting near term levels of interest rates urder the federal reserve s revised operating procedures adopted in late october 1979 but modified in late 1982 in the next section the interest rate information value of the fomc policy directive is discussed in terms of a simple money demand and supply model

a note on discount rate policy and the variability of discount window borrowing abstract the purpose of this note is to evaluate the appropriate discount rate policy rules consistent with minimization of the variability of borrowing at the federal reserve discount window in the context of goodfriend s 1983 model of the bank borrowing decision it is demonstrated that either a penalty rate or a subsidy rate policy will produce minimized variability of borrowing so long as the subsidy rate adjusts point for point to changes in the value of the federal funds rate these policy rules are compatible with a policy procedure designed to target borrowed or non borrowed reserves if the fed does not adhere to one of these specific rules minimization of borrowing variability requires an open market procedure in which the fed pegs the federal funds rate

a note on interest on required reserves as an instrument of monetary control abstract the purpose of this paper is to evaluate the potential role of interest on required reserves as a monetary control instrument it is found that an increase in the interest rate paid on reserves held at the federal reserve has counteracting effects on the variability of the money stock hence there is an optimal setting for the interest rate on required reserves that theoretically may include or lie anywhere between the extreme cases of no interest payment and the payment of interest at the maximum feasible level

electoral outcomes with probabilistic voting and nash social welfare maxima abstract this paper provides unexpected support to nash s view of how bargaining determines the social choice we first present a spatial model of electoral competition with probabilistic voting and a very close relation between voters preferences and their choice probabilities the outcome of the electoral competition game is then shown to be precisely the social alternative that maximizes a nash type social welfare function theorem 1 this electoral outcome is also interpreted as a unanimity likelihood maximum corollary 1 within our framework existence and uniqueness of such an outcome are guaranteed corollaries 2 and 3

the federal reserve s new operating procedures a post mortem abstract although money stock targeting has been the strategic focus of federal reserve policy since the mid 1970 s operating policy the tactics whereby the longer run strategy is implemented over short term intervals has been changed by the federal reserve at least twice over this period a particularly dramatic change in operating policy was announced by the federal reserve in october 1979 this paper provides empirical evidence that settles questions about the nature of this change and suggests that the new operating procedures may have contributed to the heightened interest rate volatility experienced over the 1979 to 1982 period

u s treasury bill forward and futures prices for the period 1976 87 forward rates on u s t bills averaged more than 30 basis points above the comparable futures market rates since risk is common to both rates i argue that this difference can be explained by the substitutability of different maturity t bills for money consistent with this hypothesis i find that this difference depends positively on interest rates and the spread between the federal funds and 3 month t bill rates and negatively on the ratio of short term governments to broadly defined money also significant shifts occurred in the relationship in october 1979 and august 1982 coinciding with changes in federal reserve operating procedures copyright 1994 by ohio state university press

effectiveness of electoral systems for reducing government corruption a game theoretic analysis abstract a theoretical model is developed for predicting the relative effectiveness of different electoral systems for reducing government corruption we consider voting games in which parties with known corruption levels and known positions on a major policy question compete for legislative seats we find that approval voting and proportional representation are fully effective in the sense that all equilibria exclude corrupt parties from legislative seats plurality voting is partly effective in the sense that there always exist some equilibria that exclude corrupt parties borda voting is ineffective because for some political situations no equilibria can guarantee the exclusion of corrupt parties journal of economic literature classification number d72

