Download or read book Looking for the News in the Noise Additional Stochastic Implications of Optimal Consumption Choice written by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In neoclassical models of consumption choice under earnings uncertainty changes in consumption programs from one period to the next are determined by new information received about future earnings over the period. This proposition suggests testing the neoclassical model by ascertaining whether new earnings information explains consumption choice through time. It also suggests that actual consumption choices imbed extractable information about the extent and time resolution of earnings uncertainty. This paper derives a fairly general theoretical relationship between properly defined innnovations in consumption (noise) and revisions in expectations of lifetime earnings (news). It also clarifies the relationship between testing for the theoretical determinants of consumption and standard Euler tests that focus on theoretical nondeterminants of consumption. The chief prediction of the paper's theoretical results, that noise exactly equals news, is tested using aggregate time series data on consumption and earnings. We find that new earnings information explains only a very small fraction of the variance of aggregate consumption innovations. On the other hand, the extent of suboptimal consumption choice appears to be of little economic significance.
Download or read book LOOKING FOR THE NEWS IN THE NOISE ADDITIONAL STOCHASTIC IMPLICATIONSOF OPTIMAL CONSUMPTION CHOICE written by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on Saving Bequests Altruism and Life cycle Planning written by Laurence J. Kotlikoff and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-06-22 with total page 596 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays, coauthored with other distinguished economists, offers new perspectives on saving, intergenerational economic ties, retirement planning, and the distribution of wealth. The book links life-cycle microeconomic behavior to important macroeconomic outcomes, including the roughly 50 percent postwar decline in America's rate of saving and its increasing wealth inequality. The book traces these outcomes to the government's five-decade-long policy of transferring, in the form of annuities, ever larger sums from young savers to old spenders. The book presents new theoretical and empirical analyses of altruism that rule out the possibility that private intergenerational transfers have offset those by the government.While rational life-cycle behavior can explain broad economic outcomes, the book also shows that a significant minority of households fail to make coherent life-cycle saving and insurance decisions. These mistakes are compounded by reliance on conventional financial planning tools, which the book compares with Economic Security Planner (ESPlanner), a new life-cycle financial planning software program. The application of ESPlanner to U.S. data indicates that most Americans approaching retirement age are saving at much lower rates than they should be, given potential major cuts in Social Security benefits.
Download or read book Understanding Saving written by Fumio Hayashi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analysis of consumption and saving decisions by households has always been one of the most active areas of research in economics--and with good reason. Private consumption is the most important component of aggregate demand in a capitalist economy, and explaining consumption is the key element in most macroeconomic forecasting models. To evaluate the effect of government policies invariably requires the knowledge of how they change parameters relevant for household decision making. Understanding Saving collects eleven papers by economist Fumio Hayashi, along with two previously unpublished chapters, for a total of thirteen chapters. The monograph, which brings together Hayashi's empirical research on saving, is divided into three sections. Part I, "Liquidity Constraints", contains five studies that test the well-known implication of the Life Cycle-Permanent Income hypothesis that households shield consumption from income fluctuations. Part II, "Risk-Sharing and Altruism", contains three papers that examine the interactions between related and unrelated households predicted by the hypothesis for the US and Japanese households. The three papers in Part III, "Japanese Saving Behavior", present the author's explanation of the high saving rate in postwar Japan.
Download or read book On the Economic Interpretation and Measurement of Optimal Capacity Utilization with Anticipatory Expectations written by Catherine J. Morrison and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study builds on recent research giving the notion of capacity utilization clearer economic foundations. In this research optimal output Y* is defined as the minimum point on the firm's short-run average total cost curve, and capacity utilization is then computed as CU=Y/Y*, where Y is actual output. Here I extend these concepts to include adjustment costs due to changes in the stock of capital, and nonstatic expectations of future output demand and input prices. The more general notion of CU is shown to depend on the shadow values of the firm's quasifixed inputs, and is decomposed to isolate the effects of anticipatory expectations. An empirical comparison is then made between traditional indices and alternative economic CU measures, using annual U.S. manufacturing data 1954-80. The calculated indices exhibit plausible patterns, which can be interpreted as the effects of nonstatic expectations and adjustment costs.
Download or read book NBER Reporter written by National Bureau of Economic Research and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Journal of Monetary Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 1040 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book On the Interest Rate Elasticity of the Demand for International Reserves written by Sebastian Edwards and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to what is suggested by the theory, most empirical studies on the demand for international reserves have failed to find a significant(negative) coefficient for the opportunity cost of holding reserves. In this paper it is argued that the reason for this is that the opportunity cost of holding international reserves has been measured incorrectly. In the empirical analysis presented in this paper the spread between the interest rate at which countries can borrow from abroad and LIBOR is used as a proxy for the net opportunity cost for holding reserves. The results obtained using data for a group of developing countries for 1976-198O show that when this net opportunity cost is used, the regression coefficient is significantly negative.
