Volume 2, Issue 1

Seminal models of herd behaviour and informational cascades point out existence of negative information externalities, and propose to ‘destroy’ information in order to achieve social improvements. Although in the last years many features of herd behaviour and informational cascades have been studied, this particular aspect has never been extensively analysed. In this article we try to fill this gap, investigating both theoretically and experimentally whether and to which extent destroying information can improve welfare. Our empirical results show that this decisional mechanism actually leads to a behaviour pattern more consistent with the theory that in turn produces the predicted efficiency gain.

Regressions and tests performed on data from Transparency International Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) 2004 survey show that personal or household experience of bribery is not a good predictor of perceptions held about corruption among the general population. In contrast, perceptions about the effects of corruption correlate consistently among themselves. However, no consistent relationship between opinions about general effects and the assessments of the extent with which corruption affects the institutions where presumably corruption is materialized is found. Countries are sharply divided between those above and below the US$ 10,000 GDP per capita line in the relationships between variables concerning corruption. Among richer countries, opinions about institutions explain very well opinions concerning certain effects of corruption, while among poorer countries the explanatory power of institutions for the effects of corruption falls. Furthermore, tests for dependence applied between the variables in the sets of respondents for each of 60 countries also show that, for most of them, it is likely that experience does not explain perceptions. On the other hand, opinions tend to closely follow the trend of other opinions. Additionally, it is found that in the GCB opinions about general effects of corruption are strongly correlated with opinions about other issues. The correlation is so strong as to justify the hypothesis that it would suffice to measure the average opinion of the general public about human rights, violence etc. to accurately infer what would be the average opinion about least petty and grand corruption. The findings reported here challenge the value of perceptions of corruption as indications of the actual incidence of the phenomenon.

A widely spread belief among economists is that monetary policy has relatively short-lived effects on real variables such as unemployment. Previous studies indicate that monetary policy affects the output gap only at business cycle frequencies, but the effects on unemployment may well be more persistent in countries with highly regulated labor markets. We study the Swedish experience of unemployment and monetary policy. Using a structural VAR we find that around 30 percent of the fluctuations in unemployment are caused by shocks to monetary policy. The effects are also quite persistent. In the preferred model, almost 30 percent of the maximum effect of a shock still remains after ten years.

This paper develops a model for analyzing the costs and benefits of intellectual property enforcement in LDCs. The North is more productive than the South and is the only source of innovator. There are two types of goods, and each bloc has a comparative advantage in producing a specific type of good. If comparative advantage is strong enough, even under piracy there are goods that the South will not produce. Piracy will then lead to a reallocation of innovative activity in favor of these goods. That may harm consumers (including consumers in the South) to the extent that these goods have smaller dynamic learning externalities than the other goods, and that their share in consumption is small. Thus, whether or not piracy is in the interest of the South depends on how important are the goods for which it has a comparative advantage to its consumers, and what the growth potential of these goods is. While, all else equal, the North tends to lose more (or gain less) from piracy than the South, because monopoly profits eventually accrue to the North, the South may lose more than the North if there is a strong enough home bias in favor of the goods for which it has a comparative advantage.

The paper develops a model of firm´s investment under uncertainty with financial market imperfections and analyzes the effects of financial constraints on firm´s investment. Firm´s investment is an increasing function of the firm´s marginal q , however the investment function is characterized by an upper bound that depends on the firm´s borrowing capabilities. The firm´s marginal q is the sum of the expected value of the marginal profitability of the physical capital stock and of a positive external finance premium. In the presence of financial market imperfections the firm forms expectations about future financial conditions and these expectations raise the firm´s current marginal q . Similarly, the shadow price of firm´s debt is the sum of the interest cost of debt repayment and of a provision for external finance that depends on the firm´s expectations over future financial conditions.

