Knowledge that Transforms

Using two decades of annual data, we explore the links between real exchange rates and employment, wages, and overtime activity in U.S. manufacturing industries. Especially in industries with lower price-over-cost markups, exchange rates have statistically significant effects on industry wages, with the magnitude of these effects rising as industries increase their export orientation and declining as imported input use becomes more important. Exchange rate implications for jobs and hours worked are smaller and less precisely measured. We find a much higher response of overtime wages and overtime hours to transitory exchange rates movements.

Several specifications of state-space models are used to obtain estimates of the NAIRU for the G7 except Japan, plus Australia, over the past 28 years. A Phillips curve-type regression is shown to deliver estimates that do not mimic low-frequency movements in unemployment rates, even when a drift is included in the specification of the NAIRU. Standard errors around the estimates are extremely large. Using information about the behavior of unemployment, in addition to inflation, alleviates both these shortcomings.

Estimates of the Taylor rule using historical data from the past decade or two suggest that monetary policy in the U.S. can be characterized as having reacted in a moderate fashion to output and inflation gaps. In contrast, the parameters of optimal Taylor rules derived using empirical models of the economy often recommend much more vigorous policy responses. This paper attempts to match the historical policy rule with an optimal policy rule by incorporating uncertainty into the derivation of the optimal rule and by examining plausible variations in the policymaker's model and preferences.

We measure income uncertainty at the level of U.S. states, and the extent to which it has been reduced through risksharing, using a method recently developed by Athanasoulis and van Wincoop (2000). Risk is measured as the standard deviation of state-specific income growth uncertainty, measured by using the error term of a regression of income growth on variables in the information set. Risk sharing is measured by the extent to which this standard deviation has been reduced through financial markets and federal fiscal policy. The advantage of this measure over the existing risk sharing literature is that the interpretation does not depend on many auxiliary assumptions. Our findings on the extent of risk sharing are insensitive to the only assumption we need to make, the variables that are in the information set. We find that the standard deviation of state-specific income growth uncertainty is reduced by less than half through financial markets and federal fiscal policy. We show that the extent of risk sharing would be much higher if agents held better diversified portfolios across the states.

This paper examines the evolution of productivity in U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963 to 1992. We define a vintage effect as the change in productivity of recent cohorts of new plants relative to earlier cohorts of new plants, and a survival effect as the change in productivity of a particular cohort of surviving plants as it ages. Both factors contribute to industry productivity growth, but play offsetting roles in determining a cohort's relative position in the productivity distribution. Recent cohorts enter with higher productivity than earlier entrants did, whereas surviving cohorts show productivity increases as they age. These two effects roughly offset each other, however, so there is a rough convergence in productivity across cohorts in 1992 and 1987.

This paper investigates trend and cycle dynamics in per capita income for the major U.S. regions during the 1956–1995 period. Cointegration and serial correlation common features information are used in jointly decomposing the series into trend and cycle components. We find considerable differences in the volatility of regional cycles. Controlling for differences in volatility, we find a great deal of comovement in the cyclical response for all regions but the Far West. Possible sources underlying differences in regional cycles are explored, such as the share of a region's income accounted for by manufacturing, defense spending as a proportion of a region's income, oil price shocks, and the stance of monetary policy. Somewhat surprisingly, we find that the share of manufacturing in a region seems to account for little of the variation in regional cycles relative to national cycles, but manufacturing share differentially affects trend growth for four of the seven regions studied.

This paper theoretically and empirically examines ownership structure in foreign direct investment (FDI) projects. We show that in choosing an ownership structure, foreign investors, local entrepreneurs, and government consider the specific, costly-to-market assets that the participants and the country bring to the project. In equilibrium, the foreign equity share rises with the importance of foreign investor assets and declines with the contribution of local assets towards the amount of surplus generated in the project. Government policies and the institutional structure of the country also affect ownership structure.

This paper tests a textbook consequence of competitive markets: that an industry-wide increase in the price of labor is passed on to consumers through an increase in prices. Using several data sources on restaurant prices, I explore the price impact of minimum-wage hikes in Canada and the United States. Particular attention is paid to the timing of these price responses to gauge the ‘stickiness’ of minimum-wage cost shocks. I find that restaurant prices generally rise with changes in the wage bill and that this response is concentrated in the quarter surrounding the month during which the legislation is enacted.

Several authors have recently investigated the predictability of exchange rates by fitting a sequence of long-horizon error-correction equations. We show by means of a simulation study that, in small to medium samples, inference from this regression procedure depends on the null hypothesis that is used to generate empirical critical values. The standard assumption of a stationary error-correction term between exchange rates and fundamentals biases the results in favor of predictive power. Our results show that evidence of long-horizon predictability weakens when using empirical critical values generated under the more stringent null of no cointegration. Likewise, results are weakened using critical values generated under the null that exchange rates and fundamentals are generated by an unrestricted VAR with no integration restrictions.

Although prior studies of job displacement and disability have measured the impact of these shocks in terms of lost earnings, no previous research has linked these permanent earnings shocks to the long-run consumption smoothing behavior of these households. Because consumption is generally considered a better measure of well-being than is income, understanding the link between these earnings shocks and consumption is important in trying to gauge the magnitude of the long-run impact caused by such events. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the analysis finds the percentage change in consumption is generally less than that of the head's earnings and total family income, especially at the time of the shock. The results also indicate that displaced households respond to an increase in the probability of future job losses by reducing their consumption prior to a job loss. These results suggest that only focusing on earnings overestimates the impact of these shocks on household well-being.