Kravis, Heston, and Summers provided comparable price and volume data for gross domestic product and its components for each of 34 countries, varying in affluence from India and Malawi to the United States. The article discusses the data and the way in which they are generated, and considers the use of these data for applied demand analysis.
An explicit solution of an equilibrium model with price-setting firms and searching customers makes possible a number of comparative-statics predictions about how cost differences among firms, search costs of customers, and taxes will affect the mean and variance of the distribution of market prices. Another implication of the model is that a firm's demand depends on the difference between its price and the average price in the market.
In this model, the effects of advertising are infinitely durable, fixed (and sunk) costs give rise to economies of scale, post-entry behavior is noncooperative, and pre-entry expectations are rational. Despite the obvious resemblance to work on the use of investment in production capacity to deter entry, here the incumbent monopolist never finds it optimal to advertise more if entry is possible than if it is not. This result and other features of this model indicate the dangers of analyzing advertising with analogies to other sorts of investments. The results make clear the need for more theoretical work on advertising and entry deterrence.
This paper explores the formulation and analysis of linear equilibrium models of investment in which learning is perpetual and informationally decentralized firms need never share the same beliefs concerning time series relevant to their decisions. Recursive, Kalman filtering techniques are shown to be applicable in an illustrative, hierarchical information structure, and a nonlinear technique of undetermined coefficients is shown to be applicable in an illustrative, symmetric information structure in which there is a confounding of laws of motion with forecasting problems. The equilibrium time series of these models can display interesting movement in response to shocks and measurement errors, including persistence, certain cross-correlation properties, and damped oscillations. That is, forecasts errors are serially correlated over decision makers and serially correlated over time in a certain crucial sense. More generally, these models do place restrictions on observed time series and can be fitted to data.
Understanding inventory movements is central to an understanding of business cycles. This paper presents an empirical study of the behavior of inventories in the automobile industry. It finds that inventory behavior is well explained by the assumption of intertemporal optimization with rational expectations. The underlying cost structure appears to have substantial costs of changing production as well as substantial costs of being away from target inventory, thelatter being a function of current sales. Given this cost structure, whether inventory behavior is stabilizing or destabilizing depends on the characteristics of the demand process. In the automobile industry, inventory behavior is destabilizing: the variance of production is larger than the variance of sales.
This paper examines the effects of unexpected inflation on the returns to the common stock of companies with different short-term monetary positions, and different long-term monetary positions, and different amounts of nominal tax shields. Unlike most previous studies of the effects of nominal contracting, we distinguish between expected and unexpected inflation in our tests. Surprisingly, over the 1947-79 period there is little evidence that stockholders of net debtor firms benefit from unexpected inflation relative to the stockholders of net creditor firms. We conclude that wealth effects caused by unexpected inflation are not an important factor in explaining the behavior of stock prices.
This paper examines the theory of optimal insurance purchasing in the presence of uninsurable background risk. Existing theorems concerning the optimal level of insurance and the optimal form of an insurance contract are shown to hold only under restricted market and risk assumptions. In particular, conditions sufficient for the optimality of full coverage or sufficient for the optimality of deductible policies depend on the correlation between insurable and uninsurable risks. These results may provide a partial explanation why existing theory is often contradicted by observable behavior.
This paper studies the time-series behavior of asset returns and aggregate consumption. Using a representative consumer model and imposing restrictions on preferences and the joint distribution of consumption and returns, we deduce a restricted log-linear time-series representation. Preference parameters for the representative agent are estimated and the implied restrictions are tested using postwar data.
All but one of the U.S. recessions since World War II have been preceded, typically with a lag of around three-fourths of a year, by a dramatic increase in the price of crude petroleum. This does not mean that oil shocks caused these recessions. Evidence is presented, however, that even over the period 1948-72 this correlation is statistically significant and nonspurious, supporting the proposition that oil shocks were a contributing factor in at least some of the U.S. recessions prior to 1972. By extension, energy price increases may account for much of post-OPEC macroeconomic performance.