To have one central bank governor address you today may be regarded as a misfortune, but to invite two looks like carelessness! It is a great honour to be invited by this year’s President-Elect, Marty Feldstein, to deliver the Ely lecture. Marty has been my teacher, mentor, colleague and friend for over thirty years, and I never cease to be amazed by the energy and imagination which he devotes to the study of economic problems. I got to know Marty during my time as a Kennedy Scholar at Harvard in 1971. The Kennedy Scholarships form one part of Britain's national memorial to President Kennedy. The other part is an acre of land, now American territory, at Runnymede. At the ceremony to open the Runnymede memorial in 1965, Prime Minister Harold Wilson remarked about President Kennedy that "his eyes were on the horizon, but his feet were on the ground”. Almost thirty years earlier Richard T. Ely published his autobiography entitled "Ground under Our Feet". Whereas I found the experience of coming from Europe to the United States intellectually liberating and exhilarating, a hundred years earlier Ely found academic freedom by making the reverse journey. As

An index of Inequality is constructed which decomposes into two components, corresponding to vertical and "horizontal" equity respectively.Horizontal equity Is defined in terms of changes in the ordering of a distribution.The proposed index is a function to two inequality aversion parameters.One empirical application is for comparison of a pre-tax distribution with a post-tax distribution, and an example of this is given for the distribution of incomes in the UK in 1977.There is a trade-off between "horizontal" and vertical equity, and for particular combinations of the inequality aversion parameters the original distribution.willbe preferred to the final distribution.The paper concludes with an application of the proposed index to a model of optimal taxation.

The way in which taxation affects corporate financial policy, and the level of investment through the structure of the cost of capital, is still a bone of contention. Various specifications of the cost of capital have been used in econometric models (for example, Jorgenson [3]) although in a recent theoretical paper Stiglitz [10] has claimed that, ignoring uncertainty, the cost of capital is simply the rate of interest.3 In this paper we shall analyse the effect of personal and corporate taxation on both the firm's choice of financial policy and its investment decision. We shall see that the latter is influenced by the former because the cost of capital depends upon the optimal financial policy. The results have implications for the specification of the neoclassical investment model which has come to play such an important part in the econometric study of investment behaviour, because the cost of capital is a good deal more complicated than most of this work allows for. Another problem which will be examined is how expectations of future changes in tax rates affect the firm's policy. In recent years governments have often announced tax changes in advance, and increasing attention is being paid to the use of announcements of future tax changes as a policy tool in its own right. These announcement effects can have a significant impact on investment behaviour. To make it easier to see the role of taxation we shall assume a world of perfect certainty. There are three justifications for this neglect of uncertainty. First, when tax changes are announced in advance, expectations that these changes will take place are held with a very high degree of certainty. Secondly, this assumption makes our results directly comparable with those of the neoclassical investment model. Finally, in a world of certainty we know that the firm will, if it is acting in the shareholders' interests, maximize the market value of the stock. But in a world of uncertainty which does not have a complete set of Arrow-Debreu markets it is not clear just what the firm should be trying to maximize. This is because shareholders have different subjective beliefs about what the best policy is, and there are no contingent commodity markets for them to hedge on. If one shareholder believes that the firm would make enormous profits by drilling for oil in the North Sea and nobody else believes that this would be successful, then for this shareholder the optimal policy is to drill even though the market value of the firm's stock would slump in the short run.4 Section 2 discusses a model of the valuation of the company and the way in which this is influenced by taxation. This brings out the interaction between the systems of personal and corporate taxation. In Section 3 we analyse the firm's optimal financial policy where it has a choice between financing investment by using retentions, borrowing, or

This article investigates why, in October 1987, almost all stock markets fell together despite widely differing economic circumstances. We construct a model in which “contagion” between markets occurs as a result of attempts by rational agents to infer information from price changes in other markets. This provides a channel through which a “mistake” in one market can be transmitted to other markets. We offer supporting evidence for contagion effects using two different sources of data.

[This article investigates why, in October 1987, almost all stock markets fell together despite widely differing economic circumstances. We construct a model in which "contagion" between markets occurs as a result of attempts by rational agents to infer information from price changes in other markets. This provides a channel through which a "mistake" in one market can be transmitted to other markets. We offer supporting evidence for contagion effects using two different sources of data.]

This paper explores the portfolio behavior of investors differing with respect to both tax rates and risk aversion, emphasizing the role of constraints on individual and firm behavior in ensuring the existence of and characterizing portfolio equilibrium. Under certain conditions on the securities available in the market, which also are necessary for shareholders to be unanimous in supporting firm value maximization, investors will be segmented by tax rate into two groups, one specialized in equity and the other in debt. Though the relative wealths of the two groups determine the aggregate debt-equity ratio, each firm will be indifferent to its financial policy.

Martin Feldstein:1 Chairman Alan Greenspan's remarks today give us an opportunity to understand his thinking about monetary policy and about the Federal Reserve's actions during the past 15 years. It was a period of substantial accomplishment that no doubt reflects in considerable measure the views of the Chairman himself. The Fed's primary goal, price stability, has been achieved, with inflation down from 4 percent at the end of the 1980's to about 1.5 percent now. The 2-percentage-point difference between the interest rate on conventional Treasury bonds and on inflation-indexed bonds (TIPS) shows that financial markets expect inflation will remain at about 2 percent for at least the next decade.

The authors attempt to account for the covariances between stock markets and to assess their integration. They estimate a factor model for sixteen national stock market returns whose volatility is induced by changing volatility in the factors. Unanticipated returns depend on innovations in economic variables and 'unobservable' factors. Assets risk premia are linear combinations of the factors risk premia. The authors find that idiosyncratic risk is priced and the 'price of risk' is different across stock markets. Besides, only a small proportion of their covariances can be accounted for by 'observable' economic variables. Correlation changes are driven primarily by movements in 'unobservables.' Copyright 1994 by The Econometric Society.