Research Database

Forecasts are routinely revised, and these revisions are often the subject of informal analysis and discussion. This paper argues 1) that forecast revisions are analyzed because they help forecasters and forecast users to evaluate forecasts and forecasting procedures, and 2) that these analyses can be sharpened by using the forecasting model to systematically express its forecast revision as the sum of components identified with specific data revisions and forecast errors. An algorithm for this purpose is explained and illustrated.

This paper presents maximum likelihood estimates of a real business cycle model very similar to one Kydland and Prescott [1982] suggested. The results of the paper conflict with Kydland and Prescott’s. The model leaves unexplained much of the variance of two key investment series, namely, structures and equipment. Also, much of the variation in the differences of per capita hours can be generated assuming that past leisure choices do not affect current utility.

This paper derives a variance bounds test for a broad class of linear rational expectations models. According to this test if observed data accords with the model, then a weighted sum of autocovariances of the covariance-stationary components of the endogenous state variables should be nonnegative. The new test reinterprets its forefather - West's [1986] variance bounds test - and extends its applicability by not requiring exogenous state variables in order to be tested. The possibility of the test's application to nonlinear models is also discussed.

Recent developments in the theory of economies with private information permit a re-examination of the issues raised in the "real bills-quantity theory" debate. A model is developed here in which there are banks, in which fiat money is present, and in which agents possess private information. Two regulatory regimes are then considered. In the first, banks are essentially unregulated. In the second, banks face 100 percent reserve requirements. Issues related to existence and optimality of equilibrium are addressed, and problems with existence are given an interpretation in terms of the "stability" of the banking system. Existence (stability) problems which arise under laissez-faire banking can be rectified by a 100 percent reserve requirement. However, unless there is private information regarding access to investment opportunities, there are typically better ways to accomplish this. Finally, it is shown that even in the presence of 100 percent reserve requirements banks are not simply "money warehouses." Bank deposits and money bear different (real) return streams, even under 100 percent reserves.

This paper investigates whether there are simple versions of the permanent income hypothesis which are consistent with the aggregate U.S. consumption and output data. Our analysis is conducted within the confines of a simple dynamic general equilibrium model of aggregate real output, investment, hours of work and consumption. We study the quantitative importance of two perturbations to the version of our model which predicts that observed consumption follows a random walk: (i) changing the production technology specification which rationalizes the random walk result, and (ii) replacing the assumption that agents' decision intervals coincide with the data sampling interval with the assumption that agents make decisions on a continuous time basis. We find substantially less evidence against the continuous time models than against their discrete time counterparts. In fact neither of the two continuous time models can be rejected at conventional significance levels. The continuous time models outperform their discrete time counterparts primarily because they explicitly account for the fact that the data used to test the models are time averaged measures of the underlying unobserved point-in-time variables. The net result is that they are better able to accommodate the degree of serial correlation present in the first difference of observed per capita U.S. consumption.

A definition of a transactions medium is proposed. This is that a transactions medium permits the attainment of otherwise unattainable resource allocations. It is shown that by this definition money can be a transactions medium in a pure exchange, overlapping generations economy. It is also shown that money is a transaction medium only if there are informational asymmetries of a particular type. Finally, it is shown that the set of economies for which money is a transactions medium is not isolated, in a well-defined sense.

This paper examines the optimal debt contract between lenders and a sovereign borrower when the borrower is free to repudiate the debt and when his decision to invest or consume borrowed funds is unobservable. We show that recurrent debt crises are a necessary part of the incentive structure which supports the optimal pattern of lending.

We construct a sequence of pure exchange, stationary OLG economies in which generations have longer and longer life spans and all agents maximize a discounted sum of utilities with a fixed, positive, and common discount rate. Period utility functions and endowment patterns are subject to mild restrictions and within generation heterogeneity is permitted. We show that: (i) Every sequence of equilibrium interest rates converges to the discount rate. (ii) Eventually every nonmonetary steady state is optimal and a monetary steady state will never exist. (iii) For any agent consumption at any fixed age converges to permanent income evaluated using the utility discount rate.

Game theory addresses a problem which is central to economics. Yet, according to the folklore of economics, game theory has failed. This paper argues that this is an incorrect interpretation of the game theory literature. When faced with a well-posed problem, game theory provides a solution. Procedures for facing game theory with well-posed problems are suggested, and examples of economic applications provided. The applications are Samuelson's fiat money model, Phelps' capital overaccumulation problem, multiple rational expectations equilibria, and a bargaining problem.