federal reserve operating procedures a survey and evaluation of the historical record since october 1979 comment william poole has produced another thoughtful and thought provoking paper two major conclusions emerge from his work first the instability of growth in m1b since october 1979 can be attributed largely to a reluctance by the federal reserve to permit wide enough swings in the federal funds rate second to correct this problem and to promote greater stability in financial markets and the economy the fed ought to replace lagged with contemporaneous reserve accounting and reform the discount window they should then begin to hit a nonborrowed base or reserves target that grows at a steady rate i will organize my comments around these two conclusions i will not comment directly on the other excellent paper in this session by ralph c bryant i will refer to some of bryant s empirical work though in my discussion of the poole paper poole attributes the continued extensive volatility of m1b growth since october 1979 to efforts by the federal reserve to smooth interest rates he concedes that the fed really has let go the federal funds rate to a very considerable extent but he believes that variability in m1b growth over tonger periods is due primarily to the important role accorded interest rates in federal reserve policy making italics mine he cites four reasons for believing that the post october 1979 targeting procedures qualitatively are not very different from the federal funds targeting procedure followed earlier of the four the most interesting and empirically verifiable is that in nearly one third of the weeks since october 1979 the federal funds rate has averaged within 100 basis points of either the bottom or the top of the widened target range during these weeks the constraint on the funds rate might have prevented the fed from hitting its nonborrowed reserves target poole in fact accepts this view uncritically

towards micropolitical foundations of public finance abstract observed fiscal policy reflects the incentives embedded in political institutions in this paper we illustrate the effects of two general institutional features separation of powers which is common in presidential congressional political systems and legislative cohesion which is typical of parliamentary systems compared to a simple legislative game separation of powers brings about a smaller size of government and lower waste legislative cohesion induces a more equal distribution but more waste and higher taxes than separation of powers

the 1979 federal reserve policy shift some evidence using causality tests on 6 october 1979 the fomc announced a shift from federal funds rate ffr to nonborrowed reserves nbr targeting the sequence of events preceding this major policy change are well known and require only a brief recounting here prior to the 1979 announcement the fomc implemented monetary policy by confining the ffr to a narrow band about 50 to 100 basis points in width any tendency for the rate to move outside this range was countered by providing more or fewer nbr to the banking system the underlying assumption upon which this strategy was based was that money demand was stable the fed could then control the money stock by altering interest rates thereby moving the public along a fixed money demand function during the mid 1970s however various events in the money market e g income and supply shocks financial innovation and portfolio readjustments lessened the stability of money demand and brought the twin objectives of monetary control and financial market stability into frequent conflict the record shows that these conflicts were usually resolved in favor of interest rate stability rather than monetary control the consequence of ffr targeting was inflation attempts to maintain a stable ffr at the operating level in the face of money demand shifts forced the central bank to exceed its money growth targets for periods long enough to increase nominal aggregate demand in the economy with the adoption of the nbr strategy the fed attempted to achieve better control over inflation by short circuiting the endogenous influences of spending on the growth of the money stock in contrast to the pre 1979 policy spending shocks would now be reflected in ffr movements which would to some extent generate pressures to return money growth to its desired path subsequent to the announced policy shift there was much doubt about whether the federal reserve was successfully executing a nbr plan the gist of this skepticism centers on the belief that the new procedures were technically flawed specifically that reserves targeting when combined with lagged reserve accounting and borrowings projection errors resulted in short run accommodation increased interest rate and money growth volatility

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

federal reserve interest rate targeting rational expectations and the term structure abstract the amount of information in the yield curve for forecasting future changes in short rates varies with the maturity of the rates involved indeed spreads between certain long and short rates appear unrelated to future changes in the short rate contrary to the rational expectations hypothesis of the term structure this paper estimates a daily model of federal reserve interest rate targeting behavior which accompanied by the maintained hypothesis of rational expectations explains the varying predictive ability of the yield curve and elucidates the link between fed policy and the term structure

balanced budget redistribution as the outcome of political competition this paper models balanced budget redistribution between socio economic groups as the outcome of electoral competition between two political parties equilibrium is unique in the present model and a sufficient condition for existence is given requiring that there be enough stochastic heterogeneity with respect to party preferences in the electorate the validity of hotelling s principle of minimum differentiation and of director s law are examined under alternative hypotheses concerning administrative costs of redistributions and voter s possibilities both of abstaining from voting and of becoming campaign activists for one of the parties the policy strategy of expected plurality maximization is contrasted with the strategy of maximizing the probability of gaining a plurality incomes are fixed and known so lump sum taxation is feasible however constraints on tax transfer differentiation between individuals are permitted in the analysis

