Sticky Price Models,Durable Goods,and Real Wage Rigidities

The standard two‐sector New Keynesian model with durable goods is at odds with conventional wisdom and vector autoregression (VAR) evidence: Following a monetary shock, the model generates (i) either negative or no comovement across sectoral outputs and (ii) aggregate neutrality of money when durable goods' prices are flexible. We reconcile theory with evidence by incorporating real wage rigidities into the standard model: As long as durable goods' prices are more flexible than nondurable goods' prices, we obtain positive sectoral comovement and, thus, aggregate nonneutrality of money.     

The demonetization of gold: transactions and the change in control

Three models of a monetary economy are considered, in order to show the effects of a gold demonetization: the first with a gold money, the second with demonetized gold but no central bank, and the third with demonetized gold, but with a central bank. The distinctions between ownership and control are discussed. Our results show a gain in efficiency (in the case of “enough money”) when a switch is made from a durable commodity money to a fiat money. This is due to players being able to enjoy both the full service value of gold and transactions value of money—something that cannot be done in the original model with gold money. When we further add in the central bank, there is a somewhat further efficiency gain in the case of “not enough money”. We close the paper with a discussion of the usefulness of central banks.     

Durable Goods,Investment Shocks,and the Comovement Problem

Sticky‐price models suggest that capital investment shocks are an important driver of business cycle fluctuations. Despite quantitative importance in explaining business cycles, a comovement problem emerges because the shocks generate intertemporal substitution effects away from consumption toward investment. This paper resolves the problem by extending the standard sticky‐price model to a two‐sector model with consumer durable services. When durable goods are used as investment in capital and consumer durables, positive capital investment shocks also generate intratemporal substitution effects away from consumer durable services toward nondurable consumption that dominates intertemporal effects. Consequently, consumption increases, and the comovement problem is resolved.     

PORTFOLIO CHOICES,CONSUMPTION, AND PRICES IN A MARKET WITH DURABLE ASSETS

Recent research in investments has focused almost exclusively on financial assets such as corporate stocks. Although durable assets constitute an important part of investors' holdings, little effort has been made to explore their role in individuals' investments decisions and on assets pricing. This paper establishes results concerning the role of durable assets in the determination of optimum portfolio choices. The paper explores the effect of consumption considerations related to the service flows generated by durable assets on optimum portfolio considerations and asset prices. The main result is tied to the existence, or lack thereof, of efficient rental markets. In the absence of rental markets (or with restrictions on renting), investors' portfolio choices are not independent of consumption considerations as they are assumed to be in the standard CAPM. Individuals may thus hold different portfolios, and prices reflect the owner's inability to trade consumption flows. Under perfect market assumptions with unrestricted rental markets, optimum portfolio choices are undistinguishable from those implied by the standard CAPM in the sense that they are mean-variance efficient and identical for all individuals. Consumption is adjusted by trading service flows in the rental market. Prices, and the price of risk, however, reflect the existence of durable assets service flows as well as the risks involved in trading these flows in the rental market. In the model, risky rental income is introduced by uncertain rental costs. Equilibrium rental rates, an important part of the return expected from holding durable assets, are determined in the context of the mean-variance framework as a function of return and undiversifiable risk.     

New Keynesian models, durable goods, and collateral constraints

Econometric evidence suggests that, in response to monetary policy shocks, durable and non-durable spending co-move positively, and durable spending exhibits a much larger sensitivity to the shocks. A standard two-sector New Keynesian model with perfect financial markets is at odds with these facts. The introduction of a borrowing constraint, where durables play the role of collateral assets, helps in reconciling the model with the empirical evidence.     

Conducting the international orchestra: Bank of England leadership under the classical gold standard

A large literature assigns to the Bank of England a leadership role in the management of the classical gold standard. This paper documents the exceptional behavior of the Bank of England's discount rate — in particular, that it tended to lead discount rates abroad. It then develops a game-theoretic analysis of central bank interaction under the classical gold standard. Sterling's reserve currency status is shown to provide a rationale for Stackelberg leadership by the Bank of England. Contrary to popular notions, however, Britain's foreign creditor status does not provide a basis for the Bank of England's leadership strategy.     

Optimal Disbursement of a Sunk Resource and Decentralised Cost Allocation

We consider whether the allocation of the sunk cost of a central resource to operating divisions can be consistent with economically optimal resource consumption decisions. When it is recognised that the central resource is scarce, one may, in principle, defend the allocation of sunk cost, if it measures the opportunity cost of usage. However, typically it has been proposed that such allocations are, at best, a proxy for opportunity cost. Applying classical control theory techniques in a wide range of operating environments, we are able to identify cost allocations that exactly equal opportunity cost. Hence, for our model environment, we provide a rationale for sunk cost allocation in terms of guiding optimal decisions, in contrast to the traditional defence in terms of providing a proxy for opportunity cost. We demonstrate clearly how cost allocations are related to opportunity costs, and identify the circumstances under which the allocation of full costs or alternatively a fixed proportion (related to acquisition conditions) of costs, results in the implementation of economically optimal resource consumption decisions.     