We study the Beaudry and Portier (2006)-hypothesis of delayed-technology diffusion and news-driven business cycles. For German data on TFP and stock prices we find qualitatively similar empirical evidence. Quantitatively, however, an impulse response analysis suggests that a substantial part of the total TFP response is immediate rather than delayed. We relate this to disembodied technological change and noisy data on TFP. Nevertheless, we confirm the technology interpretation of structural shocks by showing that they are Granger-causal for data on patents granted by the German patent agency. We also show that these shocks generate comovement of macro variables at business cycle horizons and account for a sizable share of the forecast error variance of these variables in the medium and long run.

This paper argues that the production constraints in the basic NAIRU model should be distinguished by type: capital constraints and labour constraints. It notes the failure to incorporate this phenomenon in standard macro models. Using panel data for UK manufacturing over 80 quarters we show that capital constraints became relatively more important during the 1980s as industry failed to match the increase in labour flexibility with rising capital investment.

To provide an modelling strategy with transparent and theoretically coherent foundation has been one of the targets of the paper by Garratt, Lee, Pesaran and Shin. They develop a core model for a small open economy based production technology, arbitrage conditions, flow identities and long-run solvency conditions. This leads to five long-run relations: the uncovered interest rate parity, the purchasing power parity, production function, trade balance and real money balance. Since the economic theory there is formulated generally but not restricted to the economy of UK for which their empirical model is implemented, we expect that this modelling strategy should be able to generate similar results for the data of other countries. In this empirical note we apply the modelling strategy to German data to see in how far the economic theory formulated there can account for German data. We are able to identify five cointegration relations in a conditional vector error correction model and the overidentification restrictions of the five cointegration relations as, UIP, PPP, production function, trade balance and real money balance are not rejected by the data.

In this paper we study the effect of the single currency across industries for euro area members. This analysis may help to shed light on the main factors influencing the euro effect on trade flows. We intend to verify whether these factors are specific to individual sectors and/or countries or common to the entire euro area. We use a dynamic specification of an augmented gravity equation. Following the most recent econometric literature, we apply the “System GMM” dynamic panel data estimator of Blundell and Bond to avoid inconsistency and biases in the estimates, and introduce controls for heterogeneity. Aggregate sector results average out country-level behaviours that, on their turn, are affected by different (unobserved) responses of firms, endowed with diverse production costs, to the enhancing and dampening impacts due to the euro. Due to this reason, the cancelling out at aggregate level of heterogenous behaviours induces an aggregation bias. So it is not surprising that when moving from sector to sector/country analysis the picture becomes much more variegated, with the emergence of a whole range of winners and losers among industries in the different nation. Our empirical results are in line with theoretical framework we assumed as reference that considers the possibility of both stimulative and dampening effects coming from trade integration and points out the fact that sector exports impacts are the aggregation results of firm-level heterogenous behaviours.

This paper surveys the current state of global empirical research on price setting behaviour at the firm level to evaluate the adequacy of pricing models used in the macro literature. To that end, it analyses the implications of 25 theoretical models (sticky information, menu costs, time dependent, costs of adjustment and customer anger models) in terms of their ability to match the key micro stylised facts. It is found that the explanatory power differs considerably across models and that many popular models are at odds with the main micro features, suggesting the need to further refine modelling strategies.

OECD unemployment rates show long swings which dominate shorter business cycle components and these long swings show a range of common patterns. Using a panel of 21 OECD countries 1960-2002, we estimate the common factor that drives unemployment by the first principal component. This factor has a natural interpretation as a measure of global expected returns, which is given added plausibility by the fact that it is almost identical to the common factor driving investment shares. We estimate a model of unemployment adjustment, which allows for the influence both of the global factor and of labour market institutions and we examine whether the global factor can act as a proxy for the natural rate in a Phillips Curve. In 15 out of the 21 countries one cannot reject that the same natural rate, as a function of the global factor, appears in both the unemployment and inflation equations. In explaining both unemployment and inflation, the global factor is highly significant, suggesting that models which ignore the global dimension are likely to be deficient.

