Download or read book The Young Person s Guide to Neutrality Price Level Indeterminacy Interest Rate Pegs and Fiscal Theories of the Price Level written by Willem H. Buiter and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 62 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The paper establishes the following: First, money is neutral even if there is a non-zero stock of non-monetary nominal public debt, because the government adjusts real taxes to satisfy its intertemporal budget constraint. Second, Woodford's fiscal theory of the price level, according to which for certain fiscal rules the (initial) price level is independent of the nominal money stock, is invalid. It combines an overdetermined fiscal-financial program with an unwarranted weakening of the government's intertemporal budget constraint, requiring it to hold only in equilibrium, and only for arbitrarily restricted configurations of public spending, taxes and initial debt stocks. Third, there is price level determinacy under an exogenous nominal interest rate rule if the transactions technology has cash-in-advance features. The price level is hysteretic in this case. Finally, it is not possible to draw inferences about the historical process of technological improvements in the transactions technology leading to a cashless economy, by studying the limiting behavior, as a transactions efficiency index takes on successively higher values of a sequence of histories, each one of which is indexed for all time by a given level of efficiency.
Download or read book Monetary Unions written by Forrest Capie and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has prompted much discussion. This book stands back and considers the relevant theory or what lessons might be drawn from other unions that have been formed as well as looking at EMU directly.
Download or read book The Fallacy of the Fiscal Theory of the Price Level written by Willem H. Buiter and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is not common for an entire scholarly literature to be based on a fallacy, that is, 'on faulty reasoning; misleading or unsound argument'. The 'fiscal theory of the price level', recently re-developed by Woodford, Cochrane, Sims and others, is an example of a fatally flawed research programme. The source of the fallacy is an economic misspecification. The proponents of the fiscal theory of the price level do not accept the fundamental proposition that the government's intertemporal budget constraint is a constraint on the government's instruments that must be satisfied for all admissible values of the economy-wide endogenous variables. Instead they require it to be satisfied only in equilibrium. This economic misspecification has implications for the mathematical or logical properties of the equilibria supported by models purporting to demonstrate the properties of the fiscal approach. These include: overdetermined (internally inconsistent) equilibria; anomalies like the apparent ability to price things that do not exist; the need for arbitrary restrictions on the exogenous and predetermined variables in the government's budget constraint; and anomalous behaviour of the equilibrium' price sequences, including behaviour that will ultimately violate physical resource constraints. The issue is of more than academic interest. Policy conclusions could be drawn from the fiscal theory of the price level that would be harmful if they influenced the actual behaviour of the fiscal and monetary authorities. The fiscal theory of the price level implies that a government could exogenously fix its real spending, revenue and seigniorage plans, and that the general price level would adjust the real value of its contractual nominal debt obligations so as to ensure government solvency. When reality dawns, the result could be painful fiscal tightening, government default, or unplanned recourse to the inflation tax.
Download or read book Monetary Theory as a Basis for Monetary Policy written by A. Leijonhufvud and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-03-11 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the inflationary 1970s, theoretical work on monetary policy has concentrated almost exclusively on price-level stabilization and the avoidance of nominal shocks. In the aftermath of the collapse of financial bubbles in various parts of the world, the accomplishments and limitations of this dominant approach are debated in this volume edited by Axel Leijonhufvud, with contributions by a number of noted monetary economists, including Nobel Laureate Robert Lucas.
Download or read book Working Paper Series written by and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Central Banks as Fiscal Players written by Willem Buiter and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-12 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is well known that the balance sheets of most major central banks significantly expanded in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-2011, but the consequences of this expansion are not well understood. This book develops a unified framework to explain how and why central bank balance sheets have expanded and what this shift means for fiscal and monetary policy. Buiter addresses a number of key issues in monetary economics and public finance, including how helicopter money works, when modern monetary theory makes sense, why the Eurosystem has a potentially fatal design flaw, why the fiscal theory of the price level is a fallacy and how to escape from the zero lower bound.
Download or read book Handbook of Research on Public Finance in Europe and the MENA Region written by Erdo?du, M. Mustafa and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the 1970s, globalization has created an economic environment of interdependency between nations. Now, many countries in European and the MENA (Middle East and Northern Africa) regions must grapple with the need to increase public revenue while maneuvering through a global “race-to-the-bottom” tax competition. The Handbook of Research on Public Finance in Europe and the MENA Region explores economic development and public finance by providing critical insight into the use of public finance and policy and illuminating the intricacies of these topics through discussion of theory, empirical work, and policy objectives. This book is ideally designed for business professionals, policy makers, financers, students and researchers in the fields of public policy and economics.
Download or read book NBER Reporter written by National Bureau of Economic Research and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fiscal Discipline and Exchange Rate Regimes written by Matthew B. Canzoneri and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fundamentals Or Population Dynamics and the Geographic Distribution of U S Biotechnology Enterprises 1976 1989 written by Lynne G. Zucker and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 82 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Population ecology models are elegant in form and adequate in describing aggregate data, but poor in telling stories and predicting the location of growth. Fundamentals models emphasizing the variables central to resource mobilization, such as intellectual human capital, can predict where and when biotechnology enterprises emerge and agglomerate. Density dependence and previous founding dependence proxy many underlying processes; the legitimation and competition interpretation is more conjectural than empirically tenable. We argue and demonstrate for biotechnology that an alternative model based on the fundamentals related to resource reallocation and mobilization provides a stronger frame to explore industry formation. Fundamentals models outperform population ecology models in the estimations, while a combined model driven by fundamentals but incorporating weak population dynamics does best. In repeated dynamic simulations, the population ecology model predictions are essentially uncorrelated with the panel data on biotechnology entry by year and region while the combined model has correlation coefficients averaging above 0.8.
