Ideas, Civil Servants and Keynes

Sir John Hoskyns has joined Anthony Wedgwood Benn in condemning Civil Service obstruction to the implementation of government policy. William Kingston examines the changes in the Civil Service that have made bureaucratic stubbornness all too predictable.     

Keynes, yuppies and capital (gains)

Has stock exchange speculation reinforced prejudice in favour of capital Gains Tax? Martin pot, a self-confessed stock market investor, argues that keynes’ criticism of stock market ‘gambling’-despite himself having regular bouts of speculation-underlies much support for the assimilation of capital gains to income. But speculation is not cured by taxation but by low inflation.     

Health, Government, and Irving Fisher

A bstract    This paper provides a few historical notes on government involvement in health, followed by a summary of the theoretical arguments that economists offer in its support. Irving Fisher's views and recommendations about health are examined in the light of today's perceptions concerning health, health economics, and health policy. The wide variety of roles that the U.S. and other governments currently play in health is reviewed, and the ability of economics to explain these roles is assessed. The consequences of government involvement for the health of populations, for expenditures on health care, and for political and social stability are examined. The paper concludes with an overview of new worldwide trends in health policy and some probable explanations for these trends.     

Fisher ideal output,input, and productivity indexes revisited

A productivity index for a firm is generally defined as an output index divided by an input index. The first part of the paper uses the test or axiomatic approach to index number theory in order to determine the appropriate functional form for the output and input indexes. It is found that the Fisher ideal index satisfies 21 reasonable tests and is uniquely characterized by a subset of these tests. In the remainder of the paper, the economic approach to productivity indexes introduced by Caves, Christensen, and Diewert is adopted and, again, a strong justification for the Fisher productivity index is provided.The editor of this paper was N.R. Adam.This research was supported by a Strategic Grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The author is indebted to Shelley Hey for typing assistance.     

Understanding the Fisher equation

It is argued that univariate long memory estimates based on ex post data tend to underestimate the persistence of ex ante variables (and, hence, that of the ex post variables themselves) because of the presence of unanticipated shocks whose short‐run volatility masks the degree of long‐range dependence in the data. Empirical estimates of long‐range dependence in the Fisher equation are shown to manifest this problem and lead to an apparent imbalance in the memory characteristics of the variables in the Fisher equation. Evidence in support of this typical underestimation is provided by results obtained with inflation forecast survey data and by direct calculation of the finite sample biases. To address the problem of bias, the paper introduces a bivariate exact Whittle (BEW) estimator that explicitly allows for the presence of short memory noise in the data. The new procedure enhances the empirical capacity to separate low‐frequency behaviour from high‐frequency fluctuations, and it produces estimates of long‐range dependence that are much less biased when there is noise contaminated data. Empirical estimates from the BEW method suggest that the three Fisher variables are integrated of the same order, with memory parameter in the range (0.75, 1). Since the integration orders are balanced, the ex ante real rate has the same degree of persistence as expected inflation, thereby furnishing evidence against the existence of a (fractional) cointegrating relation among the Fisher variables and, correspondingly, showing little support for a long‐run form of Fisher hypothesis. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Real Wages and Employment: Four Great Economists: Pigou, Simons, Keynes and Hansen

Professor Eli Schwartz of Lehigh University reviews the theories of Pigou, Simons, Keynes and Hansen concerning unemployment. He concludes that we are in a'Pigovian'world where unemployment is due to defects in the labour market.     

丝路城市走廊假说、战略内涵与发展论证

中国一带一路倡议将会激励更多过去位于全球化发展边缘地区的国家和地区纳入世界经济系统之中,并强化彼此之间的经济社会和基础设施联系.通过密切经贸往来和快速交通组织,沿线许多节点城市及其周边地区将形成更大范围带状城市聚落系统,将此命名为丝路城市走廊.基于以上发展猜想,从理论起源、内涵与定义、战略价值、发展论证等方面对丝路城市走廊进行研究,采用归纳和演绎方法,根据六大经济走廊的城市发育基础和要素流通现状,结合国内城市群与六大经济走廊联系的情况,提出多条初步成型的丝路城市走廊.认为丝路城市走廊具备新的全球化框架和内涵,有助于兼容沿线国家和地区的发展规划,具有较大的理论和实践价值.     

