Do credit market imperfections justify a central bank׳s response to asset price fluctuations?

Do credit market imperfections justify a central bank׳s response to asset price fluctuations? This study addresses this question from the perspective of equilibrium determinacy. In the model we use, prices are sticky and the working capital of firms is subject to asset values because of a lack of commitment. If credit market imperfections exist to a small degree, the Taylor principle is a necessary and sufficient condition for equilibrium determinacy, and monetary policy response to asset price fluctuations is good from the perspective of equilibrium determinacy. However, if credit market imperfections exist to a large degree such that the collateral constraint is binding, then the Taylor principle no longer guarantees equilibrium determinacy, and monetary policy response to asset price fluctuations becomes a source of equilibrium indeterminacy. We find that the existence of credit market imperfections makes it unsuitable to initiate a monetary policy response to deal with asset price fluctuations. We also find that reductions in credit market imperfections can enlarge the indeterminacy region of the model parameters.     

大型超市自有品牌购买意向影响因素研究

随着零售业竞争不断加剧,自有品牌战略成为零售业一个新的利润源泉。但实践显示,大型超市在不断推出自有品牌商品后,并没有带来意料之中的利润增长,消费者对自有品牌商品的认可度较低、满意度不高、购买意愿不强。由此,对影响自有品牌购买意向关键因素的识别显得十分重要。本文在已有研究成果基础上,围绕六个方面提出了研究假设,利用调查数据,运用SPSS统计分析软件进行了验证。研究结果表明,自有品牌的感知质量、感知风险、销售价格、促销力度、超市自身形象、消费者品牌偏好等因素与大型超市自有品牌购买意向呈正相关。     

Upstream conduct and price authority with competing organizations

We characterize the degree of price authority that competing upstream principals award their downstream agents in a setting where these agents own private information about demand and incur nonverifiable distribution costs. Principals cannot internalize these costs through monetary incentives and design “permission sets” from which agents choose prices. The objective is to understand the forces shaping delegation and the constraints imposed on equilibrium prices. When principals behave noncooperatively, agents are biased toward excessively high prices because they pass on distribution costs to consumers. Hence, the permission set only features a price cap that is more likely to bind as products become closer substitutes, in sectors where distribution is sufficiently costly, and when demand is not too volatile. By contrast, when principals behave cooperatively, the optimal delegation scheme is richer and more complex. Because principals want to charge the monopoly price, the optimal permission set features a price floor when the distribution cost is sufficiently low, it features instead full discretion for moderate values of this cost, and only when it is high enough, a price cap is optimal. Surprisingly, while competition (as captured by stronger product substitutability) hinders delegation in the noncooperative regime, the opposite occurs when principals maximize industry profit.     

Lack of confidence,the zero lower bound,and the virtue of fiscal rules

In the presence of the zero lower bound, standard business cycle models with a Taylor-type monetary policy rule are prone to equilibrium multiplicity. A drop in private sector confidence can drive the economy into a liquidity trap without any change in fundamentals. I show, in the context of a standard New Keynesian model, that it is possible to design Ricardian fiscal spending rules that insulate the economy from such expectations-driven liquidity traps. In the case of price adjustment costs, desirable fiscal rules ensure that a drop in confidence does not lead to a decline in real marginal costs. In the case of nominal wage adjustment costs, desirable fiscal spending rules ensure that a drop in confidence does not lead to a decline in the ratio of the marginal rate of substitution between private consumption and hours worked relative to the real wage rate.     

Why are gasoline prices sticky? A test of alternative models of price adjustment

Macroeconomic models of business cycles rely on the assumption that firms adjust prices infrequently to generate the short‐run non‐neutrality of money documented by the monetary transmission literature. They posit different mechanisms to generate price stickiness, with correspondingly different implications for inflation dynamics. Using an autoregressive conditional binomial model, we test which mechanism is most consistent with the pattern of price adjustment found in daily wholesale gasoline price data. Our results lead us to reject menu costs and information‐processing delays but suggest that strategic considerations related to the idea of ‘fair pricing’ play an important role in accounting for price stickiness. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

论我国经济发达地区民间借贷的发展与规制——以江苏为实证分析样本

经济发达地区民间借贷的发展具有复杂性和先行性,出现了很多规避法律和监管的结构化创新。研究经济发达地区民间借贷法律规制可以从具有代表性的客观对象中概括可取的经验,以提炼普遍性的规则,解决制度与监管的不足,保证社会的稳定发展。融资性民间借贷是现代民间借贷的常态,应当立足商法和经济法思维,坚持营业自由、过程性规制的理念,以信息披露、登记制度、利率和借贷担保为重点进行分类规制。     