federal reserve control of the money stock comment it is widely believed that the money stock of the united states somehow defined should play a central role in the conduct of federal reserve monetary policy in particular it is believed that the federal reserve should publicly announce a target time path for the money stock and then try to make the actual stock follow that path closely the analytical basis for this approach to federal reserve policy however is seriously deficient unfortunately moreover debate about this approach seldom focuses on the important controversial issues about which views can justifiably differ instead the debate often becomes mired in confusion and false issues one important source of confusion is an inadequate analysis of the operating procedures through which the federal reserve implements its policy from one short run period to the next a second source is a widespread misperception of the economic processes determining the money stock most noneconomists and even many economists seem to believe that the federal reserve can straightforwardly cause the money stock to follow a target path closely month by month provided only that the federal reserve conscientiously tries to do so a third source of confusion is a poor understanding of the two stage decision process implicit in the

the banking industry under uncertain monetary policy abstract the optimal loan decisions of banks are shown to be dependent on the banks rational forecast of the future federal funds rate which in turn is related to the policy rule used by the fed consequently a change in the policy of the fed will alter the reduced form model of the banking industry this result brings into question the fed s ability to predict and control the money stock under the procedure adopted by the fed between october 1979 and september 1982

the policy evaluation problem and the demand for money abstract this paper applies the lucas policy evaluation proposition to the money demand function we find some support for the hypothesis that the decrease in serial correlation of interest rates since the fed policy change in 1979 has resulted in an increase in the estimated elasticity of money demand

dynamic monetary control and interest rate stabilization abstract interest rate stabilization results in an instrument shortage that complicates monetary control by introducing strategic considerations into the trading desk s decision problem the paper demonstrates that when expected future open market operations influence current bank and depositor behavior an instrument shortage is necessary and sufficient for the commitment policy to be time inconsistent and for the discretionary policy to be suboptimal i e worse than the commitment policy the moving average component of the commitment policy is of higher order than the discretionary policy under either regime the expected value of the representative bank is increasing in the trading desk s emphasis on interest rate stability

the relation between money growth variability and the variability of money about target abstract an increase in the speed at which the fed returns the money stock to its targeted path following a stochastic shock can cause a lower variance of money about the targeted level while causing a greater variance of the growth rate of the money stock

r d competition versus r d cooperation in oligopolistic markets with evolving structure this paper considers investment behavior of duopolistic firms subject to technological progress it is assumed that initially both firms offer a homogeneous product but after a stochastic waiting time they are able to implement a product innovation production capacities of both firms are product specific it is shown that firms anticipate a future product innovation by under investing if the new product is a substitute to the established product and higher profits and over investing in case of complements and lower profits compared to the corresponding standard capital accumulation game this anticipation effect is stronger in the case of r d cooperation furthermore since due to r d cooperation firms introduce the new product at the same time this leads to intensified competition and lower firm profits right after the new product has been introduced in addition we show that under r d competition the firm that innovates first overshoots in new product capacity buildup in order to exploit its temporary monopoly position taking into account all these effects the result is that if the new product is neither a close substitute nor a strong complement of the established product positive synergy effects in r d cooperation are necessary to make it more profitable for firms than r d competition

incumbent performance and electoral control in the pure theory of electoral competition citizens compare the platforms of the candidates and vote for the one whose platform is preferred candidate strategies are identified with promises about future performance in office models of this sort have been developed in both static mckelvey 1975 and dynamic kramer 1977 i settings and all appear to have the property that if the set of alternatives is large enough in some sense equilibrium platforms rarely exist but these models have another feature that is quite as disturbing as their instability in the static setting discussed by mckelvey little attention is paid to the possibility that once in office the politician s preferences may diverge from those of his constituents and that he may therefore choose policies at variance from his platform instead it is simply assumed that promises will be kept whether or not such behavior is congruent with the interest of the officeholder it is sometimes argued that an enforcement mechanism may exist to discipline politicians for failing to keep promises but without a specification of the mechanism it is not obvious that it would be in the interests of the