Did gold-standard adherence reduce sovereign capital costs?

A commonly cited benefit of the classical gold standard is that it reduced borrowing costs by signaling a country's commitment to financial probity. Using a new dataset, this paper tests whether gold-standard adherence was negatively correlated with the cost of capital. Conditional on UK risk factors, there is no evidence that the bonds issued by countries off gold earned systematically higher excess returns than the bonds issued by countries on gold. This conclusion is robust to allowing betas to differ across exchange-rate regimes; to including other determinants of the country risk premium; and to controlling for the British Empire effect.     

Interest rate interactions in the classical gold standard, 1880-1914: was there any monetary independence?

This paper examines an hypothesis of Svensson (1994) (Journal of Monetary Economics 33, 157-199) that a credible target zone can confer on a country a degree of independence in the operation of its monetary policy, even when exchange rates are fixed. We test this hypothesis for the Classical gold standard using a newly created monthly data base for the period 1880-1913. Building on the recently noted finding that the Classical gold standard represented a credible, well-behaved, target zone system we propose a number of ways of testing the Svensson’ model. Our main finding is that the Classical gold standard did indeed confer some independence in the operation of monetary policy for participating countries. This would seem to have an important bearing on the kind of institutional framework required for a modern day target zone to function effectively and, in particular, to weather speculative attacks.     

Long‐run price competition

We generalize the standard repeated‐games model of dynamic oligopolistic competition to allow for consumers who are long‐lived and forward looking. Each period leaves some residual demand to future periods and pricing in one period affects consumers' expectations about future prices. We analyze this setting for an indivisible durable good with price‐setting firms and overlapping cohorts of consumers. The model nests the repeated‐game model and the Coasian durable‐goods model as its two extreme cases. The analysis is mostly focused on constant‐price collusion but conditions for collusive recurrent sales are also identified.     

A new perspective on the Gold Standard: Inflation as a population phenomenon

The purpose of this paper is to contribute a new model of the Gold Standard, focusing on the interaction between resource scarcity and demographics. In a dynamic micro-founded model we find that: i) prices and equilibrium gold holdings increase with population (a scale effect), but decrease with the population growth rate; ii) that the Gold Standard implies deflation unless extraction resources outstrip population growth; and iii) there is no optimal quantity of money. The predictions of the model are examined using a structural VAR. Our results also shed light on debates about the viability of a return to the Gold Standard, and, more generally, on the interaction between policy variables and scarce resources.     

Gold price dynamics and the role of uncertainty

This study focuses on the dynamics of the gold price against bonds, stocks and exchange rates based on a disaggregation of the underlying relationships across different frequencies applying a wavelet decomposition. To analyze joint extreme movements (i.e. tail dependence), we adopt a copula approach, which helps us to assess the dependence between the returns of gold and other assets in calm and turmoil market times and therefore the hedge and safe haven functions of gold. We also examine whether gold prices are directly affected by changes in macroeconomic uncertainty, economic policy uncertainty and/or CPI forecasters disagreement. Analyzing data for nine economies for a sample period starting in 1985, we find that the role of gold changes significantly after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. Gold is unable to serve as a hedge or safe haven in the classical sense while the findings for the period prior to 2008 mostly suggest that gold is able to shield investors. Uncertainty measures display a surprising and time-varying relationship with the path of the gold price. While economic policy uncertainty is positively correlated with gold price changes, macroeconomic uncertainty and inflation uncertainty among forecasters are both negatively related to gold price changes.     

A Bayesian analysis of log-periodic precursors to financial crashes

A large number of papers have been written by physicists documenting an alleged signature of imminent financial crashes involving so-called log-periodic oscillations–oscillations which are periodic with respect to the logarithm of the time to the crash. In addition to the obvious practical implications of such a signature, log-periodicity has been taken as evidence that financial markets can be modelled as complex statistical-mechanics systems. However, while many log-periodic precursors have been identified, the statistical significance of these precursors and their predictive power remain controversial in part because log-periodicity is ill-suited for study with classical methods. This paper is the first effort to apply Bayesian methods in the testing of log-periodicity. Specifically, we focus on the Johansen–Ledoit–Sornette (JLS) model of log periodicity. Using data from the S&P 500 prior to the October 1987 stock market crash, we find that, if we do not consider crash probabilities, a null hypothesis model without log-periodicity outperforms the JLS model in terms of marginal likelihood. If we do account for crash probabilities, which has not been done in the previous literature, the JLS model outperforms the null hypothesis, but only if we ignore the information obtained by standard classical methods. If the JLS model is true, then parameter estimates obtained by curve fitting have small posterior probability. Furthermore, the data set contains negligible information about the oscillation parameters, such as the frequency parameter that has received the most attention in the previous literature.     