Previous authors have argued that the optimal monetary policy is contractionary. If buyers value consumption substantially more than sellers, there is some randomness and informational constraints make asset trading useful, we show that there is an incentive compatible expansionary policy that dominates all incentive compatible contractionary policies.

Antitrust regulators often attempt to prevent proposed corporate market-extension mergers or acquisitions by arguing that doing so will result in the proposer entering the market as an additional, smaller, independent competitor. In cases where this so-called doctrine of probable future competition is valid, regulators still need guidance in ranking the priority of cases to pursue. This paper modifies the approach of Dansby and Willig to compute measures of the gross benefits arising from valid regulation. Such measures relate the change in consumer plus producer surplus caused by regulation, to measures of market concentration, firm conduct assumptions, small firm profits, and market demand data.

In an overlapping generations model with borrowing and lending, uncertainty, and asymmetric information, fiat money may be essential to the existence of a competitive equilibrium. It may also serve to enhance the information of economic agents in a well-defined sense. In addition, the model presented provides suggestions about why the presence of valued fiat currency is essential to existence of equilibrium, even though in equilibrium perfect substitutes for money may exist.

A model of credit rationing based on asymmetrically informed borrowers and lenders is developed. In this context, sufficient conditions are derived for an appropriate government policy response to credit rationing to be a continuously open discount window. It is also demonstrated that such a policy can be deflationary, and that given a commitment to operate in this way, the monopoly issue of liabilities can Pareto dominate their competitive issuance.

We propose a definition of time consistent policy for infinite horizon economies with competitive private agents. Allocations and policies are defined as functions of the history of past policies. A sustainable equilibrium is a sequence of history-contingent policies and allocations that satisfy certain sequential rationality conditions for the government and for private agents. We provide a complete characterization of the sustainable equilibrium outcomes for a variant of Fischer's (1980) model of capital taxation. We also relate our work to recent developments in the theory of repeated games.

Models of low-frequency behavior of time series may have strongly conflicting substantive implications while fitting the data nearly equally well. We should develop methods which display the resulting uncertainty rather than adopt modeling conventions which hide it. One step toward this goal may be to consider “overparameterized” stationary ARMA models.

One purpose of this article is to exposit the relationship between life cycle models (with constructive immortality) and infinitely lived agents models. We use this to point out problems in interpreting data, especially with regard to the use of interest rates in the class of representative agent models when growth in population and per capita variables is taken into account. We also point out some common misconceptions regarding the "volume of trade" in representative agent models and show how to reconcile the savings profile of the representative agent with the life cycle savings profile in a life cycle model.

Game theory is both at the heart of economics and without a definitive solution. This paper proposes a solution. It is argued that a dominance criterion generates a, and perhaps the, generalized equilibrium solution for game theory. First we provide a set theoretic perspective from which to view game theory, and then present and discuss the proposed solution.

The consequences of a straightforward monetary targeting scheme are examined for a simple dynamic macro model. The notion of "targeting" used below is the strategic one introduced by Rogoff (1985). Numerical simulations are used to demonstrate that for the model under consideration, monetary targeting is likely to lead to a deterioration of policy performance. These examples cast doubt upon the general efficacy of simple targeting schemes in dynamic rational expectations models.

A simple extension of the traditional analysis of human capital accumulation is considered in a general equilibrium context. When real wages are equated to marginal products in the presence of human capital investment, resulting equilibria are almost never efficient even by very weak criteria. This is true even though labor is not a quasi-fixed factor, and informational asymmetries are excluded from the model. It is shown that human capital investment generates externalities, and has associated with it a “free-rider problem.” This, in turn, explains the common practice of employers requiring minimum levels of human capital accumulation for some employees, and refusing to hire “overqualified” workers for other positions.

Using optimal control theory and a vector autoregressive representation of the relationship between money and interest rates one can derive a feedback control procedure which defines the best possible tradeoff between interest rate volatility and money supply fluctuations and which could be used to reduce both from their current levels.

We use a model of pure, intertemporal exchange with spatially and information-ally separated markets to explain the existence of private securities which circulate and, hence, play a prominent role in exchange. The model, which utilizes a perfect foresight equilibrium concept, implies that a Schelling-type coordination problem can arise. It can happen that the amounts of circulating securities that are required to support an equilibrium and that are issued at the same time in informationally separated markets must satisfy restrictions not implied by individual maximization and market clearing in each market separately.

A method is presented for solving a certain class of hierarchical rational expectations models, principally models that arise from Stackelberg dynamic games. The method allows for numerical solution using spectral factorization algorithms, and estimation of these models using standard maximum likelihood techniques.

