投资主体决策异质性与货币政策效果差异

本文在对中国近期投资需求现实考察的基础上,构建了各类主体的投资需求新古典模型,根据不同投资主体目标函数和约束条件的差异得出结论:(1)以调整利率(准备金)为主的货币政策对于私营企业固定资产投资、住宅投资具有较大效应,而对于国有企业投资作用相对较小,对于地方政府投资的效应为0,甚至作用相反。(2)以控制信贷规模为主的货币政策对于私营企业投资、家庭具有较明显的作用,对于国有企业投资作用较小,对于政府投资作用非常微小。(3)政府对国有企业上缴利润比例的调整对于国有企业的投资变化具有较强影响,而房地产调控政策如果发挥作用,则对于地方政府投资和住宅投资具有较大效应。     

THE CARE AND HANDLING OF MONETARY AUTHORITIES*

Sometimes a group of people want to hire some agent (a monetary authority, for instance) to force them to cooperate with one another. This can cause problems, not only of the standard principal-agent type, but also of inconsistency, which appears here as renegotiation. The group faces a conflict between controlling the agent – the agency problem – and controlling themselves – the inconsistency problem. Terms of office are a good way to resolve this problem, and in fact, for people patient enough, the renegotiation problem disappears. This model provides insights into why the public dislikes inflation, why the market for presidents does not clear in Walrasian fashion, and why the controversy about “rules versus discretion” provides no policy guidance.     

STABILITY AND INSTABILITY OF THE COUCRNOT EQUILIBRIUM*

Conditions for the Cournot equilibrium to be locally asymptotically stable or unstable are explored, which are still compatible with the second‐order condition for the optimum. The Cournot equilibrium may not be stable even if the condition owing to Fisher (1961 ), Hahn (1962 ), and Okuguchi (1964 , 1976, 1999 ) is satisfied, which was given as a sufficient condition for the Cournot equilibrium to be stable. However, as long as a game by symmetric players is concerned, the Cournot equilibrium is unstable whenever F‐H‐O condition is not satisfied. In this sense, that F‐H‐O condition is not satisfied is sufficient for the Cournot equilibrium to be unstable.     

CARTEL STABILITY AND THE CURVATURE OF MARKET DEMAND*

The stability of collusion is analysed for a family of demand functions whose curvature is determined by a parameter varying between zero and infinity. When the number of firms is low, firms may prefer to act as quantity setters in order to increase cartel stability if demand is sufficiently convex. Otherwise, price-setting behaviour enhances their ability to collude. As the number of firms tends to infinity, Cournot behaviour is preferable to Bertrand behaviour in order to stabilize collusion, independently of the characteristics of market demand.     

FIXED COSTS,THE BALANCED BUDGET MULTIPLIER AND WELFARE*

In a two‐sector model, where one of the sectors is monopolistically competitive and subject to increasing returns to scale but without love for variety, we analyse the effects of a balanced budget fiscal expansion. Such an expansion could increase the welfare of the representative individual, if elasticities of substitution in production and consumption are low. A reorganization of production takes place—increasing returns enabling a rise in real income.     

THE CYCLICAL EFFECTS OF MONETARY POLICY REGIMES*

A 1979 change in U.S. monetary policy coincided with a break in the cyclical behavior of monetary aggregates, while the cyclical behavior of all other real and nominal variables remained relatively constant. A model is developed to assess the quantitative importance of a change in monetary policy in accounting for these observations. The monetary authority's reaction function is estimated conditionally on the theoretical model and accounts for upward of 72–95% of all observed changes, including inside money preceding the business cycle and a qualitative change in the cyclical behavior of the monetary base.     

DISCOUNT RATE FOR PUBLIC INVESTMENT IN A MONETARY DISEQUILIBRIUM ECONOMY*

In this paper, we explore the social rate of discount for public investment in a monetary overlapping generations model which allows for market disequilibria arising from price and wage rigidities. Financing public investment with a lump-sum tax on the younger generation, borrowing and money supply, the government maximizes the sum of generational utilities discounted by a social rate of time preference. For the social welfare optimum, it is required to take the boundary-maintaining policy by making demand for output equal to supply. In a stationary state, we show that (i) the social rate of discount on the Keynesian-repressed inflation boundary should be the weighted average of the social rate of time preference and the market rate of interest, the weights depending on the amount of private investment crowded out by public investment, and (ii) on the Keynesian-classical boundary it should be a modified version of the weighted average rule, containing an extra term which represents the marginal opportunity cost of public investment through its impact on labour employment.     

THE REAL BALANCE EFFECT AND STABILITY ANALYSIS IN CLASSICAL MONETARY THEORY

The paper investigates the use of the real balance effect mechanism by Dennis Robertson in Money (1922), Banking Policy and the Price Level (1926) and subsequently in his Lectures On Economic Principles (1957-59). The Paper draws on the correspondence between Robertson and Don Patinking during the period 1951-56. It was Patinkin's opinion that Robertson never used the real balance effect as a mechanism to bring the disequilibriated monetary sector back to a new equilibrium; this paper shows that these conclusions are crucially dependent on the interpretation of what constitutes 'stability analysis'.