211 estimates of the social cost of carbon are included in a meta-analysis. The results confirm that a lower discount rate implies a higher estimate; and that higher estimates are found in the gray literature. It is also found that there is a downward trend in the economic impact estimates of the climate; that the Stern Review’s estimates of the social cost of carbon is an outlier; and that the right tail of the distribution is fat. There is a fair chance that the annual climate liability exceeds the annual income of many people.

The aim of this paper is to show that random matrix theory (RMT) can be a useful addition to the economist’s tool-kit in the analysis of macro-economic time series data. A great deal of applied economic work relies upon empirical estimates of the correlation matrix. However due to the finite size of both the number of variables and the number of observations, a reliable determination of the correlation matrix may prove to be problematic. The structure of the correlation matrix may be dominated by noise rather than by true information. Random matrix theory was developed in physics to overcome this problem, and to enable true information in a matrix to be distinguished from noise. There is now a large literature in which it is applied successfully to financial markets and in particular to portfolio selection. The author illustrates the application of the technique to macro-economic time-series data. Specifically, the evolution of the convergence of the business cycle between the capitalist economies from the late 19 th century to 2006. The results are not in sharp contrast with those in the literature obtained using approaches with which economists are more familiar. However, there are differences, which RMT enables us to clarify.

Most people accept that structural and labour market reforms are needed in Europe. However few have been undertaken. The usual conjecture is that reforms are costly in economic performance and costly to finance. Blanchard and Giavazzi (2003) and Spector (2004) develop a general equilibrium model with imperfect competition to show the impact of labour or product market deregulation. We extend that model to combine these two types of reform, and then to include the effects of lowering tax distortions, the costs of financing these reforms and the conflict between long run gains and short run costs. Specifically, we use the model to explain the natural rate of unemployment and non-wage employment costs in order to show the impact of these reforms on the short and long run Phillips curve parameters. We find that structural reforms imply short run costs but long run gains; that the long run gains outweigh the short run costs; and that the financing of such reforms will be the main stumbling block. Likewise, we find an ambiguous effect on flattening the Phillips curve in the short run, but favourable effects on the natural rate in the long run. However the implications for welfare improvements and employment generation are quite distinct. Tax reforms are more effective for welfare gains, but market liberalisation is more valuable for generating employment.

In contrast to West Germany, illicit drugs were virtually absent in East Germany until 1990. However, after the collapse of the former GDR, East Germany was expected to encounter a sharp increase in substance abuse. By analyzing individual data, we find that East Germany largely caught up with West Germany’s ever-growing prevalence of cannabis use within a single decade. We decompose the west-east difference in prevalence rates into an explained and an unexplained part using a modified Blinder-Oaxaca procedure. This decomposition suggests that the observed convergence is only weakly related to socioeconomic characteristics and therefore remains mainly unexplained. That is, West and East Germans seem to have become more alike per se. We conclude that both parts of the country have converged in terms of the culture of cannabis consumption.

The paper investigates the relationship between external debt and economic growth, focusing on the role played by the policy and institutional framework. Results for a panel of 114 developing countries show that the debt-growth nexus depends on institutions and policies. The Debt-Laffer curve looses statistical significance once institutional quality is controlled for and debt overhang seems to be at work exclusively in countries with sound institutions. On the contrary, external debt proves to be irrelevant for countries with weak institutions. A policy implication is that efficient debt relief policies should be tailored to country-specific characteristics and conditional to a certain level of institutional quality.

The paper presents an economic model of interaction between cricket boards, players and international club-line games sponsors like ICL or IPL. It attempts to capture the inherent conflict between such games and country-line games traditionally organized by cricket boards. It identifies the nature of various trade offs facing these ‘players’ in the game and examines the effects of market-size changes on the composition of players, the scale of country-line and club-line games and the welfare of players and cricket boards.

A transactions model of the demand for multiple media of exchange is developed. Some results are expected, and others are both new and surprising. There are both extensive and intensive margins to currency substitution, and inflation may affect the two margins differently, leading to subtle incentives to adopt or abandon a substitute currency. Variables not previously considered in the literature affect currency substitution in complex and somewhat unexpected ways. In particular, the level of income and the composition of consumption expenditures are important, and they interact with the other variables in the model. Independent empirical work provides support for the theory.

