Money,reserves, and the transmission of monetary policy: Does the money multiplier exist?

With the use of non-traditional policy tools, the level of reserve balances has risen in the US from roughly $20 billion before the financial crisis to well past $1 trillion. The effect of reserve balances in macroeconomic models often comes through the money multiplier, affecting the money supply and the bank lending. In this paper, we document that the mechanism does not work through the standard multiplier model or the bank lending channel. If the level of reserve balances is expected to have an impact on the economy, it seems unlikely that a standard multiplier story will explain the effect.     

Consequences of Mutual Ownership for Building Societies

This paper argues that the mutual ownership of building societies entails, in principle, different objectives from those of a company. It considers whether members' interests are best served by maximising either surpluses or growth and reviews evidence on economies of scale and effciency compared with banks. Conversion seems unlikely to result in great improvements in effciency and it is hard to say whether members benefit from free shares by more than they may lose as customers. The case of Abbey National is examined in the light of the reasons it gave for conversion.     

Futures studies in India putting down roots

Since the 1970s the Indian government's Department of Science and Technology has been working to spread futures studies throughout the country's educational institutes, governmental policy-making groups, and corporations. Satish Seth has been involved in this effort from the beginning, and here reports on the progress and achievements to date.     

State lotteries and externalities to their participants

The degree of participation in state lotteries can either increase or decrease expected returns. It is theoretically possible for unfair bets to become more than fair as participation in lotteries changes. In addition, the purchase of every combination of numbers can be more than a fair bet and such a purchase may increase the expected return to other lottery players.     

Earnings and Welfare after Downsizing: Central Bank Employees in Ecuador

This article measures the earnings and welfare losses experiencedby displaced employees of the Central Bank of Ecuador. It linksthese losses to individual characteristics such as gender, education,seniority, and salary in the public sector. Data are from asurvey of displaced employees that included subjective evaluationsof well-being in addition to information on activity and earnings.The welfare losses of separated employees are not highly correlatedwith their earnings losses, partly because some of them (especiallywomen) withdrew from the labor force after separation. Earningsand welfare losses also vary depending on the nature of displacement,which was voluntary for roughly half the employees and involuntaryfor the rest. Overall, the losses were larger for employeeswith less education and more seniority, but not necessarilylarger for employees with higher salaries. However, compensationfor displacement was based on a rule of thumb that involvedonly salary and seniority and was applied across-the-board.For those employees who left voluntarily, the resulting compensationpackage was, on average, about 20 percent higher than the welfareloss. The article derives the implications of these findingsfor the design of assistance programs for displaced workersand, more specifically, for the tailoring of compensation packagesto their individual characteristics.     

Strategic Quality Decisions under Heterogeneous Resource Endowments

The literature on product competition advocates a differentiation strategy assuming firm homogeneity in resources. However, firm heterogeneity in resource endowments has long been recognized in economics. Merging these two perspectives, we show that the increase in consumer preference for quality leads to firms' aggressive price competition instead of quality differentiation. As consumers look for higher quality, the cost advantage arising from superior resources increases and makes head-to-head competition more profitable than accommodating a less efficient rival. When consumers are highly concerned about quality, even a small resource difference leads a more efficient firm to initiate cutthroat price competition for market dominance.     

RECOVERING PORTFOLIO DEFAULT INTENSITIES IMPLIED BY CDO QUOTES

We propose a stable nonparametric algorithm for the calibration of “top‐down” pricing models for portfolio credit derivatives: given a set of observations of market spreads for collateralized debt obligation (CDO) tranches, we construct a risk‐neutral default intensity process for the portfolio underlying the CDO which matches these observations, by looking for the risk‐neutral loss process “closest” to a prior loss process, verifying the calibration constraints. We formalize the problem in terms of minimization of relative entropy with respect to the prior under calibration constraints and use convex duality methods to solve the problem: the dual problem is shown to be an intensity control problem, characterized in terms of a Hamilton–Jacobi system of differential equations, for which we present an analytical solution. Given a set of observed CDO tranche spreads, our method allows to construct a default intensity process which leads to tranche spreads consistent with the observations. We illustrate our method on ITRAXX index data: our results reveal strong evidence for the dependence of loss transitions rates on the previous number of defaults, and offer quantitative evidence for contagion effects in the (risk‐neutral) loss process.     

Are auction revenues affected by rising art buyers’ premia? The case of early American art

The steady rise in the premiums charged to art buyers at auction (above hammer price) has been underway since 1992. This article, using a stable and bounded sample of repeat purchase of American works created before 1950, reveals that this tact has reduced hammer prices for that art. However, renewed and hyper-competitive efforts to bring more and higher quality art to market by the two main houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have resulted in general profitability. Nevertheless, we calculate that a rise in buyers’ premia at Sotheby’s, a publically traded company, has reduced revenues and profits below their potential in the absence of such increases.