Chaotic implications of the natural rate of unemployment

By means of a discrete time, dynamic model this paper shows that, despite correct short-term expectations about price change by all agents concerned, the economy may exhibit chaotic behaviour rather than convergence to a natural, equilibrium rate, when wage bargain takes place according to the usual specification of the Phillips curve while firms maximize profit. The lack of coordination between profit-maximizing firms and wage-bargaining workers may result in an irregular dynamic path which questions whether the natural rate, even if it exists, is at all knowable in these circumstances.     

Some implications for monetary policy of uncertain exchange rate pass-through

The paper uses MULTIMOD to examine the implications of uncertain exchange rate pass‐through for the conduct of monetary policy. From the policymaker's perspective, uncertainty about exchange rate pass‐through implies uncertainty about policy multipliers and the impact of state variables on stabilization objectives. When faced with uncertainty about the strength of exchange rate pass‐through, policymakers will make less costly errors by overestimating the strength of pass‐through rather than underestimating it. The analysis suggests that pass‐through uncertainty of the magnitude considered does not result in efficient policy response coefficients that are smaller than those under certainty.     

The Yugoslav inflation: Some competing hypotheses

Various hypotheses about wage and price inflation in Yugoslavia are presented and tested empirically with quarterly data from the 1962–1972 period. Both theoretical literature and empirical evidence on the behavior of the self-managed firm are used to derive different models of wage determination. The wage-equation results indicate that labor-market conditions, inflationary expectations; and labor-productivity variables are significant determinants of the rate of growth of wages. The price equations, based on a modified cost-markup model consistent with the practices of Yugoslav firms, identify labor costs and aggregate demand as significant determinants of the rate of growth of prices. University of California, Berkeley.     

The endogeneity of the natural rate of growth

The aim of this paper is to estimate the sensitivity of thenatural rate of growth to the actual rate of growth for 15 OECDcountries over the period 1961–95, on the hypothesis thatthe natural rate of growth is not exogenously given. To do this,we estimate the natural rate of growth and, then, how it changeswhen the actual growth rate is different from the natural rate.As a side test of the endogeneity hypothesis, we also test forthe direction of causality between national output and factorinputs for the same set of countries. Our results support theidea that the natural rate of growth is not independent of theactual rate of growth and bring to the fore the importance offocusing on demand as well as supply for an understanding oflong-run growthrate differences between countries.     

Unemployment hysteresis and the natural rate of vacancies

On the basis of macro data from 10 OECD countries, I find that the job vacancy rate outperforms the unemployment rate as a reliable measure of domestic inflationary pressure. Moreover, while the rate of unemployment affects inflation primarily through its difference, the vacancy rate operates through a level effect as well. In most countries, a unique equilibrium rate of vacancies seems to coexist with a drifting equilibrium rate of unemployment. I show that this result is consistent with existing theories of unemployment hysteresis that focus on depreciation of human capital and search activity during unemployment spells. First version received: October 1997/Final version received: June 2001     

Short-run variation in the natural rate of unemployment

The initial findings of Lilien (1982), that the dispersion in sectoral labor market conditions exerts a significant positive impact on the unemployment rate, are confirmed for the Canadian data. In addition, the empirical results are shown to hold for a decycled version of Lilien's dispersion index and within a more complete specification of the natural rate and aggregate demand models. Although it is significant in all cases, the magnitude of the labor market dispersion effect is sensitive to the specification of the natural rate. As an aside, the work yields a test which reflects favorably on the policy neutrality hypothesis.     

Immigration and the natural rate of unemployment in Australia

This paper presents an indirect test of the proposition that a decrease in the rate of immigration into Australia during the early 1960s lowered the efficiency with which unemployed persons and unfilled job vacancies were matched, and increased labor turnover, thereby increasing the “natural” rate of unemployment. A theoretical model of employment growth is used to derive an expression for the steady-state relationship between unemployment and vacancies. Estimates of the model are obtained for the period 1955i–1973ii during which distinctly different immigration levels occurred. The empirical results are not consistent with the contention that a decrease in immigration caused the relationship between unemployment and job vacancies in Australia to shift outward. Therefore, the evidence suggests that the unemployment rate associated with a given level of labor demand was not significantly increased by the reduction in immigration to Australia.     

Some implications of anarchy for the distribution of property

A model of an anarchistic society is introduced and its implications for the distribution of income are considered. The economy is assumed to allocate one unit of an all-purpose completely divisible good to each individual in society. This initial distribution of income is changed through theft into a final distribution. The notion of equilibrium is introduced and the equilibrium distribution for a two-person example is displayed. Finally, the notion of orderly anarchy is discussed. An orderly anarchistic allocation of income is defined to be a distribution of income in which no effort is spent in stealing property from others. It is shown that every allocation in the core is an orderly anarchistic allocation and that the core is nonempty.     

Estimating the natural rate of interest in an open economy

The concept of the natural or equilibrium rate of interest has attracted a lot of attention from monetary policymakers in recent years. Most attempts to estimate the natural rate use a closed-economy framework. We argue that in the face of greater integration of global product and capital markets, an open economy framework is more appropriate. We provide some initial estimates of the natural rate for the USA and Japan in a two-country framework. Our identifying assumptions include a close relationship between the time-varying natural rate of interest and the low-frequency fluctuations of potential output growth in both the home country and the foreign country. Our results suggest that the natural rates in both countries are mainly determined by their own trend growth rates of potential output. Nevertheless, the other country’s trend growth plays an important role in several specific periods. The gap between the actual real interest rate and our estimated natural rate offers valuable insights into the recent stance of monetary policy in both of these two countries.     