This paper has two sources: One is my own research in three broad areas: business cycles, economic measurement and social choice. In all of these fields I attempted to apply the basic precepts of the scientific method as it is understood in the natural sciences. I found that my effort at using natural science methods in economics was met with little understanding and often considerable hostility. I found economics to be driven less by common sense and empirical evidence, than by various ideologies that exhibited either a political or a methodological bias, or both. This brings me to the second source: Several books have appeared recently that describe in historical terms the ideological forces that have shaped either the direct areas in which I worked, or a broader background. These books taught me that the ideological forces in the social sciences are even stronger than I imagined on the basis of my own experiences. The scientific method is the antipode to ideology. I feel that the scientific work that I have done on specific, long standing and fundamental problems in economics and political science have given me additional insights into the destructive role of ideology beyond the history of thought orientation of the works I will be discussing.

The most important economic measures are monetary. They have many different names, are derived in different theories and employ different formulas; yet, they all attempt to do the same thing: to separate a change in nominal value into a ‘real part’ due to the changes in quantities and an inflation due to the changes in prices. Examples are: real national product and its components, the GNP deflator, the CPI, various measures related to consumer surplus, as well as the large number of formulas for price and quantity indexes that have been proposed. The theories that have been developed to derive these measures are largely unsatisfactory. The axiomatic theory of indexes does not make clear which economic problem a particular formula can be used to solve. The economic theories are for the most part based on unrealistic assumptions. For example, the theory of the CPI is usually developed for a single consumer with homothetic preferences and then applied to a large aggregate of diverse consumers with non-homothetic preferences. In this paper I review both the general literature and my own past contributions in order to identify theories of measurement that are based on plausible economic assumptions. It turns out that all such theories lead to the Törnqvist price or quantity indexes. The paper also covers several related topics, particularly the presently unsatisfactory determination of the components of real GDP. I also propose a novel set of integrated accounts to measure changes in relative prices as well as the sectoral sources of inflation.

The paper discusses the issue of estimating short- and long-run exchange rate pass-through to import prices in euro area countries and reviews some problems with the measures recently proposed in the literature. Theoretical considerations suggest a cointegrating relationship (between import unit values, the exchange rate and foreign prices), which is typically ignored in existing empirical studies. We use time series and up-to-date panel data techniques to test for cointegration with the possibility of structural breaks and show how the long run may be restored in the estimation. The main finding is that allowing for possible breaks around the formation of EMU and the appreciation of the euro starting in 2001 helps restore a long run cointegration relationship, where over the sample period the fixed component of the pass-through decreased while the variable component tended to increase.

This study explores a new modelling approach that bridges the gap between multilateral country-level data and the bilateral-model based, goods-market specific purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis. Under this approach, PPP is embedded in latent common factors, extractable from a large set of bilateral price disparities, and tested via an error-correction model where the factors act as error-correction leading indicators for exchange rate and inflation. Significant modelling results for five OECD countries using monthly data suggest that the extant finding of insignificant PPP using similar data should be due to errors-invariables attenuation and that its correction lies in effective construction of latent variables.

This paper develops a model of the circumstances under which it is beneficial to participate in a currency area. The proposed two-country monetary model of trade with nominal rigidities encompasses the real and monetary arguments suggested by the optimum currency area literature: correlation of real and monetary shocks, international factor mobility, fiscal adjustment, openness, difference in national inflationary biases, and transactions costs. The effect of openness on the net benefits is ambiguous, contrary to the usual argument that more open economies are better candidates for a currency area. Also, prospective member countries do not necessarily agree on whether a given currency union should be created.

This lecture revisits the evidence on the incidence and severity of different varieties of financial crises within the context of globalization then (pre-1914) and now (1980 to the present). I then discuss the determinants of emerging market crises from the perspective of the recent balance sheet approach. This approach puts at center stage the importance of financial development. I then peel the onion back further and consider the “deep” institutional determinants of financial development and their relationship to financial stability. I conclude by conjecturing about the ways countries learn from their financial crises to improve their institutions and grow up to financial stability.

