The aggregate elasticity of factor substitution with middle products

The elasticity of substitution between factors in production relates the change in the ratio of factors used in a production process to a given change in the factor price ratio. An aggregate concept of such an elasticity relates a change in overall factor endowments to the resulting change in factor prices. For a closed economy the behavior of consumers is an important part of such an aggregate elasticity, since endowment changes can bring about changes in commodity prices and resulting adjustments to factor prices. For a small open economy, commodity prices in typical models are exogenous. In the model with middle products, all final consumer goods are non-traded, so that local consumer behavior can affect factor prices. The aggregate elasticity of substitution is shown to be an average of production elasticities and demand elasticity even for a small open economy.     

Factor Price Equality and Biased Technical Change in a Two-Cone Trade Model

We reconsider the effects of long‐run economic growth on relative factor prices across cones of specialization. We model economic growth as exogenous technical change. Allowing for capital biased technical change with a sector bias and for endogenous commodity prices, we find that economic growth may increase or decrease factor price differences across cones. For a neutral demand side and capital biased growth in the most capital intensive sector, we find that economic growth encourages less factor price diversity across cones.     

The Emergence of the Law of Value in a Dynamic Simple Commodity Economy

Abstract

A dynamic computational model of a simple commodity economy is examined and a theory of the relationship between commodity values, market prices and the efficient division of social labour is developed. The main conclusions are: (i) the labour value of a commodity is an attractor for its market price; (ii) market prices are error signals that function to allocate the available social labour between sectors of production; and (iii) the tendency of prices to approach labour values is the monetary expression of the tendency of a simple commodity economy to allocate social labour efficiently. The model demonstrates that, in the special case of simple commodity production, Marx's law of value can naturally emerge from multiple local exchanges and operate ‘behind the backs’ of actors solely via money flows that place budget constraints on their local evaluations of commodity prices, which are otherwise subjective and unconstrained.     

Factor Market Oligopsony and the Production Possibility Frontier

The authors consider a model with two final goods, one intermediate good, and two primary factors. One final good and the intermediate good are produced using primary factors, labor and capital. The other final good is produced using labor and the intermediate input. Producers of the second final good exert oligopsonistic market power on the intermediate input, which captures real world phenomena prevalent in the food processing and other manufacturing industries. If the capital/labor ratio in one final‐good sector is in between those of the intermediate‐input sector and the combined intermediate‐input and the other final‐product sectors, and if the oligopsony power is sufficiently large, the model generates results that are not adherent to the standard two‐sector Heckscher–Ohlin model. Results that deviate from the H–O model include the relationships between factor prices and commodity prices, the price–output effect, tangency between the price line and the PPF, and the curvature of the PPF.     

Global Liquidity and Commodity Prices

While monetary easing and increasing participation of financial institutions in commodity trading have enhanced the financialization of commodity markets, this paper investigates empirically whether the impact of global liquidity on commodity prices has grown since the crisis. For each commodity group, this paper uses a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model to address the short‐run relationship between global liquidity and commodity prices. The key finding is that the effect of global liquidity on commodity prices becomes more salient since the global financial crisis. This paper also suggests a price‐based liquidity indicator has a greater explanatory power for the commodity price dynamics than monetary aggregates.     

CURRENCY AREAS AND MONETARY COORDINATION*

We integrate a monetary search model into open‐economy macro to analyze the gains from coordinating on inflation. Search frictions and local congestion lead to a determinate exchange rate between two currencies. Relative prices deviate from the law of one price. Because the deviations depend on the cross‐country differential in money growth, each country is tempted to inflate to exploit the deviations. Policy coordination reduces inflation and improves welfare for all countries. In contrast to traditional models, the gains from coordination continue to exist even after each country optimally sets a direct tax on the foreign use of the country's currency.     

Commodity Prices and the Dynamics of Inflation in Commodity‐Exporting Nations: Evidence from Australia and Canada*

A commodity‐price boom is under way. What does this boom mean for inflation in countries with substantial net commodity exports? The answer depends on movements in commodity prices, changes in foreign exchange rates and the determinants of domestic price inflation. We estimate equations to provide indications of the strength of each of these forces for both Australia and Canada. The results show that world commodity prices move pro‐cyclically with world industrial production and that rates of change in commodity prices are directly related to domestic inflation in both countries. However, there is an offsetting impact of exchange‐rate changes, which is strong enough in the case of Australia, but not Canada, to substantially eliminate the inflationary impact of a commodity‐price boom.     

Commodity prices and related equity prices

This paper shows that commodity‐sensitive stock price indices have strong power in predicting nominal and real commodity prices at short horizons (one‐month‐ahead predictions) using both in‐ and out‐of‐sample tests. The forecasts based on commodity‐sensitive stock price indices are able to significantly outperform naïve no‐change forecasts. For example, the one‐month‐ahead forecasts for nominal commodity prices reduce the mean squared prediction error by between 1.5% (for natural gas prices) and 20% (for copper prices). Moreover, the one‐month‐ahead directional forecast is found to perform significantly better than a 50:50 coin toss. As stock prices are not subject to revision, the proposed variable, which reflects timely and readily available market information, can potentially be a valuable predictor and thereby help to improve the accuracy of commodity price forecasts.     

