We study the full equilibrium dynamics of a two-country world economy with a floating exchange rate, traded and nontraded goods, and explicit modeling of the use of money. The resulting exchange rate equation depends on several details of the economic structure, such as the supply structure and propensities to spend on various goods. Although real exchange rate movements have the usual association with the current account, the ordinary exchange rate may appreciate or depreciate when there are deficits on current account even when the quantities of money do not change. Deviations from purchasing-power parity and the Fisher equation are shown to be the rule rather than the exception.
Between-family differences in expenditures and output reflect the effect of simultaneous increases in children's ability on the willingness of parents to transfer resources to them. Within-family differences also reflect the attitudes of parents toward disparity among children. In this paper we characterize the conditions on parents' preferences that determine whether between-family differences exceed within-family differences. For additive utility, within-family differences in expenditures always exceed between-family differences. This may also be true for the max-min utility function if an increase in ability reduces the marginal utility of income. Within-family differences in output (utility or income) can also exceed between-family differences. In this case, the implication for income distribution is that equality is enhanced by a higher correlation of ability between brothers.
This paper estimates a general equilibrium model of suppressed inflation using quarterly U.S. data for the sample period 1942:IV-48:II. It finds that the pricelevel was reduced by at least 30.4 percent and that this suppression of inflation reduced employment by at least 11.7 percent and output by at least 7.1 percent. It also finds that monetary policy could have been equally successful in combating inflation but would not have had the side effect of reducing employment and output.
The inability to observe the money supply and price level has been an essential ingredient of informational based equilibrium models of cycles. Here we assume these data are available but show that heterogeneous information about the productivity of capital can lead to a monetary theory of fluctuations. In equilibrium, each agent's investment depends on the difference between his own productivity and the perceived real rate. In the presence of money demand shocks, the nominal rate is noisy signal of the real rate. This leads to greater fluctuations in output than if all agents had the same information.
The welfare cost of free public schools is the difference between the cost of those schools and the maximum parents would be willing to pay to send their children to those schools. Estimates based on data from California school districts in 1970 indicate that this welfare cost is substantial, mostly because private schools are cheaper per unit of quality than public schools.
Exchange-rate rules that link exchange depreciation to domestic price-level changes are shown to affect the output price-level stability trade-off through two separate channels. On one hand a PPP-oriented exchange-rate policy tends to maintain constant the real exchange rate, thus stabilizing demand. But the exchange-rate policy works also through the supply side, via the prices of imported intermediate goods. Here exchange-rate indexation works to amplify the effect of wage disturbances on prices and potentially on output. In the context of a rational-expectations model with long-term overlapping wage contracts, the analysis shows that the impact of increased indexation on output and price-level stability depends on the extent of monetary accommodation.
Rational expectations and cleared markets lead to the proposition that feedback monetary policy is irrelevant to real activity, as in the analyses of Sargent and Wallace. However, if agents are differentially informed and have access to a common price, then prospective monetary policy actions--future feedback to imperfectly known current circumstances--can alter real activity by changing the information content of prices.