Knowledge that Transforms

This paper presents and estimates a simple model of real exchange rate determination that includes the expected future U.S. federal budget deficit as a determinant. The model is applied to the real value of the dollar versus the mark, yen, and pound over the period June 1974-October 1987. The estimates suggest that rapid increases in the expected future deficit in the early 1980s contributed to a rapid appreciation of the dollar. The fall in the value of the dollar in the spring of 1985 appears to be due to a fall in the expected budget deficit. Copyright 1989 by MIT Press.

A test of the hypothesis that estimates of the interest elasticity of personal and private saving may be biased downward by a failure to control for behavior related to defined benefit pension programs fails to reject existence of a positive interest elasticity of private saving. Correcting for pension funding bias, the estimated interest elasticity of private saving is 0.04, well below Michael J. Boskin's (1978) estimate of 0.4 obtained with a different data set and different estimation procedures. The estimated interest elasticity of personal saving is 0.28. Copyright 1989 by MIT Press.

The earnings of married women have a more equalizing effect on the distribution of lifetime family earnings (or the expected present value of earnings) than on the distribution of annual family earnings, using Panel Study of Income Dynamics longitudinal data. The intertemporal variability of wives' labor supply causes the correlation between the lifetime earnings of husbands and wives to weaken relative to the correlation between their annual incomes, resulting in lower lifetime inequality. The inequality of potential income (full employment earnings) is found to be much greater for lifetime earnings than average annual earnings, based on alternative endogenous wage-hours models. Copyright 1989 by MIT Press.

To what extent has the increased supply by government of certain union-like services reduced the demand for union membership and thereby contributed to the decline in trade union density? The existing empirical evidence is meager and conflicting. The puropse of our paper is to reexamine the government substitution hypothesis, specifically with respect to the relationship between government welfare spending and union density. We test the hypothesis with time-series data using three alternative models of union growth. The advantage of this approach is that it will permit an assessment of how sensitive the results are to both specification and sample period changes. In all, we find the time-series evidence of a negative welfare effect on union density to be mixed. Copyright 1989 by MIT Press.

The recent debate questioning whether unemployment in the 1970s represents sectoral adjustment or cyclical variation is expanded to examine comparable causes of real wage variability. Using Panel Study of Income Dynamics panel data, real wages respond more to persistent sectoral shocks than cyclical shocks in the 1970s, making recent estimates of procyclical wage variability appear weak in perspective. Employing a model of endogenous sector-specific individual skills, older workers earning economic rents are shown to have the greatest wage response to sectoral shocks. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that short run cyclical shocks may be met with hours adjustment, as specified in implicit or explicit contracts, but that persistent shocks require wage adjustment. Copyright 1989 by MIT Press.

Stephen C. Farber, Robert J. Newman, Regional Wage Differentials and the Spatial Convergence of Worker Characteristic Prices, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 71, No. 2 (May, 1989), pp. 224-231

A common feature to most aggregative studies of the labor market is a marginal productivity expression in which the quantity of labor appears on the left hand side of the equation, and the right hand side includes the real wage and output. A number of researchers have cautioned that if the output variable is treated as exogenous, serious econometric difficulties may result. However, the assumption that output is exogenous has not been tested. In this paper, we estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market, and use it to test the assumption of output exogeneity. We find that the assumption that output is exogenous cannot be rejected by the data.

While quarterly consumption data are known to be well fitted by an integrated first-order moving average process--IMA(1, 1)--with a positive coefficient, monthly consumption data are found to be well fitted by an IMA(1, 1) process with a negative coefficient. Without measurement errors, one implication is that, if R. Hall's (1978) random walk model of consumption behavior is true, then the agents' decision interval must be greater than a month. (In particular, this evidence rejects the possibility of continuously taken decisions.) Another implication is that, if consumption decisions are generated by an IMA(1, 1) process at intervals shorter than a month, the coefficient must be negative. The paper also discusses the case of monthly data corrupted by measurement errors. Copyright 1989 by MIT Press.

Yoon Dokko, Are Changes in Inflation Expectations Capitalized into Stock Prices? A Micro-Firm Test for the Nominal Contracting Hypothesis, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 71, No. 2 (May, 1989), pp. 309-317