A MODEL OF INFLATION TRANSMISSION IN AN EXCHANGE RATE TARGET ZONE

I incorporate an exchange rate target zone with intramarginal interventions in a small open economy model. Using the method of undetermined coefficients, I solve for the price level and the nominal exchange rate to determine how price shocks from the large economy affect the small open economy. The results show that the behaviour of inflation transmission within the band differs from the behavior of inflation transmission at the edge of the band of the target zone. Foreign shocks can affect local prices in both cases but the central bank can respond through market interventions within the band while it cannot do so at the edge. Near the edge of the band, a central bank has to intervene to stop the exchange rate from breaching the band. My model predicts that if the interventions are robust, then the exchange rate is mean reverting and an exchange rate target zone can insulate an economy from foreign price shocks. Based on the model, central bank interventions contribute to long‐run price stability in a target zone regime. Finally, I empirically test the model using unit root and cointegration tests, and present some policy implications.     

Analysis of shock transmissions to a small open emerging economy using a SVARMA model

Using a parsimonious structural vector autoregressive moving average (SVARMA) model, we analyse the transmission of foreign and domestic shocks to a small open emerging economy under different policy regimes. Narrower confidence bands around the SVARMA responses compared to the SVAR responses, advocate the suitability of this framework for analysing the propagation of economic shocks over time. Malaysia is an interesting small open economy that has experienced an ongoing process of economic transition and development. The Malaysian government imposed exchange rate and capital control measures following the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Historical decomposition and variance decomposition allow contrast of shocks propagating under different policy regimes. Malaysia is highly exposed to foreign shocks, particularly under the managed float exchange rate system. During the pegged exchange rate period, Malaysian monetary policymakers experienced some breathing space to focus on maintaining price and output stability. In the post-pegged period, Malaysia's exposure to foreign shocks increased and in recent times are largely driven by world commodity price and global activity shocks.     

A structural VAR business cycle model for a volatile small open economy

New Zealand is a small economy exposed to a volatile climate, relatively volatile international trade prices, and its exposure to international financial markets has increased markedly since economic reforms in the 1980s. This paper applies identification techniques suggested by Cushman and Zha [Cushman, D.O. and Zha T.A., 1997. Identifying monetary policy in a small open economy under flexible exchange rates, Journal of Monetary Economics, 39, pp. 433–448.], Zha [Zha, T.A., (1999). Block recursion and structural vector autoregression, Journal of Econometrics, 90, pp. 291–316.] and Dungey and Pagan [Dungey, M. and Pagan, A., 2000. A structural VAR model of the Australian economy, The Economic Record, 76, pp. 321–342.] to develop a large four block structural VAR model of the New Zealand business cycle to capture these features. The model reveals that climate and international trade price shocks have been more important sources of business cycles fluctuations than international or domestic financial shocks. Furthermore, the model does not encounter the price and exchange rate puzzles that have bedevilled attempts to identify monetary policy shocks in small open economy SVAR models.     

Technology Transfer,Welfare, and Wage Inequality

We use a linear two‐country, two‐factor, two‐product, two‐different technologies (2×2×2×2) model to study technology transfer and its effects on each country's welfare and factor prices. We demonstrate that technology transfer could benefit both the recipient and the transferring countries. For the recipient country, technology transfer increases the price of the factor that is more intensively used and decreases the price of the other factor. Our results provide an alternative explanation of a trend observed in the past half century: a rise in real wage inequality between relatively skilled workers and less‐skilled workers because of technological progress in numerous countries.     

Taxes on capital in a specific factor model with international capital mobility

The efficiency and distributional effects of sundry capital taxes are analyzed in a simple two-sector specific factor model where capital is mobile both between the two sectors and between the home country and the rest of the world. Two cases are discussed: the small country case where factor and commodity prices are parametric; and the large country case. The optimal tax on capital export is illustrated when commodity prices are parametric. A simple approach to the case when both factor and commodity prices are variable is demonstrated.     

A decomposition of the Harberger expression for tax incidence

In this paper we propose a decomposition of the Harberger expression for the incidence of the corporate income tax into ‘commodity price distortion’ and ‘factor price distortion’ effects. By applying Harberger's estimates of the parameters for the U.S. economy, we will demonstrate that the factor price distortion effect, which has an extremely simple formal expression, explains 115 percent of the total effect of the tax change on the rate of return. This suggests that the commodity price distortion effect may be relatively unimportant in explaining the tax incidence. The difference between our two effects and Mieszkowski's (1967) output and factor substitution effects is also noted.     

