Knowledge that Transforms

Much recent monetary policy analysis has featured stochastic simulations with small structural macroeconomic models that include: a spending vs. saving ( IS') sector; a price-adjustment sector; and an interest rate policy rule. The first two are frequently specified so as to reflect optimizing behavior; policy may or may not be specified as optimizing depending on the study's objectives. Some leading issues concern modifications to simple quantitative optimizing models that are needed to generate realistic degrees of persistence in inflation and output-gap variables. A major policy issue is whether it is desirable for monetary policy to respond strongly to the output gap. The paper argues that the latter is unobservable and considers the implications of using a trend-type measure while the true concept is of a type more in keeping with basic theory. In such circumstances, highly undesirable consequences are likely to ensue if policy responds strongly to the measured gap.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

GARP for Kids: On the Development of Rational Choice Behavior by William T. Harbaugh, Kate Krause and Timothy R. Berry. Published in volume 91, issue 5, pages 1539-1545 of American Economic Review, December 2001

Finance theory suggests that changes in exchange rates should have little influence on asset prices in a world with integrated capital markets. Indeed, the existing literature examining the relationship between international stock prices and exchange rates finds little evidence of systematic exchange rate exposure. We argue in this paper that the absence of evidence may be due to restrictions imposed on the sample of data and the empirical specifications used in previous studies. We study a broad sample of firms in eight countries over an eighteen-year period. We find that firm-level and industry-level share values are significantly influenced by exchange rates. Further, we do not find evidence that exchange rate exposure is falling (or becoming less statistically significant) over time. Our results suggest that significant firm, industry and country-specific differences remain even as financial markets become more and more integrated.

Information Cascades: Replication and an Extension to Majority Rule and Conformity-Rewarding Institutions by Angela A. Hung and Charles R. Plott. Published in volume 91, issue 5, pages 1508-1520 of American Economic Review, December 2001

Politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork-barrel spending. We compare a winner-take-all system—where all the spoils go to the winner—to a proportional system—where the spoils of office are split among candidates proportionally to their share of the vote. In a winner-take-all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable. We then consider the electoral college system and show that it is particularly subject to this inefficiency. (JEL D82, L15)

A study finds that women, like men, experience most of the expected wage response to dollar fluctuations at times of job transitions, rather than when they remain with the same employer. In this context, dollar-depreciation periods, which are generally viewed as providing positive labor demand shocks, reduce the penalties that often are associated with a job change. Since women have higher job-changing rates than their male counterparts, these findings suggest that the average female worker has more sensitive wages than her male counterpart. Within the population there is diversity in these effects, with the least-educated women having both the highest job-transition rates and the largest response to exchange rates at these transitions.

Longevity Expectations and Death: Can People Predict Their Own Demise? by V. Kerry Smith, Donald H. Taylor and Frank A. Sloan. Published in volume 91, issue 4, pages 1126-1134 of American Economic Review, September 2001

Child disability is an important phenomenon. Government figures indicate around 6.0 % of children were considered disabled in the early 1990s (John McNeil, 1993). After an era of relative stability, child disability rates have grown over the past decade. Surprisingly little is known about the economic effects of children’s health problems. Children with impaired health

According to conventional wisdom, long-term bonds are appropriate for conservative long-term investors. This paper develops a model of optimal consumption and portfolio choice for infinite-lived investors with recursive utility who face stochastic interest rates, solves the model using an approximate analytical method, and evaluates conventional wisdom. As risk aversion increases, the myopic component of risky asset demand disappears but the intertemporal hedging component does not. Conservative investors hold assets to hedge the risk that real interest rates will decline. Long-term inflation-indexed bonds are most suitable for this purpose, but nominal bonds may also be used if inflation risk is low. (JEL G12)

A common claim in the nonrenewable resource literature is that improvements in technology may largely offset the effects of increasing scarcity over time. This study provides perhaps the first empirical evidence on this issue by analyzing the determinants of the average finding cost for additional petroleum reserves in the United States over the 19671990 period. Using a new index of the level of technology, our analysis suggests that technological change played a major role in allaying what would otherwise have been a sharp rise in the average cost of finding additional reserves of natural gas. The impact of technological change on finding costs for U.S. crude oil reserves has been more modest. To place our work in context, we note that in recent years there has been renewed interest in the causes and consequences of technological change. At the macroeconomic level, a huge literature modeling the impact of technological innovation on economic growth and living standards has emerged [see, e.g., Paul Romer (1990) and Gene M. Grossman and Elhanan Helpman (1991)]. At the micro level, increasingly sophisticated methods are being used to assess the links between technological change, productivity, and average or marginal costs at the sectoral level [see, e.g., Samuel Kortum and Saul Lach (1995)]. The potential effects of technological change in alleviating the increasing scarcity of nonrenewable resources are widely discussed in the resource and environmental economics literature. The simplest variant of the Harold Hotelling (1931) model predicts that nonrenewable resource prices should rise at a rate equal to the real rate of interest. It is well known, however, that