Banking deregulation and allocative efficiency in Pakistan

This article examines the impact of deregulation policies on allocative efficiency of banks in Pakistan. It investigates whether deregulation has impacted the pattern of allocative efficiency of banks and explores which bank ownership segment has been more responsive. It uses data from 1991 to 2005 and explicitly models allocative inefficiency by using the translog shadow cost-share system. Empirical results show that overregulation and imperfect market structure hampers the ability of banks to make competitive decisions. We find evidence of allocative inefficiency leading to over-utilization of labour and deposits vis-à-vis operating cost. Empirical results for time-varying allocative efficiency show declining levels of allocative inefficiency for state-owned and private banks in post-reform period. Deregulation policies induce state-owned banks to decrease over-utilization of labour relative to deposits and operating cost while private banks succeed in using operating cost closer to optimal levels. Hence, policymakers have latitude to introduce more reforms without jeopardizing allocative efficiency.     

Inflation and income distribution in Central America,Mexico, Panama,and the Dominican Republic

Analyses of the impact of inflation on income distribution typically only consider the general inflation rate. However, when the consumption structure of households is shaped by its income level and inflation varies across goods and services, they are affected differently by inflation. The aim of this study is to contribute to the analysis of this effect in Central American countries (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica), Panama, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic (CAPMDR) for the period 2007–2018. According to our findings, there have been significant differences in the inflation rates faced by different income groups. By employing these percentile‐specific inflation rates, we have computed an “inflation‐corrected Gini index.” This adjustment is important because although inequality has been decreasing during past years in the countries in our sample, on average, about half of the gains observed using the standard Gini index are lost once the Gini indices are corrected for inflation, a clearly nonnegligible magnitude.     

通货膨胀、信息搜寻成本与价格分散

在人们为了交易动机而持有实际货币余额中,至少有一部分是为了寻找较低价格而产生的对信息搜寻行为的一种投入。在这一假设下,通货膨胀和价格分散之间存在正的相互作用。许多实证研究都支持了这一观点。     

房价、房价偏离与溢出效应：来自珠江三角洲的经验证据

利用国外较新的PMG估计法,探讨影响珠江三角洲商品房均衡价值的因素及房价偏离,并采用脉冲响应函数分析房价偏离在不同城市间的溢出效应。随着收入和人口的增加,房价加速上涨;经济越发达的城市,房价收入比越大,房价的增长速度更快、波动更为剧烈。人均可支配收入是推动房价上涨最重要的长期因素,通货膨胀次之,贷款最小;但贷款、通货膨胀是主要的短期推动力。虽然珠江三角洲地区房价总体上没有明显的泡沫,但波动很剧烈,一旦发生调整,其幅度将很大。除江门外,其他城市只对深圳房价偏离的冲击做出响应,而深圳对其他城市房价偏离的冲击没有响应;江门房价更多的受到来自中山和珠海的影响,深圳是珠江三角洲房价波动的源头。     

Aggregation of Directional Distance Functions and Industrial Efficiency

Three main objectives are pursued in this paper. First, we intend to analyze the aggregation problem of directional distance functions from a constructive viewpoint. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions concerning the structural properties of the production technology and of the nature of groups of firms. Indeed, exact additive aggregation holds for a linear technology and for a direction solely defined in the output space. Second, since these conditions are somewhat restrictive, we are interested in providing a measure for the aggregation bias through the relationship between industrial and structural technical efficiency. Finally, we show that this aggregation bias is a lower bound for industrial allocative efficiency.     

Exchange Rate Regimes and Inflation: Evidence from India

Abstract

Exchange rate stability is crucial for inflation management as a stable rate is expected to reduce domestic inflation pressures through a ‘policy discipline effect’ – restricting money supply growth, and a ‘credibility effect’ – inducing higher money demand and reduced velocity of money. Alternatively, the ‘impossibility trillema’ of Mundell (1961a Mundell, R. A. (1961a). Capital mobility and stabilization policy under fixed and flexible exchange rates. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 29, 475–485. doi: 10.2307/139336[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 1961b Mundell, R. A. (1961b). Flexible exchange rates and employment policy. Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 27, 509–517. doi: 10.2307/139437[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) predicts that in the presence of an open capital account, a stable exchange rate may lead to lack of control on monetary policy and, hence, higher inflation. Using a monetary model of Inflation, this paper investigates the impact of the ‘empirically-claimed’ de facto stable exchange rate regime on inflation in India during different sub-periods of exchange rate stability. The results show that the impact of exchange rate regime on inflation is not visible in the Indian case, which could be because of the offsetting sterilization policy undertaken by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) during expansionary money supply growth resulting from its large-scale intervention to even out exchange rate volatility.     