Primary commodity price fluctuations and developing countries: An econometric model of copper and Zambia

Most of the literature on commodity price fluctuations and their impact on development has been based on cross-country data and aggregated export earnings. The results have been inconclusive, largely because the analysis fails to recognize the importance of country and commodity differences. This paper isolates a single commodity, copper, and a single country, Zambia, which copper export earnings loom large in the economy. It then presents an econometric model of the country, consisting of a disaggregated copper export sector with links to a macro model of the whole economy. Fluctuations in export prices around a smooth trend are then simulated, and their impact on the non-export sectors observed through such a development indicators as exployment levels, GDP levels and growth rates, general price levels and final demand.     

The choice of a foreign price measure in a Bayesian estimated new-Keynesian model for Israel

We estimate a small DSGE model by full information Bayesian techniques on the basis of Israeli data from 1995 to 2006. The model was first developed and estimated by means of classical GMM in Argov and Elkayam (2010), and since then it has been used at the Bank of Israel for monetary policy analysis. It is widely believed that in 2007 (out of sample year) as elsewhere worldwide, inflation rose in Israel due to high commodity prices in global markets. However, our baseline model attributes most of the high inflation in 2007 to supply shocks. One conjecture is that this model's result derives from the inappropriate original use of the unit value of imported consumer goods (which do not include unprocessed food and energy) as the main foreign price measure. We test this conjecture by re-estimating the model with various other foreign price measures that typically do reflect the global rise in commodity prices and compare the log-marginal likelihoods. We find that no other price measure outperforms the original choice in the sample period. Only the foreign trade-weighted CPI equals the performance of the original choice while improving the 2007 interpretation of inflation, and should therefore be considered the main foreign price measure. The proposed methodology for comparing the suitability of alternative measures for observable variables can be applied to any model with exogenous variables that are characterized by univariate equations.     

Approximate tâtonnement processes

Summary We introduce a probabilistic model for price adjustment in an exchange economy which approximates the classical Walras tâtonnement process while avoiding many of its unrealistic features. The model is decentralized in that the trades permitted to an agent and the resulting price changes depend only on the commodity vector currently held by that agent, and not on the commodity vectors held by the other agents in the economy. Our results will show that the Walras tâtonnement process can be decentralized without changing its behavior on the macroeconomic scale. Our model has a finite set of commodities, a market maker who adjusts prices, and a large finite set of agents who trade only with the market maker. Each agent has a demand function depending on his commodity vector and the price vector. At each discrete time, one agent is chosen at random and exchanges his current commodity vector for his demand vector. Then the market maker adjusts the price vector by an amount which depends on the selected agent's commodity vector and the current price. Prices are adjusted rapidly enough to avoid prolonged trading at the wrong price, but slowly enough so that a substantial price change will depend on a significant simple of agents. The main result shows that with probability arbitrarily close to one the price will rapidly approach and then remain close to an equilibrium value, following a path which is close to the price path of the corresponding tâtonnement process.     

Trade,Migration, and Inequality in a World without Factor Price Equalization

The behavior of trading economies in the absence of factor price equalization is not well understood, although empirical evidence against factor price equalization is overwhelming. We map regions of diversification and specialization for competitive world economies with different factor endowment partitions. Goods and factor price responses as economies move within and across different regions of specialization are explored using a series of novel diagrams. The usefulness of endogenizing patterns of specialization is illustrated by considering the impact on inequality of migration flows (such as US–Mexico), the substitutability of trade and migration, and the impact of the entry of a large unskilled labor‐intensive economy (such as China) on factor prices and factor flows.     

The demise of commodity price agreements: the role of exchange rates and special interests

We derive the equilibrium joint distribution of exchange rate and commodity price in a two-country rational expectations model. The correlation between commodity price and exchange rate appears crucial for the stability of commodity markets. This result arises from the common practice to quote commodity prices in consuming countries' currency, which subjects producing countries to the currency risk. Welfare results of commodity price stabilization are obtained and facilitate the interpretation of the position taken by industrialized countries long opposed to international commodity agreements. We apply our model to the Philippines and investigate the potential effects of the International Sugar Agreement (ISA) on the various conditional volatilities of the model. We conclude on the relative ineffectiveness of these agreements in limiting fluctuations of sugar prices.     

Bayesian analysis of Hong Kong's housing price dynamics

This paper uses a Bayesian vector‐autoregressive model with sign restrictions to estimate the underlying drivers of Hong Kong's housing price dynamics in the short run. While existing studies are useful in analysing housing valuation, little attention has been paid to the short‐run dynamics. In contrast, the present paper identifies short‐run drivers of housing prices using structural identification with theoretical underpinnings. We find that among the shocks that we have identified, bank lending shock and housing supply shock were the main factors affecting Hong Kong's housing prices. Low mortgage rates were another key factor that led to the significant increase in housing prices after the global financial crisis.