Consumer Feelings and Equilibrium Product Quality

This paper considers the possibility that a firm can invest not only in the true product quality, but also in activities such as merchandizing and store atmospherics that influence consumer perception of the product quality. Consumers make their purchase decisions based on the signal (perception) of quality they experience, where the signal is influenced by both the true product quality valued by the consumer and the affect of the consumer at the time of the signal formation. In this situation, a firm finds it optimal to invest in both product quality and in variables inducing affect, even though rational consumers, in equilibrium, correctly solve back for the true product quality. We uncover an asymmetry in the effects of the cost of producing quality and the cost of inducing affect. As a firm's cost of quality decreases, the firm will find it optimal to invest more both in the true quality and in the affect inducement, even if it does not have a lower cost of inducing affect. Conversely, if a firm finds it easier to induce affect, then the product quality decreases but affect-inducing activities increase.
Under competition, we find that the firm investing more in quality also invests more in affect creation. An implication of this is that in a competitive environment, consumers can rationally associate an up-lifting store atmosphere, affect inducing merchandizing, or mood-creating communication with high quality products even when the firm has no need to signal their private cost of quality information, and when there is no consumption externality of the affect. We also analyze the case in which firms might have different costs and consumers are uncertain about the costs incurred by a given firm. Here again we show that the perceived quality production is positively correlated with both the true quality and the affect inducing activities.     

Voluntary Quality Disclosure under Price‐Signaling Competition

We analyze an oligopolistic competition with differentiated products and qualities. The quality of a product is not known to consumers. Each firm can make an imperfect disclosure of its product quality before engaging in price‐signaling competition. There are two regimes for separating equilibrium in our model depending on the parameters. Our analysis reveals that, in one of the separating regimes, price signaling leads to intense price competition between the firms under which not only the high‐quality firm but also the low‐quality firm chooses to disclose its product quality to soften the price competition. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

论通货膨胀会计对传统会计基本理论和方法的推动和发展

通货膨胀直接干扰了人们对企业经济活动的正确判断。2007年美国次贷危机爆发以来,我国也面临着巨大的通货膨胀压力。运用通货膨胀会计可以提高会计信息的质量。一直以来,我们国家人民币形成了外升内贬的奇怪情况,持续上涨的物价水平严重困扰着政府的决策者和企业的经营发展。越来越多的企业开始研究和探讨通货膨胀会计。我国通货膨胀会计模式的研究应未雨绸缪,而西方发达国家通货膨胀会计研究和实施经验对我国也有积极的借鉴意义。     

一类价格调整问题的数学模型及其求解方法

虽然市场需求是价格的函数，但企业在价格调整实践中往往不能直接获取需求函数的具体表达式，而只能在某一给定价格水平下观察到市场需求量的值。因此，企业通常不能直接利用需求函数来调整价格以完成预期的市场需求调整的战略计划。本文将企业为达到市场需求战略调整目的而考虑的价格调整问题归结为一个隐式互补问题。在该模型中，企业可以依据自身经营战略目标的调整相应地调整各类产品的市场价格，使得价格调整后的产品销量迭到预定的目标。文章给出了求解这类隐式互补问题的直接迭代法，并给出了数值结果。     

Does Monetary Aid Catalyse New Business Creation? Analysing the Impact of Global Aid Flows on Formal and Informal Entrepreneurship

Official development aid – monetary transfers to developing countries to promote social and economic development – reached more than $140 billion in 2016. However, traditional forms of government bilateral aid continue to decline, while private aid is rising. Nevertheless, the impact of this aid, including its potential to stimulate economic development through new business formation, remains uncertain. In this study, we examine the impact of three sources of monetary aid flows on formal and informal entrepreneurship. Drawing from the international political economy literature we argue that bilateral aid and private aid are associated with higher levels of informal entrepreneurship, while multilateral aid is accompanied by lower levels. Moreover, we show that bilateral and private aid are linked with lower levels of formal entrepreneurship, while multilateral aid has no impact. The analyses of a panel of 313 observations from 49 countries provide robust support for these arguments.     

A monetary business cycle model with unemployment

To reproduce key features of the post-war U.S. data, most monetary business cycle models must assume there are high price markups and that agents have high labour supply elasticities despite the existence of contradictory microeconomic evidence. This paper eliminates the need for these assumptions by introducing imperfectly observed effort into a limited participation model. The estimated model is better able to capture the sluggish price response to a monetary policy shock than the standard model, and is consistent with evidence regarding the qualitative responses of the U.S. economy to technology shocks, fiscal policy shocks and monetary policy shocks.     

Monetary and fiscal policy under deep habits

Allowing habits to be formed at the level of individual goods – deep habits - can radically alter the fiscal policy transmission mechanism as the counter-cyclicality of mark-ups this implies can result in government spending crowding-in rather than crowding-out private consumption in the short run. We explore the robustness of this mechanism to the existence of price discrimination in the supply of goods to the public and private sectors. We then describe optimal monetary and fiscal policy in our New Keynesian economy subject to the additional externality of deep habits and explore the ability of simple policy rules to mimic fully optimal policy. We find that the presence of deep habits at empirically estimated levels can imply large externalities that significantly affect the conduct of monetary and tax policy. However, despite the rise in government spending multipliers implied by deep habits, government spending is barely used as a stabilisation tool under the optimal policy.     