Shadow rates as a measure of the monetary policy stance: Some international evidence

This paper examines the usefulness of shadow rates to measure the monetary policy stance by comparing them to the official policy rates and those implied by three types of Taylor rules in both inflation-targeting countries (the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and others that have only targeted inflation at times (the United States, Japan, the Euro Area and Switzerland) over the period from the early 1990s to December 2021. Shadow rates estimated from a dynamic factor model are shown to suggest a much looser policy stance than either the official policy rates or those implied by the Taylor rules, and generally to provide a more accurate picture of the monetary policy stance during both ZLB and non-ZLB periods, since they reflect the full range of unconventional policy measures used by central banks. Furthermore, generalised impulse response analysis based on three alternative vector autoregression (VAR) models indicates that monetary shocks based on the shadow rates are more informative than those related to the official policy rates or to two- and three-factor shadow rates, especially during the Global Financial Crisis and the recent COVID-19 pandemic, when unconventional measures have been adopted. Finally, unconventional policy shocks seem to have less persistent effects on the economy in countries, which have adopted an inflation-targeting regime.     

Elementary Index Bias: Evidence for the Euro Area from a Large Scanner Dataset

We provide evidence on the effect of elementary index choice on inflation measurement in the euro area. Using scanner data for 15,844 individual items from 42 product categories and 10 euro area countries, we compute product category level elementary price indexes using eight different elementary index formulas. Measured inflation outcomes of the different index formulas are compared with the Fisher ideal index to quantify elementary index bias. We have three main findings. First, elementary index bias is quite variable across product categories, countries and index formulas. Second, a comparison of elementary index formulas with and without expenditure weights shows that a shift from price only indexes to expenditure weighted indexes would entail at the product level multiple percentage points differences in measured price changes. And finally, we show that elementary index bias is quantitatively more important than upper level substitution bias.     

Causes of Inflation in Europe, the United States and Japan: Some Lessons for Maintaining Price Stability in the EMU from a Structural VAR Approach

Price stability being among the primary goals of EMU monetary policy,it should be interesting to analyse thefactors that led to the disinflationarydevelopments of the last years. Using a structural VAR approach withlong-run identifying restrictions derived from an open-economy macromodel, various factors of inflation for Austria, Germany, Italy, the UnitedKingdom, the United States and Japan and the extent to which they havecontributed to inflation are analysed. These factors are energy price shocks, supply shocks, wage setting influences, demand and exchange rate disturbances and money supply surprises. The latter three are also used to calculate core inflation. Within a smaller model for aggregate EMU data, supply and demand influences are analysed. While supply and demand factors have generally contributed to the inflation decline, monetary policy, enhanced competition, low energy prices and moderate wage setting are featuring most prominent in the recent disinflation process.     

Inflation and the Income Share of the Rich: Evidence for 14 OECD Countries

This paper examines the distributional implications of inflation on top income shares in 14 advanced economies using data over the period 1920–2016. We use local projections to analyze how top income shares respond to an inflation shock, and panel regressions in which all variables are defined as 5-year averages to examine the impact of inflation on the position of the top-one-percent in the long run. Our findings suggest that inflation reduces the share of national income held by the top 1 percent. Furthermore, we find that inflation shocks and long-run inflation have similar effects on top income shares.     

通货膨胀目标制的模式及作用机制浅探

通货膨胀目标制是20世纪90年代兴起的一种新的货币政策框架,目前已经在不同地区、不同类型的国家中得到了广泛的应用,并取得良好的效果。通货膨胀这一经济现象是无法完全消灭的,而其失控会不可避免的对经济各方面造成不良的影响。通胀目标制不同于其他货币制度之处就在于它是在通货膨胀失控之前就采取有效措施来预防,而不是每次都等到损害已经造成后再补救。因此,对通货膨胀目标制的定义、模式、作用机制及政策效果进行分析就很有必要,它为中国的货币政策改革提供了一种选择。     

财政分权、地方政府投资与通货膨胀——来自中国转型期的证据

依据当前我国通货膨胀严重和地方投资过热同时并存这一经济现象,建立模型实证研究财政分权体制下地方政府投资对通货膨胀的影响。实证结果显示,地方政府投资是我国通货膨胀形成的一个因素,地方政府投资通过乘数效应拉动社会需求,同时不断增加的投资加强了对土地财政依赖,两者共同作用推动了通货膨胀上升。     

House Prices,Wealth and Consumption: New Evidence from Australia and Canada

Over the past two decades, a number of countries have experienced appreciation in house prices at the same time that aggregate consumption has increased. This paper tests alternative hypotheses for this phenomenon by using repeated household surveys from Australia and Canada to identify the transmission mechanism that links consumption and household wealth. The empirical analysis suggests that neither a direct wealth effect nor a common causal factor likely accounts for the observed correlation between wealth and consumption in these two countries. Rather, indirect factors such as collateral effects arising from relaxation of credit constraints are a more likely explanation.     