Download or read book Bulletin written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Theoretical Issues Pertaining to Monetary Unions written by Bennett T. McCallum and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 50 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The optimal currency area (OCA) concept is central to the economic analysis of monetary unions, as it clearly identifies the relevant optimizing tradeoff: extension of the area over which a single currency is used enhances allocative efficiency but reduces the possibility of tailoring monetary policy to the needs of different areas. Empirical work has verified the importance of various features of economies that make them strong or weak candidates for a common currency arrangement, but existing studies do not permit actual quantification of costs and benefits. Thus the OCA concept remains less than fully operational. A second relevant body of theory is that pertaining to currency crises. Formal models clarify various points concerning speculative attacks on fixed exchange rates, and show how abrupt reserve losses and depreciations can occur rationally at times when no major shocks are hitting the system. These models support the notion that a fixed (but adjustable) exchange- rate regime is not a viable option for most nations, given high mobility of financial capital. Also discussed is the recently- developed fiscal theory of price level determination, which if valid would have major implications for monetary-fiscal arrangements in currency unions. This theory does not contend that fiscal behavior drives an accommodative monetary authority, but rather that the price level roughly mimics the pattern of the government bond stock rather than base money when their paths differ drastically. An example is exposited in which there are two rational expectations solutions for an economy with a constant money supply: a traditional solution in which the price level is also constant and a fiscalist solution in which the price level and bond stock both explode as time passes. These solutions represent competing hypotheses about the behavior of actual economies; the paper suggests that the former is more likely to prevail in actuality.
Download or read book Monetary Policy Shocks written by Lawrence J. Christiano and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper reviews recent research that grapples with the question: What happens after an exogenous shock to monetary policy? We argue that this question is interesting because it lies at the center of a particular approach to assessing the empirical plausibility of structural economic models that can be used to think about systematic changes in monetary policy institutions and rules. The literature has not yet converged on a particular set of assumptions for identifying the effects of an exogenous shock to monetary policy. Nevertheless, there is considerable agreement about the qualitative effects of a monetary policy shock in the sense that inference is robust across a large subset of the identification schemes that have been considered in the literature. We document the nature of this agreement as it pertains to key economic aggregates.
Download or read book The Unequal Work Day written by Dora L. Costa and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 24 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I investigate how the distribution of daily hours worked among prime-aged men has changed since the 1890s by occupational and industrial group and by the hourly wage. I find that although hours of work have fallen for all workers, the decline was disproportionately large among the lowest paid workers. In the past hours worked were very unevenly distributed with the lowest paid workers working the longest day whereas today it is the highest paid workers who work the longest day. I argue that much of the change in the relative length of the work day can be accounted for by changes in the number of daily hours workers are willing to supply. I show that the unequal distribution of work hours in the past equalized income and that in recent times the unequal distribution of hours worked magnifies income disparities, suggesting that wage or wealth data may underestimate long-run improvements in the welfare of the lowest paid workers.
Download or read book Cyclical Movements in Wages and Consumption in a Bargaining Model of Unemployment written by Julio Rotemberg and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper considers a model where individual workers bargain with firms over their wages and where their bargaining power is so strong that some workers are unemployed. The result is that an increase in the elasticity of demand facing individual firms raises employment (as in the case where the labor market clears) but that wages rise only modestly. In fact, consistent with the findings of Wilson (1997), some job-specific wages actually fall. Nonetheless, average wages may rise either because wages of non-rationed workers rise or because there is cyclical upgrading of jobs. Assuming that workers are also rationed in financial markets, the increase in employment that accompanies the increase in the demand elasticity for individual products also increases consumption substantially. Thus, the model rationalizes the finding that real wages rise less in booms than does consumption. At the same time, the model is consistent with a lack of secular movements in hours and unemployment as well as a secular proportionality of consumption and real wages.
Download or read book Monetary and Exchange Rate Policies EMU and Central and Eastern Europe written by David K. H. Begg and published by Centre for Economic Policy Research. This book was released on 1999 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report examines European transition economies and their need to find a robust strategy for macroeconomic policy in the period leading up to accession and in preparation for joining EMU.
Download or read book Price Indexes for the Treatment of Depression written by Richard G. Frank and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 52 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We construct price indexes for treatment of a specific illness, acute phase major depression, using treatment episodes of care (rather than fixed input bundles) to define quantity. We identify different treatment service bundles that combine varying quantities of prescription drugs, medical management and psychotherapy. We make use of results from clinical research and official government guidelines for standards of care to identify therapeutically similar treatment bundles. We then employ various index number formulae that involve differing assumptions on the extent of ex ante substitutability among these treatment bundles. Rather than using list prices, we utilize actual transactions data based on a MEDSTAT retrospective medical claims data base covering more than 400,000 individuals over the 1991-95 time period. We distinguish between consumers' direct payments (a CPI index) and total payments received by providers (a PPI). Although not directly comparable to BLS indexes indicating 15-25% price growth 1991-95, our CPI and PPI price indexes decline 20-30%, implying an average annual price differential from BLS indexes of about -15%.