凯恩斯假设下AD-AS模型的比较静态分析

在凯恩斯假设下的AD-AS模型是一个静态分析模型,文章在假设下,讨论了财政政策和货币政策对产出和价格、利率和投资的影响,分析结果表明:财政政策和货币政策对产出水平和劳动力市场的失业率具有直接的影响,结果同的假设下的分析结果相同,不过变动幅度同以上不同。     

Fisher equations inverted and not

Regressions of the realized real after-tax interest rate on theex post rate of inflation are shown to be incapable of discriminating between the competing hypotheses that the real after-tax interest rate is not effected by expected inflation due to the substitutability between debt and equity (the Fisher hypothesis); and, that the nominal after-tax interest rate is not effected by expected inflation due to the substitutability between money and debt (the inverted Fisher hypothesis). An alternative regression which is so capable, is shown to reject the inverted and support the original Fisher hypothesis.     

Fisher and Inference for Scores

This paper examines the work of Fisher and Bartlett on discriminant analysis, ordinal response regression and correspondence analysis. Placing these methods with canonical correlation analysis in the context of the singular value decomposition of particular matrices, we use explicit models and vector space notation to unify these methods, understand Fisher's approach, understand Bartlett's criticisms of Fisher and relate both to modern thinking. We consider in particular the formulation of certain hypotheses and Fisher's arguments to obtain approximate distributions for tests of these hypotheses (without assuming multivariate normality) and put these in modern notation. Using perturbation techniques pioneered by G.S. Watson, we give an asymptotic justification for Fisher's test for assigned scores and thereby resolve a long standing conflict between Fisher and Bartlett.     

Around the world with Irving Fisher

This paper aims to show why Irving Fisher's own data on interest rates and inflation in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Calcutta, and Tokyo during 1825–1927 suggested to him that nominal interest rates adjusted neither quickly nor fully to changes in inflation, not even in the long run. In Fisher's data, interest rates evolve less rapidly than inflation and change less than inflation over time. Even so, the “Fisher effect” is commonly defined as a point-for-point effect of inflation on nominal interest rates rather than what Fisher actually found: a persistent negative effect of increased inflation on real interest rates.     

Panel cointegration tests of the Fisher effect

Most empirical evidence suggests that the Fisher effect, stating that inflation and nominal interest rates should cointegrate with a unit slope on inflation, does not hold, a finding at odds with many theoretical models. This paper argues that these results can be attributed in part to the low power of univariate tests, and that the use of panel data can generate more powerful tests. For this purpose, we propose two new panel cointegration tests that can be applied under very general conditions, and that are shown by simulation to be more powerful than other existing tests. These tests are applied to a panel of quarterly data covering 20 OECD countries between 1980 and 2004. The evidence suggest that the Fisher effect cannot be rejected once the panel evidence on cointegration has been taken into account. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Microeconomics After Keynes: Post Keynesian Economics and Public Policy

Post Keynesian economics has mainly focused on macroeconomic issues and ignored microeconomic policy issues. This paper begins to remedy this gap. It outlines the main principles of the Post Keynesian approach, distinguishes them from neoclassical economics, explains how these principles can be applied to microeconomic issues, and then draws out some policy implications that differ markedly from neoclassical theory on the issues of health care and productivity growth.     

On the Fisher information in record values

In this article, we establish some general results concerning the comparison of the amount of the Fisher information contained in n record values with the Fisher information contained in n iid observations from the original distribution. Some common distributions are classified according to this criterion. We also propose some methods of estimation based on record values. The results may be of interest in some life testing problems. Received: September 1999     

Irving Fisher and the Contribution of Improved Longevity to Living Standards

A bstract    It is not widely recognized that conventional measures of national income and output exclude the value of improvements in the health status of the population. The present study discusses the theory of the measurement of national income, proposes a new concept called "health income" that can be used to incorporate improvements in health status, and applies the theory to data for the United States over the 20^th century. It concludes that accounting for improvements in the health status would, over the twentieth century in the United States, make a substantial difference to our measures of economic welfare.