We compare the duration and performance of different monetary regimes, especially the contrast between countries those that fix exchange rates and those that target inflation. Inflation targeting is a more durable policy; no country has yet been forced to abandon an inflation target, while many have abandoned fixed exchange rates. Indeed, even though inflation targeting began only in 1990, the duration of inflation targeting regimes is at least as long as, or longer than all alternative monetary regimes for comparable countries. Regime duration also matters in monetary policy; older regimes are typically more successful than younger ones in achieving low inflation.

The paper shows that an IMF-like coinsurance arrangement among countries can play a useful role in the global financial system. The operation of the coinsurance arrangement is examined under different loan contracts. It shows that, if the IMF’s objective is to safeguard its resources and be concerned about the welfare of the borrower, an ex ante loan contract is more likely to create the right incentives than an ex post loan contract. Such contracts highlight the need for precommitment to contend with the Samaritan’s dilemma and time inconsistency, and state-contingent repayment schemes to deal with King Lear’s dilemma.

Using available annual data of 174 economies since 1957, we examine the similarities and differences of seven international reserve ratios. While individual international reserve ratios display substantial variations across economies, they are associated with an economy’s characteristics including geographic location, income level, stage of development, degree of indebtedness, and exchange rate regime. The association pattern varies across time and type of international reserve ratios. Interestingly, there is only limited evidence that Asian and non-Asian economies have significantly different international reserve hoarding behavior. Our results suggest that the inference about whether an economy is hoarding too many or too few international reserves depends on the choice of international reserve ratio. Further, different international reserve ratios exhibit different persistence profiles, but the evidence of dependence on structural characteristics is rather weak.

The ambition of this paper is to analyse real exchange rate dynamics in Macedonia relying on a highly disaggregated dataset. We complement the indirect evidence reported in Loko and Tuladhar (2005) and we provide direct evidence on the irrelevance of the Balassa-Samuelson effect for overall inflation via service prices in the CPI. Furthermore, we estimate variants of the BEER model. We show that alternative econometric techniques and data definitions bear an impact on the robustness of the estimation results. Overall, productivity, government consumption and the openness variables were found to be fairly robust in terms of sign and size. An increase/decrease in the productivity variables is associated with an appreciation/depreciation of the real effective exchange rate. Given that the B-S effect admittedly has a very limited role to play through nontradable prices in the CPI, this relationship could be explained by the (inverse) quality effect proposed by Loko and Tuladhar and, possibly in addition to that, by the nontradable component of tradable prices.

Empirical analyses of Cagan’s money demand schedule for hyper-inflation have largely ignored the explosive nature of hyper-inflationary data. It is argued that this contributes to an (i) inability to model the data to the end of the hyper-inflation, and to (ii) discrepancies between “estimated” and “actual” inflation tax. Using data from the extreme Yugoslavian hyper-inflation it is shown that a linear analysis of levels of prices and money fails in addressing these issues even when the explosiveness is taken into account. The explanation is that log real money has random walk behaviour while the growth of log prices is explosive. A simple solution to these issues is found by replacing the conventional measure of inflation by the cost of holding money.

Using a panel data set for OECD countries we replicate the typical features of the New Keynesian Phillips curve models (NPCs) that have been estimated on country data. While this corroborates the NPC also on the macro panel data set, a different conclusion is reached when we test whether the NPC encompasses an existing model of inflation which is without feed-forward terms, but which allows for other adjustment factors than the NPC. We find that the NPC’s expected rate of future inflation and real marginal costs are weak explanatory variables, and that their statistical significance in the typical NPC is due to correlation with the equilibrium correction terms that are implied by the existing inflation model. Our results are in line with the relatively few encompassing studies that exist on country and area data.

