Knowledge that Transforms

According to the Fisher hypothesis, an increase (decrease) in the spread between the long-term, or multiperiod, interest rate and the one-period inflation rate signals an increase (decrease) in future one-period inflation. This implication is tested on data from thirteen OECD countries for the period 1962-93. Integration and cointegration techniques are applied to examine the time-series properties of interest rates and inflation rates, and the VAR methodology developed by John Y. Campbell and Robert J. Shiller (1987) is applied to examine the predictive power of the spread as well as in testing the Fisher hypothesis under rational expectations and constant ex ante real rates. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

The hypothesis that a variable is independent of past information, such as its own past and past realizations of other observable variables, is a frequent implication of economic theory. Yet standard regression-based tests of orthogonality may not have the correct level if there is feedback from innovations to future values of the regressors. In this paper we develop nonparametric tests of orthogonality based on signs and signed ranks which are proved to reject at their nominal levels over a wide class of models admitting feedback. The tests are robust to problems of non-normality and heteroskedasticity. Further, in simulation studies of two specifications of feedback-a rational expectations model considered by Mankiw and Shapiro, and the random walk model-we find that the nonparametric tests display remarkable power. The paper concludes with an application which assesses the efficiency of survey data on interest rate expectations previously studied by Friedman. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

A nonparametric test of demand theory, determining the consistency of price-expenditure data with the generalized axiom of revealed preference, is applied to household macroeconomic data for the first time. The fraction of consumption bundle comparisons that violate the generalized axiom of revealed preference is proposed as a summary statistic to indicate the consistency of a data set with revealed preference axioms. This violation rate is calculated among consumption pairs with similar expenditures to increase the power of the test. The results suggest that similar households' consumption choices and budget constraints are generally consistent with the joint hypotheses of optimizing behavior and common preferences. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Fiscal federalism theory predicts that states will behave strategically in welfare programs because voter demand for welfare is sensitive to tax price, while the tax price itself changes because of welfare-induced migration. This paper tests these propositions on AFDC in the United States for a panel from 1982-88 using new models for the determination of the recipiency ratio (the tax price) and composite neighbors. The data do not support any substantial tax price elasticity of demand for welfare. Estimates of migration effects on tax price are found to be sensitive to specification. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

This paper overcomes the long-standing problem of measuring motor carriers' service quality by utilizing service quality data collected from shippers. A service quality controlled cost function is estimated for a sample of less-than-truckload motor carriers. It is shown that excluding service quality variables from cost estimation significantly underestimates carriers' scale economies. These scale economies enable large carriers to offer higher quality services at competitive or even lower costs than small carriers. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

The author develops a method of hypothesis testing for revealed preference tests. This method is particularly well suited to tests of commonality of tastes or tests of preference stability. He devises a metric based on an estimate of the fraction of expenditure wasted in maximizing utility if all consumers in the sample share the same utility function. This metric increases in size with increases in the proportion of observations having different tastes and with increasing differences in tastes. The author proposes bootstrap methods for estimating the distribution of the test statistic. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Eduardo Luzio, Shane Greenstein, Measuring the Performance of a Protected Infant Industry: The Case of Brazilian Microcomputers, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Nov., 1995), pp. 622-633

This paper estimates a dynamic demand model for liquor in the United States using panel data from 43 states. Because of taste changes over time and between states in liquor consumption, purely time series or cross sectional studies do not elicit reliable price elasticity estimates. This study makes the case for pooling and shows how one can control for individual state effects and endogeneity of the regressors using estimators suited for a dynamic demand model. Our results indicate that the long-run price elasticity is in the -0.7 range. The findings also support strong habit persistence, a small positive income elasticity, and very weak evidence of bootlegging from adjoining states. The magnitude of the long-run price effect suggests that sin taxes can serve not only as an important income source but also as a significant deterrent effect. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Empirical estimation of input market power hindered by problems in measuring an input's value of marginal product (VMP). By estimating a variable profit function system, however, one can infer a factor's VMP through its shadow price. This technique is used here to specify a structural equation system, which is estimated using time series data for the U.S. sawmilling and paper industries, to empirically measure the degree of oligopsony power for sawlog and pulpwood inputs respectively. Results evaluated at sample means indicate that pulpwood markets are more oligopsonistic than sawlog markets, though both perform closer to perfect competition than monopsony. Time trends for market power differ for each product and perfect competition cannot be rejected for sawlogs in later years. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.

Mean and variance measures of health information about cholesterol and saturated fat are included in a demand system for fats and oils. A Bayesian model of health risk belief and consumer awareness surveys are the basis for computing these measures. The empirical demand model shows that health information has resulted in significant increases in consumption for corn, cottonseed, and soybean oils and decreased consumption for butter and lard. The predicted demand effects based on the Bayesian information model are more reasonable than predictions from using either a time trend or a simple cumulative cholesterol information index. Copyright 1995 by MIT Press.