Monetary policy for rationally inattentive economies with staggered price setting

The paper examines the optimal monetary policy when firms are constrained by information processing capability and infrequent price adjustments. Firms' information processing limit gives rise to imperfect knowledge about macroeconomic aggregates and endogenous information learning contingent on the monetary policy. Staggered price setting introduces the observed price duration and additional policy tradeoffs resulting from the interactions between nominal rigidities and imperfect information processing. The integrated model implies an optimal policy that commits to complete price stabilization in response to natural rate shocks but not in response to markup shocks. In the presence of markup shocks, it is optimal for the central bank to focus on price stabilization in the initial periods following markup shocks and shifts the emphasis to output gap stabilization later. Moreover, larger information capacity, stronger complementarities and more persistent shocks require more aggressive price stabilization in the short-run.     

Private Sector Debt,Financial Constraints,and the Effects of Monetary Policy: Evidence from the US

We characterize the response of U.S. real GDP to monetary policy shocks conditional on the level of private sector debt and the degree to which financial constraints are binding. To incorporate state-dependent effects of monetary policy, we use the local projection framework. We find that although the amount of private sector debt potentially weakens the monetary policy transmission mechanism, policy shocks exert substantially larger effects on output when high private debt coincides with binding financial constraints.     

Non-existence of equilibrium in Vickrey, second-price, and English auctions

A simple example shows that equilibria can fail to exist in second price (Vickrey) and English auctions when there are both common and private components to bidders’ valuations and private information is held on both dimensions. The example shows that equilibrium only exists in the extremes of pure private and pure common values, and that existence in standard models is not robust to a slight perturbation.     

Customer Directed Advertising and Product Quality

This paper studies the relationship between three key elements of the marketing mix, namely, price, product, and promotion, in a model where a seller employs informative advertising to launch a new product. We propose a fairly general advertising technology for the study of three promotional strategies—mass, imperfectly targeted, and customer directed advertising (CDA). We find that both the private and the social incentives to use distinct advertising strategies are aligned, and that sales are likely to be promoted through CDA. Compared to mass advertising, with CDA the social planner reduces quantity and downgrades quality whereas the seller sometimes upgrades it. Our model of targeting with endogenous product quality provides some new insights into the way the transition from mass to specialized advertising can affect market outcomes. Quality distortions imply that (i) even if CDA increases the market price, the degree of market power need not increase and (ii) CDA may yield a welfare loss even if it leads to a lower market price.     

Nonlinear Pricing and Oligopoly

We consider the general problem of price discrimination with nonlinear pricing in an oligopoly setting where firms are spatially differentiated. We characterize the nature of optimal pricing schedules, which in turn depends importantly upon the type of private information the customer possesses–either horizontal uncertainty regarding brand preference or vertical uncertainty regarding quality preference. We show that as competition increases, the resulting quality distortions decrease, as well as price and quality dispersions. Additionally, we indicate conditions under which price discrimination may raise social welfare by increasing consumer surplus through encouraging greater entry.     

POST-BUDGET ASSESSMENT AND ANALYSIS OF OIL PRICE CHANGES

In this Forecast Release we update our February forecast to take account of the Budget and other new information, particularly about oil prices and the exchange rate. This updated forecast is then used as the basis for a set of three simulations in which we explore the consequences of lower oil prices, a fall in the exchange rate and a tightening of fical and monetary policy. The main conclusions are first that the Budget (the contentr of which we broadly anticipated) has not significantly changed our assessment of the short-term prospects for output and inflation. However, a detailed examination of the Government's revenue and expenditure estimates suggests that fiscal policy in 1983-4, though broadly in line with the Medium-Term Financial Strategy, has been loosened compared with 1982-3 by rather more than appears from the PSBR projections. We ako believe that there is a risk that the PSBR will be significantly higher than officially forecast in 1983-4.
Our simulations show the size of the PSBR overshoot in the event of a further sharp fall in the oil price. I f this were accompanied by a fall in the exchange rate, inflation would quickly be back in double figures. Whether the exchange rate falls or not a lower oil price gives significant output gains. However, if the authorities reacted by tightening fiscal and monetary policy, inflation would be broadly the same as in the Post Budget forecast, but there would still be output gains from the lower oil price.     

Dealing with a liquidity trap when government debt matters: Optimal time-consistent monetary and fiscal policy

How does the need to preserve government debt sustainability affect the optimal monetary and fiscal policy response to a liquidity trap? To provide an answer, we employ a small stochastic New Keynesian model with a zero bound on nominal interest rates and characterize optimal time-consistent stabilization policies. We focus on two policy tools, the short-term nominal interest rate and debt-financed government spending. The optimal policy response to a liquidity trap critically depends on the prevailing debt burden. While the optimal amount of government spending is decreasing in the level of outstanding government debt, future monetary policy is becoming more accommodative, triggering a change in private sector expectations that helps to dampen the fall in output and inflation at the outset of the liquidity trap.