Research Database

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

Portfolio autarky obtains when residents of every country are prohibited from owning real assets located in other countries. Such a regime and a laissez-faire regime, both characterized by free trade in goods, are studied in a model whose resource and technology assumptions are those of the standard two-country, two- (nonreproducible) factor, two- (nonstorable) good model. But to ensure a market for assets (land), the model is peopled by overlapping generations; each two-period lived individual supplies one unit of labor only in the first period of his life. Unique equilibria are described and shown to exist, and, in terms of a “growth model” version of the Pareto criterion, laissez-faire is shown to be optimal and portfolio autarky to be nonoptimal.

This paper puts forward a method for improving the forecasting accuracy of an existing macroeconometric model without changing its policy response characteristics. The procedure is an extension and formalization of the practice of additive adjustments currently used by most forecasters. The method should be of special interest to forecasters who use models built by other investigators because it does not involve reestimation of the original model and uses only information routinely included in the documentation available to model users. The paper ends with a demonstration of the prediction improvement realized by application of this method to a version of the MIT-Penn-SSRC (MPS) model.

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.