The European refugee crisis and the natural rate of output

The European Commission follows a harmonized approach for calculating structural (potential) output for EU member states that takes into account labour as an important ingredient. This article shows how the recent huge migrants’ inflow to Europe affects trend output. Due to the fact that the immigrants immediately increase the working population but effectively do not enter the labour market, we illustrate that the potential output is potentially upward biased without any corrections. Taking Germany as an example, we find that the average medium-term potential growth rate is lower if the migration flow is modelled adequately compared to results based on the unadjusted European Commission procedure.     

The persistence of unemployment and the natural rate in Spain

The concept of the natural rate of unemployment is central to policy making because it indicates the capability of an economy to increase the growth of employment without increasing inflation. Since it is a nonobservable variable, an empirical counterpart must be estimated. The methodology used is based on a system of simultaneous equations that combines nominal developments (wage and price data) with the structural and institutional features (real data) of the economy. Hence, estimates of the natural rate and potential output which are consistent between themselves are obtained. They are both robust in terms of their relationship to actual wage and price inflation and comprehensive in terms of their underlying structural determinants.     

State space models for the exchange rate pass-through: determinants and null/full pass-through hypotheses

In this article, we formulate linear Gaussian state space models for the estimation of the exchange rate pass-through of the Brazilian Real against the US Dollar, using monthly data from August 1999 to August 2008. The state space/Kalman filtering framework allows the investigation of some empirical aspects previously suggested in the literature, such as time-varying coefficients and null/full pass-through hypotheses. We also test whether some theoretical ‘determinants’ of the pass-through are statistically significant in the period considered. The principal findings are as follows: (1) the data offer strong support to a time-varying pass-through; and (2) the variance of the exchange rate pass-through, the monetary policy and the trade flow have shown to be relevant determinants of the exchange rate pass-through.     

Short-time work—Some long-run implications

This paper outlines a simple model to examine some long-run implications of short-time work schemes (STWs) on labor market performance and welfare. It is not clear that STWs reduce unemployment as the induced wage push discourages job creation.     

The natural rate of interest of Hong Kong

We measure the natural rate of interest of Hong Kong in a flexible VAR model. We find that the natural rate of interest of Hong Kong fell below zero after the SARS shock in 2003 and reached the lowest after the great recession in 2007–2009. Variance decomposition shows that mainland China, instead of the USA, has a larger impact on the natural rate of interest of Hong Kong.     

Hysteresis vs. natural rate of US unemployment

This paper investigates the stochastic nature of the unemployment rate allowing for cross-section dependence from a panel of US state-level data. We first employ the PANIC method to identify the common and idiosyncratic components. Powerful recursive mean adjustment (RMA) methods are used to test for unit roots. We find significant evidence of a nonstationary common component when the data from the most recent recession are included. Even when stationarity is empirically supported, the bias-corrected half-life of the common component appears very long, casting doubt on the usefulness of the natural rate hypothesis.     

Verification of the natural unemployment rate hypothesis in the South African economy

The results obtained confirming the natural unemployment rate hypothesis, i.e., that in the long run there is no trade-off between inflation and unemployment. The results also support the weak rational expectations hypothesis, that with the increase in the information the economic agent will eliminate the money illusion, though the process towards the final elimination of the money illusion is very long, and therefore short-term Phillips curve can be sustained for quite long periods.     

Testing the rational expectations and structural neutrality hypotheses: Some further results for the U.K.

In this paper we test directly for the restrictions implied by rational expectations and structural neutrality. The tests are direct in the sense that they employ theLucas output equation father than the approximations to it, which replace the lagged output term by lagged monetary shocks, commonly considered in the literature. The direct approach is considered preferable because it avoids these ad hoc approximations and saves significantly on degrees of freedom. The latter permits us to pursue a fully nested testing procedure, which was not possible in earlier work employing postwar U.K. annual data. The main result is that the rational expectations restrictions are not accepted.     

The endogeneity of the natural rate of growth in the regions of Italy

Following León‐Ledesma and Thirlwall (2002a León‐Ledesma, M.A. and Thirlwall, A.P. 2002a. The endogeneity of the natural rate of growth. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 26: 441–59. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]), this paper examines the hypothesis that the natural rate of growth of the Italian regions is endogenous to and positively affected by the actual growth rate. Relying on fixed‐effects and SUR estimation techniques and using annual data for the 20 Italian regions over the period 1977–2003, we find strong support for the endogeneity hypothesis suggesting that faster actual growth raises the natural rate of growth of the average Italian region by about 3–3.7 percentage points. Furthermore, in line with recent findings in the literature, our analysis provides evidence of asymmetries in Okun’s Law. In particular, the asymmetric Okun coefficient in the high‐growth regime turns out to be positive in several cases, implying the unemployment rate may become pro‐cyclical when actual growth rises above a certain threshold rate.     

Average-cost pricing: Some evidence and implications

We present new survey evidence on pricing behavior for more than 14,000 European firms, and study its macroeconomic implications. Among firms that are price setters, roughly 75% respond that their prices are set as a markup on total costs, a business practice termed “full cost pricing”. Only 25% set prices as markups over variable or marginal costs. Moreover, using industry data for the U.S., we find that the correlation between changes in output prices and changes in variable input prices is significantly lower when fixed costs are likely to be more important.Since our results are similar to the findings in the classic and controversial paper of Hall and Hitch (1939) and subsequent survey evidence, we believe it worth studying the implications of full cost pricing for macroeconomics. We first propose a problem for the firm where full cost pricing can arise as optimizing behavior. We embed this problem, featuring an occasionally binding constraint, into a simple general equilibrium model. We show that when the model is hit by a shock that makes the constraint binding, the response of endogenous variables is amplified significantly more than it would be under the unconstrained regime.