Research Database

Many regional econometric models are estimated under the maintained assumption that certain national variables are exogenous with respect to the regional variables in the models. This exogeneity assumption is testable using time series methods of inference, yet, to my knowledge, no regional model has been so tested. In this paper, I test the national exogeneity assumption included in the specification of a particular regional forecasting model. Such a test is, I believe, a necessary and important step in the construction of any econometric model.

It is commonly asserted that with excess plant capacity, expansive policy stimulates output and lowers unemployment without substantially boosting inflation, while at full capacity most of the impact is on inflation. This assertion is critically examined. First, two common definitions of capacity--engineering and economic—are examined and found to be nebulous. The concepts of supply and demand are older, but better. Full capacity is reinterpreted as points where the supply curve is steep and excess capacity as points where it is fairly flat. Then the "Keynesian" model in which stimulative policy shifts only the demand curve is compared to the "classical" model where stimulative policy shifts both demand and supply curves. For the former model the assertion on capacity utilization is correct, while in the latter it is not. Empirical tests are performed to determine whether measured capacity utilization is useful for predicting inflation. The tests are ambiguous, but certainly do not strongly favor capacity utilization.

This paper argues that versions of Samuelson/Cass-Yaari overlapping-generations consumption-loans models ought to be taken seriously as models of fiat money. The case is made by summarizing and interpreting what these models have to say about fiat money and by arguing that these properties are robust in the sense that they can be expected to hold in any model of fiat money. Two of the properties establish the connection between, on the one hand, the existence of equilibria in which value is attached to a fixed stock of fiat money and, on the other hand, the optimality of such equilibria and the nonoptimality of nonfiat-money equilibria. Other properties describe aspects of the tenuousness of monetary equilibria in such models: The nonuniqueness of such equilibria in the sense that there always exists a nonfiat-money equilibrium and the dependence of the existence of the monetary equilibrium on the physical characteristics of other potential assets and on other institutional features like the tax-transfer scheme in effect. Rather than being defects of these models, it is argued that this tenuousness is helpful in interpreting various monetary systems and, in any case, is unavoidable; it will turn up in any good model of fiat money. Still other properties summarize what these models imply about the connection—or, better, lack of such— between fiat money and private borrowing and lending (financial intermediation) and what they imply about country-specific monies.

The determination of the mechanism for ordering strategies in a game theoretic conflict is the keystone of economic science, at least insofar as economics is to remain an outgrowth of that (otherwise relatively minor) school of English philosophy, Utilitarianism. A method for the solution of the general game is presented in this paper, and the implications for economic theorizing discussed.

This paper briefly recounts several of the key financial developments of 1974, describes the contingency planning exercise developed by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank to encourage planning by large member banks, and then discusses some of the comments received in a trial run. The Appendix contains a copy of the exercise together with an illustrative example.

Previous work on discrete time portfolio selection models encompassed (a) transaction's costs, and (b) uncertainty about cash flows during the first (and only) period. This paper extends these models by considering uncertainty about asset yields in the second period and the optimal strategy for portfolio selection over a two-period horizon. Among the implications are i) the optimal initial portfolio is, in general, diversified and contains more short-term assets than the myopic investor's portfolio, and ii) the shape of the mean-variance locus ensures diversification for all (two-moment) types of investors, except certain forms of risk lovers. Other partial derivatives are investigated.