This paper studies the joint business cycle dynamics of innation, money growth, nominal and real interest rates and the velocity of money. I extend and estimate a standard cash and credit monetary model by adding idiosyncratic preference shocksnto cash consumption as well as a banking sector. The estimated model accounts very well for the business cycle data, a finding that standard monetary models have not been able to generate. I find that the quantitative performance of the model is explained through substantial liquidity effects.
Central bankers' conventional wisdom suggests that nominal interest rates should be raised to implement a lower inflation target. In contrast, I show that the standard New Keynesian monetary model predicts that nominal interest rates should bendecreased to attain this goal. Real interest rates, however, are virtually unchanged. These results also hold in recent vintages of New Keynesian models with sticky wages, price and wage indexation and habit formation in consumption.
Understanding the mechanism through which financial globalization affects economic performance is crucial for evaluating the costs and benefits of opening financial markets. This paper is a first attempt at disentangling the effects of financial integration on the two main determinants of economic performance: productivity (TFP)nand investments. I provide empirical evidence from a sample of 70 countries observednbetween 1975 and 1999. The results for both de jure and de facto indicators suggest that financial integration has a positive direct effect on productivity, while it does not directly affect capital accumulation. I control for indirect effects of financialnglobalization through financial development and banking and currency crises. While the evidence on financial depth as an indirect channel is weak, the results are more robust for financial crises: they depress both investments and TFP, and are favored by financial integration, though only to a minor extent. The overall effect of financialnliberalization is positive for productivity and negligible for investments.
In the heart of the Great Crisis, amidst great uncertainty and concerns surrounding the future of capitalism, John Maynard Keynes launched his optimistic prophecy that growth and technological change would allow mankind to solve its economic problem within ancentury. He envisioned a world where people would work much less and be less oppressednby the satisfaction of material needs. To what extent have his predictions turned out to benaccurate? This essays attempts to provide some answers.
In this paper we show that subtle forms of deceit undermine the effectiveness of incentives.nWe design an experiment in which the principal has an interest in underreporting the true performance difference between the agents in a dynamic tournament. According to thenstandard approach, rational agents should completely disregard the performance feedback of self-interested principals and choose their effort level as if they had not been given any information. However, despite substantial underreporting many principals seem to exhibit lying aversion which renders their feedback informative. Therefore, the agents respond to the feedback but discount it strongly by reducing their effort relative to fully truthful performance feedback. Moreover, previous experiences of being deceived exacerbate the problem and eventually reduce average effort even below the level that prevails in the absence of any feedback. Thus, both no feedback and truthful feedback are better for incentives than biased feedback.
Lagged foreign stock returns in excess of the U.S. stock market return are informative aboutnquarterly exchange rate movements. A past high foreign stock return relative to the U.S. signals a foreign currency depreciation and hence low returns on the foreign currency.nConditional on stock return differentials, the consumption-based CAPM (CCAPM) explains the cross-sectional dispersion in U.S. dollar exchange rates. The CCAPM captures more than 40 percent of the variation in foreign currency returns scaled with the respective stock returnndifferential on a country-by-country basis.
The decomposition of national CAPM market betas of European countries’ value and growthnportfolio returns into cashflow and discount rate news driven components reveals that i) highnaverage returns on value portfolios are associated with disproportionately high sensitivity to national cashflow news which corroborates recent evidence for the U.S. and ii) two-beta variants of national CAPMs capture the cross-sectional dispersion in European stock returns. The latter finding is suggestive of relatively well integrated stock markets among the core European countries and reflects basic asset pricing theory. One (national) discount factornshould price any (international) asset.
Temporary fluctuations of the U.S. consumption-wealth ratio, cay, predict excess returns onninternational stock markets at the business cycle frequency. This finding is the reflection of a common, temporary component in national stock markets. Exposure to this common component explains up to 60 percent of the covariation among long-horizon returns on the G7nstock markets for the time period from 1973 to 2005. The impact of the common componentnon stock market comovement is particularly pronounced in the period from 1990 to 2005.
Non-monetary incentives in the form of awards have so far escaped the attention ofneconomists despite their widespread use. This paper presents an experiment conductednonline at IBM to assess the impact of these kinds of extrinsic incentives. Introducing a hypothetical award has statistically significant effects on stated contributions to a publicngood. Our design allows the estimation of the impact of different award characteristicsnrelated to, for example, how public or how valuable the award is. We illustrate thesenfindings by providing predictions about the behavior induced by a new award at IBM.
Strongly periodic series occur frequently in many disciplines. This paper reviews one specific approach to analyzing such series viz. the harmonic regression approach.In this paper the five major methodsnsuggested under this approach are critically reviewed and compared, and their empirical potential highlighted via two applications. The out-of-sample forecast comparisons are made using the Superior Predictive Ability test, which specifically guards against the perils of data snooping. Certain tentative conclusions are drawn regarding the relative forecasting ability of the different methods.