monetary policy lessons of recent inflation and disinflation by 1975 most economists agreed that the money demand function in the united states was reasonably stable and could serve as a reliable basis for the formulation of monetary policy those suspicious of monetarism were on the defensive in the light of the apparently inexorable increase of m1 velocity of about three percent per year with deviations of only a few tenths of a percent experience with rising money growth and rising inflation through 1980 only confirmed monetarist views as figure 1 shows all this had changed by 1986 with disinflation in the 1980s m1 velocity departed convincingly from its 1953 79 trend the money demand function seems to have fallen apart and is apparently not a reliable basis for monetary policy after all consequently the first major section following this introduction is devoted to the decline of velocity after 1981 and the demise of the standard money demand function some authors including i believe benjamin friedman conclude that this evidence leaves us so uncertain about the nature of money demand that policymakers cannot rely at all on any presumed money demand regularities in contrast my working hypothesis is that the money demand continues to be a stable function of relatively few variables but that the interest elasticity of money demand is substantially higher than previously thought others have sought money demand explanations in terms of regime shifts but that literature will not be discussed here events have not been kind to keynesian monetary policy positions either keynesians tend to concentrate on interest rates especially real interest rates as the best guide to the effects of monetary policy on the economy the real rate is discussed

intermediate monetary targets and macroeconomic fluctuations it is investigated whether the choice of intermediate target has altered macroeconomic fluctuations and whether the observed changes are consistent with predictions from economic theory since implications from the theoretical literature focus on the effects of structural disturbances an empirical analysis must identify these effects the structural vector autoregressive var technique estimates structural disturbances using restrictions from standard macroeconomic theory based on descriptions of actual targeting procedures by insiders to federal reserve policy decisions the intermediate target for the united states is identified as the interest rate from 1951 to 1969 and money from 1970 to 1986 var models are estimated over each subsample to assess whether the estimated structural disturbances cause endogenous variables to behave as economic theory predicts tests are also performed to assess whether or not the targeting rule affects the variance of endogenous variables attributable to structural sh

the return of the liquidity effect a study of the short run relation between money growth and interest rates in this article i use band pass filters to investigate the short run relationship between money growth and interest rates i find a negative correlation between short run movements in money growth and interest rates which i interpret as evidence that the liquidity effect dominates the anticipated inflation effect

1979 1982 rules or discretion in monetary policy gregory hoelscher what determined m1 growth from november 1979 through october 1982 a reaction function is developed and tested which ascribes the level of ml to two fed motives one is the fed s desire to hit its money growth targets the other is to carry out a counter cyclical short run monetary policy both motives are found to be significant during the period this evidence is consistent with the contention of some economists that the period was not a valid test of monetarist policy rules i introduction in october of 1979 the federal reserve system announced that it would use a new operating procedure that would allow it to place strong emphasis on controlling ml this policy shift from an interest rate target regime to a non borrowed reserves target regime was widely considered as tacit acceptance of the monetarist doctrine monetarists had been calling for a policy of stable gradually declining and pre announced money growth paths the change in operating procedure was designed to give the fed greater control over ml and to dramatize the fed s commitment to slowing money growth and inflation at the time many expected the new operating policy to result in a more stable money growth path at the expense of some short term interest rate variability the rate of inflation fell from 13 3 percent in 1979 to 3 9 percent in 1982 but the variability of both short term interest rates and of money growth increased substantially ore importantly the economy slipped into a brief recession in early 1980 and a longer and much more severe one in late 1981 by october 1982 the fed announced that it would de emphasize ml as a target variable but would continue to monitor the broader monetary aggregates thus a three year monetarist inspired experiment came to an end benjamin friedman 1984 and bryant 1983 argue that the events of 1979 82 demonstrate that monetarism as a policy guide is inadequate other economists disagree with these criticisms milton friedman 1984 mccallum 1984 and poole 1982 blame the high variance of monthly or quarterly growth rates in m1 for the poor post 1979 performance of the economy this paper assesses formally the determinants of m1 growth during the 1979 82 period if the fed was attempting to use m1 to fine tune the real sector then the argument that the 1979 82 period was not a valid test of the monetarist approach to monetary policy is that much stronger on the other hand if changes in m1 cannot be explained by fine tuning motives then perhaps the period does represent a test of monetarist policies the next section discusses the reaction function used in the paper section iii describes the data and the test results the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that the money growth targets and either of two measures of real economic performance the unemployment rate and industrial production were significant determinants of fed policy during the late 1979 to late 1982 period section iv contains conclusions ii methodology the empirical tests use a reaction function the use of a reaction function does not imply that the federal reserve board or the open market committee explicitly acts in accordance with the function the reaction function is instead an as if assumption the fed is assumed to act as if it minimizes a loss function reaction functions have been estimated by a large number of authors barth sickles and wiest 1982 summarize many of the papers published in 1978 and earlier they report that unemployment and to a lesser extent inflation were most commonly cited as significant determinants of federal reserve policy during various portions of the 1952 77 period more recent papers by abrams froyen and waud 1980 levy 1981 allen and smith 1983 bradley 1984 witte 1984a 1984b and bradley and potter 1986 have extended the literature by including additional variables and time periods in the analysis

