Knowledge that Transforms

The authors examine the importance of a disequilibrium real balance effect on non-durable consumers' expenditure in the U.K. Using cointegration techniques and the Johansen procedure they first establish a desired long-run demand function for liquid assets depending on income, wealth and a set of interest rates. Deviations of liquidity from this desired level cause changes in consumption via intertemporal substitution but via its effect on disequilibrium liquidity. Consumption is modeled in an error-correction framework and is also found to depend on income and financial wealth. Both the disequilibrium liquidity and wealth terms may be picking up the effects of financial liberalization (e.g. "mortgage leak") on consumption as funds released will be temporarily held in financial assets. They also find some evidence that changes in the distribution of income have an independent effect on aggregate consumption. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

In large demand systems, when the unknown error covariance matrix is approximated by its usual maximum likelihood estimator, the coefficient estimates are known to suffer from two problems: (1) the asymptotic standard errors severely understate the sampling variability of the estimates and (2) the efficiency of the maximum likelihood coefficient estimates is greatly impaired. In this paper, the author proposes an alternative estimator for the covariance matrix and evaluates its performance. Using time-series data for OECD countries, the author finds that there is a spectacular improvement. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

This paper constructs a time-series band for ex ante profits from forward speculation and examines the permanent components of the median of the band for six different exchange markets. The unpredictability of ex ante profits is rejected using nonparametric tests. Deviations of ex ante profits from forward premia are attributed to deviations of nominal exchange rates from martingale processes. It is shown that movements in the terms of trade are responsible for most of the variability and serial correlation properties of ex ante profits. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

This paper devises an empirical methodology for discriminating between the median voter model and the oligarchy choice model when applied to the collective provision of a public good. In particular, an empirical methodology is engineered so that a nested test procedure can evaluate competing models. The authors apply this methodology to examine the demand for military activities of ten members of the NATO alliance. A two-stage least squares procedure, corrected for autocorrelation, is used to estimate the demand equations. Test results vary: some allies abide by the median voter model, others by the oligarchy model, and still others by neither. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

This note provides a generalization of the standard adjustment cost-rational expectations model due to Sargent (1978), which, in addition to the cost of changing the level of the decision variable, also allows for the cost of altering the "speed" with which decisions are changed. It establishes the existence of a unique stable solution for this more general model, derives an explicit solution for the underlying decision problem, and provides a necessary order condition for identification of the structural parameters. The note also contains an application of the model to the determination of employment in the U.K. coal industry over the 1956-83 period. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

This paper analyzes the effects of demand shifts within and between local labor markets on unemployment and employment levels and changes observed in those markets.

In this paper, the authors present evidence that neither large differences in inflation nor long time periods are necessary for a finding favorable to purchasing power parity. Evidence from cointegrating regressions and tests of the real exchange rate indicate that purchasing power parity held as a long-run constraint between the United States and Canada for the period 1950:10 to 1961:5. The authors also find that government intervention can distort purchasing power parity over a finite period. Once the data were extended beyond the period of the free float, the evidence is no longer favorable to purchasing power parity. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

Long-duration employment opportunities are a necessary condition for workers to hold lifetime jobs. This paper uses longitudinal data on individual U.S. manufacturing plants from 1963-1982 to estimate the age and completed spell distributions for employment positions. The results indicate that, of the employment opportunities in progress in the U.S. manufacturing sector in 1982, 30.0% were at least 19 years old and 59.6% would have a completed length of at least 20 years. High rates of turnover in employment positions coexist with a large number of long-duration employment opportunities because the turnover tends to be concentrated within a subset of the producers. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

This paper examines the role of the exchange rate in U.S. external adjustments. The results show that the exchange rate is an important transmission channel of influence on prices, and with longer lags, on income and the trade balance. The effects of the exchange rate and relative prices on the trade balance are not symmetric even in the long run. Exchange rate feedback is insignificant and makes little difference in trade balance adjustment. There are also indications that the response of relative prices to the exchange rate shifted in recent years. Such changes seem to help explain the persistence of the U.S. trade deficit in recent years for multilateral trade, but not bilateral trade, with Japan or Germany. Copyright 1991 by MIT Press.

This paper characterizes the statistical distribution of the response of the U.S. trade account to a dollar depreciation. To accomplish this task, the paper builds and estimates an econometric model of U.S. bilateral trade. Given an exchange-rate shock, this distribution is generated empirically by stochastically simulating this model using random drawings for both innovations and trade elasticities. The paper finds that the distribution of trade-account responses is not stationary, that its variance is directly related to the size of the exchange-rate shock, that the dominant source of uncertainty lies with imports' price elasticities, and that the dispersion of these responses is more pronounced in the short run than in the long run. Based on these properties, the analysis applies Chebychev's inequality to the sample of trade-account responses and finds that hysteresis in price elasticities has a low probability of accounting for the persistence of the U.S. trade deficit. ; These findings have two practical implications. First, forecasts of trade-account responses to exchange-rate shocks should include the associated confidence intervals. Uncertainty in these responses is potentially large and omitting the corresponding confidence intervals is analogous to omitting standard errors of regression estimates. Second, deriving confidence intervals needs to recognize that parameter estimates are random variables and that they contribute, quite significantly in this application, to the width of these intervals.