In this article we use the techniques developed in examining optimal contracting with imperfect information to build a simple equilibrium model of a labor market with imperfect information. We then use the model to examine the effects that imperfect information imposes on labor markets, particularly when compared with full information and noncontractual base lines. We demonstrate that quits increase in periods of high output, without postulating exogenous price rigidity.

This paper examines the validity of one very special version of Coase's Theorem. The version we examine is that in any economy in which the property rights are fully allocated, competition will lead to efficient allocations. One repercussion of this result is that one way to "solve" the public goods problem would be to allocate property rights fully, transforming the economy to a private goods one and let markets do their work. This is particularly appealing due to its decentralized nature, but one must question the claim that the market will lead to efficient outcomes in this case. That is, the privatized economy created above is of a very special type which, as it turns out is highly susceptible to strategic behavior. We show that the "mechanism" suggested above is not likely to work well in economies with either pure public goods or "global" externalities. Basically, the free-rider problem manifests itself as one of monopoly power in this private goods setting. On the other hand, if the public goods or externalities are "local" in nature, there is reason to hope that this (and perhaps other) mechanism(s) will work well. The work is related to the recent literature on the foundations of Walrasian Equilibrium in that it points up a relationship between the appropriateness of Walrasian equilibrium as a solution concept, the incentives for strategic play, the aggregate level of complementarities in the economy and the problem of coordinating economic activity.

This paper investigates the role of aggregate shocks on household consumption and labor supply. It posits, estimates and tests a model where the equilibrium behavior of agents sometimes leads them to locate on the boundary of their respective choices sets. The framework is rich enough to nest much previous empirical work on life cycle labor supply and consumption based asset pricing. It also yields a structural interpretation of wage regressions on unemployment. An important feature of our model is that markets are complete. Consequently, aggregate shocks only enter through two price sequences, namely real wages, and a sequence comprising weighted prices for future contingent consumption claims which are ultimately realized. We examine the properties of this latter sequence, whose elements may be represented as mappings from real wages and aggregate dividends.

Our empirical findings may be grouped into three. First, aggregate shocks play a significant role in determining the choices people make. Second, we reject for males some of the restrictions implicit in structural interpretations of wage unemployment regressions. Moreover when these restrictions are imposed, we find wages are countercyclical, but cannot reject the null hypothesis of no effect. Third, the null hypothesis that markets are complete is not invariably rejected. However, the orthogonality conditions associated with the asset pricing equation are rejected, even though our specification of preferences incorporates types of heterogeneity which violate the necessary conditions for aggregating to a representative agent formulation. Finally, we reject the cross-equation restrictions between the labor supply of spouses implied by equilibrium behavior.

We compare the statistical properties of prices of U.S. treasury bills to those generated by a theoretical dynamic exchange economy with complete markets. We show that the model can account for neither the sign nor the magnitude of average risk premiums in forward prices and holding-period returns. The economy is also incapable of generating enough variation in risk premiums to account for rejections of the expectations hypothesis with treasury bill data. These conclusions add to the growing list of empirical deficiencies of the representative agent model of asset pricing.

In a general equilibrium setting, we study versions of the proposal to pay interest on reserves at the market rate. We argue that the proposal makes the demand for total reserves indeterminate whether interest is paid on total reserves or on required reserves only. One consequence is that tax financing of the proposal gives rise to a continuum of equilibria, equilibria which differ in real returns and consumption allocations. Another consequence is that an attempt to finance the proposal through earnings on the central bank’s portfolio either gives rise to an equilibrium with a zero nominal interest rate or fails to give rise to an equilibrium.

This paper studies the relationship between the existence and optimality of a monetary steady-state and the nonoptimality of nonmonetary steady-states. We construct a sequence of stationary overlapping generations economies with longer and longer lived generations in which all agents maximize a discounted sum of utilities with a common discount rate. Under some assumptions the following result is established: If the discount rate is greater (less) than the population growth rate, then eventually every nonmonetary steady-state is optimal (non-optimal) and a monetary steady-state does not exist (exists and is optimal).

The qualitative dynamics of a discrete time version of a deterministic, continuous time, nonlinear macro model formulated by Haavelmo are fully characterized. The methods of symbolic dynamics and ergodic theory are shown to provide a simple, effective means of analyzing the behavior of the resulting one-parameter family of first-order, deterministic, nonlinear difference equations. A complex periodic and random "aperiodic" orbit structure dependent on a key structural parameter is present, which contrasts with the total absence of such complexity in Haavelmo's continuous time version. Several implications for dynamic economic modelling are discussed.