I apply the Johansen and Swensen (1999, 2004) method of testing exact rational expectations within the cointegrated VAR (Vector Auto-Regressive) model, to testing the New Keynesian (NK) model. This method permits the testing of rational expectation systems, while allowing for non-stationary data. The NK-model is tested on quarterly U.S. and Euro area time series data. I find that the restrictions implied by the core equations of the NK-model are rejected regardless of sample periods or measures of real marginal costs. I also provide a tentative explanation of the results favored by previous researches.

Empirical evidence on the expectations hypothesis of the term structure is in-conclusive and its validity widely debated. Using a cointegrated VAR model of US treasury yields, this paper extends a common approach to test the theory. If, as we find, spreads between two yields are non-stationary, the expectations hypothesis fails. However, we present evidence that differences between two spreads are stationary. This suggests that the curvature of the yield curve may be a more meaningful indicator of expected future interest rates than the slope. Furthermore, we characterise level and slope by deriving the common trends inherent in the cointegrated VAR, and establish feedback patterns between them and the macroeconomy.

This paper proposes an econometric evaluation of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC) in the euro area, under a particular specification of the adaptive learning hypothesis. The key assumption is that agents’ perceived law of motion is a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model, whose coefficients are updated by maximum likelihood estimation as the information set increases over time. Each time new data is available, likelihood ratio tests for the cross-equation restrictions that the NKPC imposes on the VAR coefficients are computed and compared with a proper set of critical values, which take the sequential nature of the test into account. The analysis focuses on the case in which the variables can be approximated as nonstationary cointegrated processes. Results on quarterly data relative to the period 1981−2006 show that: (i) the euro area inflation rate and the wage share are cointegrated, although their relationship does not appear stable during the eighties and first nineties; (ii) the cointegrated version of the ‘hybrid’ NKPC is sharply rejected under the rational expectations hypothesis; (iii) the NKPC is rejected also when the model is evaluated under a particular formulation of the adaptive learning hypothesis over the monitoring period 1986−2006.

The present value model of the current account has been very popular, as it provides an optimal benchmark to which actual current account series have often been compared. We show why persistence in observed current account data makes the estimated optimal series very sensitive to small-sample estimation error, making it almost impossible to determine whether the consumption-smoothing current account tracks the actual current account closely, or not closely at all. Moreover, the standard Wald test of the model will falsely accept or reject the model with substantial probability. Monte Carlo simulations and estimations using annual and quarterly data from five OECD countries strongly support our predictions. In particular, we conclude that two important consensus results in the literature – that the optimal series is highly correlated with the actual series, but substantially less volatile – are not statistically robust.

Examples of simple economic theory models are analyzed as restrictions on the Cointegrated VAR (CVAR). This establishes a correspondence between basic economic concepts and the econometric concepts of the CVAR: The economic relations correspond to cointegrating vectors and exogeneity in the economic model is related to econometric concepts of exogeneity. The economic equilibrium corresponds to the so-called long-run value (Johansen 2005), the long-run impact matrix, C; captures the comparative statics and the exogenous variables are the common trends. The adjustment parameters of the CVAR are related to expectations formation, market clearing, nominal rigidities, etc. Finally, the general-partial equilibrium distinction is analyzed.

We evaluate the Swedish inflation targeting regime adopted in 1993−1995 using a novel approach based on a unique data set on the characteristics of collective wage agreements between 1908 and 2008. We find that the inflation targeting regime of 1995−2008 stands out as an exceptionally stable policy regime as judged by the willingness of wage contract-makers to repeatedly commit to three-year non-indexed wage agreements. Inflation targeting gained instant credibility in the sense that the labor market organizations entered long-term wage agreements at the same time as this new regime was announced. Inflation targeting has thus reduced macroeconomic uncertainty compared to previous regimes adopted in Sweden, including the gold standard before and after World War I, the price level targeting of the 1930s, the Bretton Woods period of fixed exchange rates. As judged by the reactions of the labor market participants, inflation targeting in Sweden is a success―at least so far. Published as Policy Paper