中央银行独立性、责任性与通货膨胀目标制

近年来不少学者提出,我国货币政策应转向通货膨胀目标制。我国现行的政策实际上正是一种隐性的通货膨胀目标制,20世纪90年代以来所发生的几次通货膨胀偏倚很大程度上是由于央行的独立性不够。鉴于通货膨胀目标制并不能解决当前我国货币政策调控中的问题并可能带来更多的问题,今后货币政策改革应坚持由直接调控向间接调控、由数量型调控向价格型调控的转变思路,在提高央行独立性的同时,增强其责任性并提高货币政策的透明度。     

Inflation literacy and inflation expectations: Evidence from Austrian household survey data

Inflation expectations are known to be quite heterogeneous across agents. We investigate whether this heterogeneity is primarily due to differences in people’s understanding of the inflation process and of the goals and intentions of the central bank. Using micro data from a survey conducted among 2000 Austrian households, we construct an indicator of “inflation literacy” from several questions on people’s knowledge about different aspects of inflation. We find that this indicator helps explain both the level and the uncertainty of inflation expectations: Households with relatively higher levels of inflation literacy tend to have lower and more accurate short-term and long-term inflation expectations. Interestingly, however, they are less certain about their inflation expectations than people with lower levels of inflation literacy. We also find that people’s trust in the central bank and in its ability to maintain price stability significantly dampens their inflation expectations.     

资产价格、通胀率与我国流动性过剩规模

现有衡量流动性过剩规模的方法存在许多不足。通过借鉴水力学理论可以推导出中国货币需求函数,以此估算我国的流动性过剩规模。在此基础上,通过Granger检验,发现流动性过剩规模与股价、房价和通胀率的走势较吻合。因此,我们可以利用流动性过剩的机会深化金融市场的改革与创新;引导流动性流向金融市场,避免房地产市场的资产价格泡沫;将货币政策与产业政策紧密配合;选择适当的货币政策工具调控流动性。     

Neo-liberalism and New Labour policy: economic performance, historical comparisons and future prospects

The paper analyses19760/70s inflation, the replacement of Keynesianwith neo-liberal economic policy, and the post-1979 declinein inflation. It is shown that the fall in inflation is explainedby trends in import prices rather than by switches in economicpolicy. However, New Labour's conversion to neo-liberalism meansthat no alternative to it is on political offer, despite returnsto pre-Keynesian policy-making, the success of which will dependon price policies based on an understanding of the institutionalroots of inflation.     

Estimating technology in the postal sector: a Bayesian approach

The aim of this article is to study the technology of the sector represented by the Spanish national post-office and telegraph service, Sociedad Estatal Correos y Telégrafos, S.A. trading as Correos, and denominated as such hereafter. Concretely, we analyse economic efficiency (technical and allocative) and scale economies of the production units (cost centres) of Correos. To do this, we employ a methodology based on an input distance function which is the dual of the cost function. Moreover, and applying duality theory, we develop an economic model to assess the effect of postal infrastructures on the operators’ costs. In order to carry out the empirical model, Bayesian econometrics is applied to estimate the parameters in the input distance function and the technical and allocative efficiency terms.     

The Inflation Game: Targets,Practices and the Social Production of Monetary Credibility

In recent years, central banks have continued to preach inflation targeting even as they have pursued a wide range of unorthodox inflation-management policies. As the disconnect between discourse and practice grows, there is a growing risk of a serious credibility gap. This article seeks to shed some light on these dilemmas by looking backwards, focusing on the ‘Great Inflation’ in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s and the successive failures of Labour’s incomes policy and the Conservatives’ monetarist experiment. These historical experiences suggest that for inflation policy to work it needs to be both understood as and made credible—which means that key actors need to not only learn that this is how the inflation game works, but also put into place a whole range of supporting practices that reflect and reproduce this conviction. In spite of the many claims by economists and central bankers to the contrary, quantitative targets do not in fact anchor inflationary expectations – social practices instead play that crucial anchoring role. At the same time, these cases both underline the particular dilemmas associated with a reliance on hard quantitative targets in times of social instability – lessons that do not bode well for our present moment.     

The Glass Ceiling Puzzle,Legal Institutions,and the Shadow Economy

ABSTRACT

Scholarly studies in economics, sociology, psychology, and management emphasize the low number of women in management as one of the main indicators of gender discrimination in the labor market. This study investigates the differences in the percentage of women in senior management across forty-five countries. The results of the regression analysis show that women are more represented in senior management in developing countries than in so-called “liberal Western democracies.” Women also participate more in senior management in countries in which prejudice and discrimination against women are greater. The study presents empirical evidence for two economic explanations for these puzzling results: the weak functioning of the legal system and the large size of the shadow economy.