This study estimates the effects of allowing bank holding companies (BHCs) to enter several lines of financial business not now permitted. A simulation technique is used to estimate the risk and return of hypothetical financial corporations after merger between a BHC and a large firm in each of these industries: securities, real estate, life insurance, property and casualty insurance, and insurance agencies. The study concludes that a merger between a BHC and a life insurance company may decrease the probability of bankruptcy for the merged firm relative to the BHC alone. This result does not hold true, however, for BHC mergers with firms in the other industries. In particular, BHC mergers with securities or real estate firms are found to increase the probability of bankruptcy.

The existence of fixed points for monotone maps on spaces of measures is established. The case of monotone Markov processes is analyzed and a uniqueness and global stability condition is developed. A comparative statics result is presented and the problem of approximation to the invariant distribution is discussed. The conditions of the theorems are verified for the cases of Optimal Stochastic Growth and Industry Equilibrium.

No, and maybe not.

We develop a Q model of investment with multiple capital goods that delivers a one-to-one relation between the growth rate of the capital aggregate and the stock market-based Q. We estimate the growth-Q relation using a panel of over six hundred Japanese manufacturing firms taking into account the endogeneity of Q. Identification is achieved by combining the theoretical structure of the Q model and an assumed serial correlation structure of the technology shock that comprises the error term in the growth-Q relation. The Q variable is significantly related to firm growth. Much, but not all, of the apparent explanatory power of cash flow disappears if its endogeneity is corrected for. The estimated Q coefficient is not implausibly small if the growth rate of the capital aggregate contains measurement error.

The paper first locates quarters in the early 1970s at which the covariance matrices of the innovation vectors have shifted for the real GNPs of the USA, West Germany and Japan treated as univariate series. The paper then exhibits differences in the impulse response time profiles of the two models estimated from the data primarily before and after the break as a concise summary of the changes in dynamic interactions of the three real GNPs.

The motive to hold inventories purely in the hope of profiting from a price increase is called the speculative motive. This motive has received considerable attention in the literature. However, existing studies do not have a clear implication for how large it is quantitatively. This paper incorporates the speculative motive for holding inventories into an otherwise standard real business cycle model and finds that empirically plausible parameterizations of the model result in an average inventory stock to output ratio that is virtually zero. For this reason, we conclude that the quantitative magnitude of the speculative role for holding inventories in this model is quite small. This suggests the possibility that the study of aggregate economic phenomena can safely abstract from inventory speculation.

This paper presents a unified approach to nonlinear and nonstationary time-series analysis for a fairly wide class of linear time variable parameter (TVP) or nonlinear systems. The method theory exploits recursive filtering and fixed interval smoothing algorithms to derive TVP linear model approximations to the nonlinear or nonstationary stochastic system, on the basis of data obtained from the system during planned experiments or passive monitoring exercises. This TVP model includes the State Dependent type of Model (SDM) as a special case, and two particular SDM forms, due to Priestly and Young, are discussed in detail. The paper concludes with three practical examples: the first based on the modelling of data from a simulated nonlinear growth equation; the second concerned with the adaptive forecasting and smoothing of the Box-Jenkins Airline Passenger data; and the third providing a critical appraisal of state dependent modelling applied to the famous Sunspot time-series.

Two mechanisms are considered through which money can play a role in a real business cycle model. One is in the form of aggregate price surprises when there is heterogeneity across individuals or groups of individuals (“islands”). These shocks affect the accuracy of information about real compensation that can be extracted from observed wage rates. Another, perhaps complementary, mechanism is that the amount of desired liquidity services varies over the cycle due to a trade-off between real money and leisure. This mechanism leads to price fluctuations even when the nominal money stock does not fluctuate. As is the case for the U.S. economy over the postwar period, the price level is then countercyclical. A key finding is that with neither mechanism do nominal shocks account for more than a small amount of variability in real output and in hours worked. Indeed, output variability may very well be lower the larger the variance of price surprises is.

In a stochastic equilibrium model some stochastic processes are usually exogenously given, while others are either chosen optimally by agents or emerge from market equilibrium conditions. When we simulate such a model, often we aim at studying the relations among variables in the model as we vary parameters of policy and of behavior of economic agents. We are no more certain (indeed often less certain) of what is reasonable or interesting behavior for the exogenous variables (some of which may be unobservable) than of the variables chosen by agents or fixed in markets. It turns out that if we are flexible about which variables’ behavior we take as given in the model solution computation, freeing ourselves from the convention that the variables exogenous to the model economy must be taken as given in the simulation computations, great computational savings may result.