Research Database

This article develops a simple model that captures a concern for relative standing, or status. This concern is instrumental, in the sense that individuals do not get utility directly from their relative standing, but, rather, the concern is induced because their relative standing affects their consumption of standard commodities. The article investigates the consequences of a concern for relative wealth in models in which individuals are making labor/leisure decisions. The analysis shows how individuals' decisions are affected by the aggregate income distribution and how the concern for relative wealth can generate behavior that can be interpreted as conspicuous consumption when wealth is not directly observable.

This essay, written around 1779, challenges the simple quantity theory of money. From the perspective of the paper money issued to pay for America’s Revolutionary War—bills of credit, or continentals—the essay rejects the idea that the value of money is determined by the number of pieces of paper issued. That idea ignores the fact that an individual nation is just a small part of the world economy. More relevant than quantity, the essay argues, are two other features: the date the government promises to exchange the pieces of paper for specie and the credibility of that promise.

This paper empirically investigates the restrictions embodied in a popular dynamic monetary model for the cross relations between consumption, money holdings, inflation and assets’ returns using quarterly data for the high-inflation economy in Israel, 1970–1988. The model considered includes money in agents’ utility function. A set of the estimated parameters is used in the analysis to assess the model’s quantitative implications for seigniorage and for the welfare costs of inflation. The estimates are found to account well for the observed stability over time of seigniorage in Israel and imply sizeable welfare costs of inflation.

We provide a new interpretation of the statistical relation between the trade balance and the terms of trade. This relation includes the J-curve, the tendency for trade balances to be negatively correlated with contemporaneous movements in the terms of trade, positively correlated with lagged movements. We document this property in international data and show that it arises, as well, in a two-country stochastic growth model. In the model trade dynamics result, in large part, from fluctuations in investment. A favorable productivity shock in the domestic economy leads to an increase in domestic output, a decrease in its relative price, and a rise in the terms of trade. The increase in domestic productivity also leads to a temporary investment boom. This boom results in an initial trade deficit, followed by future surpluses, and thus a J-curve. We also use the model to provide a new perspective on earlier theories of trade and price dynamics.