Inefficient sales delays by a durable‐good monopoly facing a finite number of buyers

This article offers a new explanation for unscheduled price cuts and slow adoption of durable goods. We study a standard durable‐good monopoly model with a finite number of buyers and show that this game can have multiple subgame perfect equilibria in addition to the Pacman outcome—including the Coase conjecture. Of particular interest is a class of equilibria where the seller first charges a high price and only lowers that price once some—but not all—high‐valuation buyers purchase. This price structure creates a war of attrition between those buyers, which delays market clearing and rationalizes unscheduled purchase and price cut dates.     

Equilibrium with investors using a diversity of deviation measures

It has been argued that investors who optimize their portfolios with attention paid only to mean and standard deviation will all end up choosing some multiple of a certain master fund portfolio. Justification for the capital asset pricing model of classical portfolio theory, which relates individual assets to such a master fund, has come from this direction in particular. Attempts have been made to provide solid mathematical support by showing that the imputed behavior of investors is a consequence of price equilibrium in a market in which assets are traded subject to budget constraints, and optimization is carried out with respect to utility functions that depend only on mean and standard deviation.     

Emergence of Captive Finance Companies and Risk Segmentation in Loan Markets: Theory and Evidence

A seller with some degree of market power in its product market can earn rents. In this context, there is a gain to granting credit to purchase of the product and thus to the establishment of a captive finance company. This paper examines the optimal behavior of such a durable good seller and its captive finance company. The model predicts a critical difference between the captive finance company's credit standard and that of independent lenders ("banks"), namely, that the captive finance company will adopt a more lenient credit standard. Thus, we should expect the likelihood of repayment of a captive loan to be lower than that of a bank loan, other things equal. This prediction is tested using a unique data set drawn from a major credit bureau in the United States, and the evidence supports the theoretical prediction.     

资源开采企业超额收益率及其会计上的制度含义——基于2001—2005年度采掘类上市公司的实证研究

理论上认为,资源性资产具有收益能力,进而推知资源开采企业存在超额收益率。验证这一理论结论,可以计量评价资源开采企业的真实收益,会为资源会计准则、资源收益分配和资源税费改革制度的制订和完善提供坚实基础。本文在ElSerafy相关理论的基础上,提出了基本的研究假设,并使用我国采掘类上市公司2001-2005年的财务会计资料对上述问题进行了实证研究。经验数据表明:我国资源开采企业的收益率超过其他行业,存在超社会平均收益率;从配对样本的检验来看,其收益率仍然是偏高的,如总资产收益率要高出约4个百分点。根据这一结果,笔者提出了资源会计准则完善与创新的初步建议。     

A specie-flow model of the gold standard

An international gold standard model is presented, focusing on the relatively short-run movements of prices, gold stocks, and money. The paper criticizes the common assumption of the gold standard as an ideal, automatically adjusting system, and allows discretionary policy to be a potentially important short-run factor.     

Gold rush fever in business cycles

A flexible price model of the business cycle is proposed, in which fluctuations are driven primarily by inefficient movements in investment around a stochastic trend. A boom in the model arises when investors rush to exploit new market opportunities even though the resulting investments simply crowd out the value of previous investments. A metaphor for such profit driven fluctuations are gold rushes, as they are periods of economic boom associated with expenditures aimed at securing claims near new found veins of gold. An attractive feature of the model is its capacity to provide a simple structural interpretation to the properties of a standard consumption and output Vector Autoregression.     

Can Markov switching models replicate chartist profits in the foreign exchange market?

In this paper we show that the Markov switching model is a relevant statistical alternative to the classical martingale model for exchange rates. By extending the standard Markov switching model we decisively reject the martingale model. Moreover, the model generates autocorrelations and linear structures in line with what is observed in reality. Subsequently, we test whether this model can explain chartist profits. We find that the extended Markov switching model is able to explain the profitability of a simple MA-30 rule. Finally, we decompose the profitability of the MA-30 rule into a linear and nonlinear part. We find that, although the implied linear structure of the Markov model explains a substantial part of the profitability, part of the profits of the MA-30 rule can be attributed to the specific nonlinearities implicit in the Markov model.