Download or read book Anticipated Budget Deficits and the Term Structure of Interest Rates written by Daniel Valente Dantas and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 40 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates the implications of government deficits in an overlapping generations consumption loan model with longterm assets. The only asset in the economy is a real consol issued by the government and serviced by lumpsum taxes on the young. We explore here the time path of short and longterm interest rates following the announcement of a future,transitory budget deficit under two alternative assumptions. In one case the deficit arises from transitory government spending, in the other case from a transfer.We show that a deficit policy ultimately raises longterm interest rates and lowers consol prices. The exact shape of the path of short-term rates depends on the source of the deficit and on the saving response to interestrates. In general, though, the term structure will be v-shaped. The interest of the model resides in the fact that the prices of longterm assets link the current generations to future disturbances. Because future disturbances affect future interest rates they affect the current value of debt outstanding and hence equilibrium short-term rates. The exact manner in which the disturbances are transmitted to prior periods depends on the extent to which consumers substitute easily across time or, on the contrary, have a strong preference for consumption smoothing.
Download or read book Journal of Economic Literature written by and published by . This book was released on 1989 with total page 1198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Tests for Liquidity Constraints written by Fumio Hayashi and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper surveys recent empirical work on tests for liquidity constraints. The focus of the survey is on the tests based on the Euler equation. After examining the technical aspects of the recent tests on aggregate time-series data and on micro data, the survey tries to evaluate their economic significance. The paper concludes that for a significant fraction of the population the behavior of consumption over time is affected in away predicted by credit rationing and differential borrowing and lending rates. However, the available evidence is shown to have failed in providing information necessary to calculate the response of consumption to changes in the time profile of income. The paper attributes the failure to the fact that not much attention in the literature has been paid to the cause of liquidity constraints.
Download or read book The Costs of Worker Displacement written by Daniel S. Hamermesh and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 56 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study defines the nature of worker displacement and develops a mechanism for inferring the amount of losses caused by displacement in away that is tied to economic theory. Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics are first used to identify the characteristics of displaced workers. After a demonstration that usual methods of evaluating workers' losses cannot provide correct measures of the cost to society, a game--theoretic model determining the amount of firm -- specific investment in workers is developed. As workers'and firms' horizons decrease, such investment will be reduced; this will be exhibited in a flattening of the wage-tenure profile as the date of displacement approaches. Examination of the profile thus provides a test whether firms and workers have good information about impending displacement. Using the PSID data for workers displaced between 1977 and 1981, the study shows there is no significant flattening of the wage-tenure profile in the entire sample. (However, some flattening does occur among unionized workers, and also among workers who are laid-off permanently from a plant that remains open.) This suggests that workers are surprised by displacement, for they continue investing in firm-specific human capital up to the time of displacement. The present value of the worker's share of the lost returns on this investment is around $7000 (1980 dollars) under intermediate assumptions about the real rate of discount, depreciation on such investment and the effect of tenure on the rate of voluntary separation.
Download or read book The Economic Effects of the Corporate Income Tax written by Alan J. Auerbach and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the extent to which dividend taxation imposes a "double tax" on corporate source earnings; the historical impact of tax incentives on the incentives to invest and the value of corporate equity; the effects of limited loss offset provisions on the incentives to invest in risky assets; and the determinants of corporate leverage.
Download or read book The Order of Liberalization of the Current and Capital Accounts of the Balance of Payments written by Sebastian Edwards and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The opening up of an economy to the rest of the world has generally been considered an integral part of economic reform aimed at increasing the role of markets. Until recently, however, very little discussion was devoted to the order in which the capital and current account should be liberalized indeveloping countries. This paper deals with several aspects of the order of liberalization. The different arguments usually given to advocate a particular ordering are critically reviewed. Then a three-good two-factor model is used to analyze the effects of alternative ordering on production and income distribution. A two-period model of a small economy is also used to investigate the welfare effects of opening the capital account in the presence of distortions. While the discussion does not yield a theorem regarding the appropriate order of liberalization, there are strong presumptions that it is more prudent to liberalize the current account first.
Download or read book Planned and Unplanned Bequests written by Daniel S. Hamermesh and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We make the distinction between bequests that are planned as part of some lifetime optimization stemming from a bequest motive, and those that are unplanned and result when the date of death differs from what the consumer might forecast. Lifetime optimization should lead to a negative effect or no effect of the expected horizon on the size of the bequest, and to a negative relation between unexpectedly long life and the bequest. Using data on wealthy decedents and their parents, we form measures of the expected horizon based on parents' longevity. There is no relation between unexpectedly early or late death and the bequest, but a significant positive relation between the bequest and the length of the horizon. Several explanations for this unforeseen result are offered, including the inference that uncertainty about length of life is important in studying bequest behavior.
Download or read book Indian Journal of Economics written by and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Taxable and Tax exempt Interest Rates written by Joe Peek and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper investigates empirically the effects of personal and corporate taxes on taxable interest rates and on the spread between taxable and tax-exempt rates. Two main sets of results emerge. First, we establish that the effective marginal investors in the Treasury bill market are households, as opposed to tax-exempt institutions or corporations. We find no evidence of corporate tax rate effects on Treasury bill yields. The study is then extended to an examination of the tax-exempt market. The results there contradict the hypothesis that commercial bank arbitrage generally ensures that the taxable-tax-exempt interest rate spread is determined by the corporate tax rate. Our estimates decisively reject the corporate in favor of the personal income tax rate as being the relevant tax rate of the marginal investor in this market as well.
