Jinook Jeong, G. S. Maddala, Testing the Rationality of Survey Data Using the Weighted Double-Bootstrapped Method of Moments, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 78, No. 2 (May, 1996), pp. 296-302

Using a panel of 51 prices from 48 cities in the United States, we provide an upper bound estimate of the rate of convergence to purchasing power parity. We find convergence rates substantially higher than typically found in cross-country data. We investigate some potentially serious biases induced by i.i.d. measurement errors in the data, and find our estimates to be robust to these potential biases. We also present evidence that convergence occurs faster for larger price differences. Finally, we find that rates of convergence are slower for cities farther apart. However, our estimates suggest that distance alone can only account for a small portion of the much slower convergence rates across national borders.

We study a barter economy in which each good is produced in two qualities and no trader can distinguish between the qualities of those goods he neither consumes nor produces. We show that in competitive equilibrium there exists a (unique) good—the one for which the discrepancy between qualities is smallest—that serves as the medium of exchange: this good mediates every trade. Equilibrium is inefficient because production of the medium would be lower if it were not for its mediating role. Introducing fiat money enhances welfare by eliminating this distortion. However, high inflation drives traders back to the commodity medium.

This article offers a tractable monetary asset pricing model. In monetary economies, the price level, inflation, asset prices, and the real and nominal interest rates have to be determined simultaneously and in relation to each other. This link allows us to relate in closed form each of the dependent entities to the underlying real and monetary variables. Among other features of such economies, inflation can be partially nonmonetary and the real and nominal term structures can depend on fundamentally different risk factors. In one extreme, the process followed by the real term structure is independent of that followed by its nominal counterpart.

The authors analyze a multiperiod model of trading with differentially informed traders, liquidity traders, and a marketmaker. Each informed trader's initial information is a noisy estimate of the long-term value of the asset and the different signals received by informed traders can have a variety of correlation structures. With this setup, informed traders not only compete with each other for trading profits, they also learn about other traders' signals from the observed order flow. The authors' work suggests that the initial correlation among the informed traders' signals has a significant effect on the informed traders' profits and the informativeness of prices.

We study a new class of unconditional and conditional mean-variance spanning tests that exploits the duality between Hansen-Jagannathan bounds (1991) and mean-standard deviation frontiers. The tests are shown to be equivalent to standard spanning tests in population, but we document substantial differences in the small sample performance of alternative tests. Our empirical application examines the diversification benefits from emerging equity markets using an extensive new data set on U.S. and U.K.-traded closed-end funds. We find significant diversification benefits for the U.K. country funds, but not for the U.S. funds. The difference appears to relate to differences in portfolio holdings rather than to the behavior of premiums in the United States versus the United Kingdom.

Within an optimal contracting framework, we analyze the optimal number of creditors a company borrows from. We also analyze the optimal allocation of security interests among creditors and intercreditor voting rules that govern renegotiation of debt contracts. The key to our analysis is the idea that these aspects of the debt structure affect the outcome of debt renegotiation following a default. Debt structures that lead to inefficient renegotiation are beneficial in that they deter default, but they are also costly if default is beyond a manager's control. The optimal debt structure balances these effects. We characterize how the optimal debt structure depends on firm characteristics such as its technology, its credit rating, and the market for its assets.

Mun S. Ho, , Finding Cointegration Rank in High Dimensional Systems Using the Johansen Test: An Illustration Using Data Based Monte Carlo Simulations, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Nov., 1996), pp. 726-732