value and risk dynamics over the innovation cycle this paper studies investment in intellectual capital and corresponding value and risk dynamics over the innovation cycle we assume that the innovation cycle consists of three phases r d trial and market introduction phases we use a real option investment model to characterize firm value and risk dynamics over the innovation cycle and find that firm value is the sum of the value of assets in place and non linear option values related to breakthrough exit and market introduction options firm risk over the innovation cycle is highly non linear and quite distinct in different phases during the r d phase risk is high as the firm faces high operating leverage originating from r d fixed costs together with technological uncertainty during the trial phase risk is significantly lower and dominated by option risk to launch the product in the market while after the introduction of the product in the market risk is equivalent to the asset risk of the company our model is consistent with the view that positive excess returns of r d intensive firms are a compensation for risk based on this insight we derive several testable predictions

trade interdependence and the international business cycle a stochastic general equilibrium model of the world economy is developed to analyze the contribution of trade interdependence to international business cycles we test some of the implications of the model using data from ten major industrial countries and a variety of detrending techniques to calculate the cyclical component of output we find that the significance of trade in the transmission of economic disturbances across countries is not robust to the choice of the detrending method in general the role of trade interdependence is moderate and seem to have been stronger in the period before 1973

risk premia and preemption in r d ventures i analyze the impact of competition on the risk premia of r d ventures engaged in a multiple stage patent race with technical and market uncertainty after solving in closed form for the case of a two stage race in continuous time i show that a firm s risk premium decreases as a consequence of technical progress and increases when a rival pulls ahead compared to the case where firms collude r d competition erodes the option value to mothball a project reduces the completion time and the failure rate of r d and causes higher and more volatile risk premia numerical simulations reveal that competition can generate risk premia up to 500 annual basis points higher and up to three times more volatility than in a collusive industry

a dynamic game of r and d patent protection and competitive behavior a theory of dynamic optimal resource allocation to r and d in an n firm industry is developed using differential games this technique represents a synthesis of the analytic methods previously applied to the problem static game theory and optimal control the use of particular functional forms allows the computation and detailed discussion of the nash equilibrium in investment rules this paper addresses the problem of resource allocation to research and development among the important issues that a firm engaging in r and d must evaluate are uncertainty regarding the feasibility and profitability of a particular innovation the possibility of a protracted development period the possibility that a rival firm may innovate first capturing either a patent or a significant share of the new market the possibility that a rival firm may imitate the innovation and appropriate some of the profits in the new market in what follows we will develop a theory of optimal resource allocation to research and development which incorporates the aspects of r and d enumerated above we will use a dynamic game theoretic analysis determining the nash equilibrium strategies for n identical firms the availability of perfect patent protection is shown to accelerate development of the innovation and the effect of increasing rivalry is addressed the impact of increasing rivalry on nash equilibrium investment in r and d depends upon the degree of appropriability of rewards if patent protection is perfect then increasing the number of nash rivals results in increased r and d effort however when imitation is rewarded the opposite may be true finally some notions of competitive and perfectly competitive equilibrium are examined in the context of the model developed below