Can the facts of UK inflation persistence be explained by nominal rigidity?

It has been widely argued that inflation persistence since WWII has been widespread and durable and that it can only be accounted for by models with a high degree of nominal rigidity. We examine UK post-war data where after confirming previous studies' findings of varying persistence due to changing monetary regimes, we find that models with little nominal rigidity are best equipped to explain it.     

Infrastructure, Externalities, and Economic Development: A Study of the Indian Manufacturing Industry

If infrastructure tends to generate spillover externalities,as has been the assumption in much of the development literature,one may reasonably look for evidence of such indirect effectsin the accounts of manufacturing industries. Empirical supportfor this assumption has so far been ambiguous. This analysisof Indian data, however, reveals substantial externality effectsfrom the states’ infrastructure to manufacturing productivity.The analysis separates the direct effects of roads and electricity,as mediated by the infrastructure services purchased by manufacturingindustries along with other intermediate inputs, from the indirecteffects, as measured by the impact of infrastructure capacityon the Solow productivity residual. In the 20 years from 1972to 1992, growth of road and electricity-generating capacityseems to have accounted for nearly half the growth of the productivityresidual of India’s registered manufacturing.     

Hysteresis in unemployment: Fact or fiction?

A stylized fact of European unemployment dynamics is one of extreme persistence and possible unit root behavior. This has led to a major reconsideration of the natural rate paradigm. We apply the Kalman filter to estimate the natural rate of unemployment for Germany and France. When the moving natural rate model is tested against the alternative of a unit root process, the unit root hypothesis is resoundingly rejected.     

DUP activities and economic theory

This paper considers the theory of Directly Unproductive Profit Seeking (DUP) activities, examining its implications for economic theory. Two classes of DUP activities are distinguished: one where the DUP activity is triggered by policy which is itself exogenously specified (e.g., tariff-revenue seeking resulting from pre-specified tariff); the other where DUP activity endogenises policy fully (e.g., tariff seeking). Implications for both positive and normative argumentation in economic theory are considered in depth for both these classes of DUP activity.     

Monetary policy and the behaviour of inflation in India: Is there a need for institutional reform?

Inflation rates in a number of developed countries follow a common trend over the past five decades: inflation starts out low in the 1950s, rises for a time before peaking in the 1970s, and then falls back to initial levels. Interestingly the behaviour of trend inflation in India broadly exhibits such a pattern. This similarity in the behaviour suggests that any explanation of inflation ought to apply across countries. To this end we construct a reduced-form inflation model for India that encompasses various well-known policy mistake theories as special cases. The restriction imposed by each of these theories on the behaviour of inflation is tested empirically. Reduced-form estimates lend support to all these theories. Although the reason for the inflation bias differs from one theory to the other, the mechanism at the heart of these theories are in fact quite similar. They all lay responsibility for inflation with the nature of monetary institutions. We use these results to interpret India's inflation experience over the past five decades and discuss the implications for institutional reform.     

HEDGED DIVIDEND CAPTURE AND EX-DAY RETURNS: AN EMPIRICAL UPDATE

We find that the magnitude of abnormal ex-day returns exhibited by US equities diminished in 1987 and 1988, subsequent to the US Tax Reform Act of 1986. We also report the results of a dividend capture strategy, hedged with the sale of stock index futures contracts. Hedging removes more than 50 percent of the risk of dividend capture, and even after transactions costs, can provide returns in excess of buying and holding the market portfolio of equities.     

Quantity Discounts, Manufacturer and Channel Profit Maximization: Impact of Retailer Heterogeneity

In this paper, we investigate if a manufacturer can simultaneously maximize own and channel profit with any quantity-based pricing policy, including a quantity-discount policy, when selling through heterogeneous retailers. We show that the manufacturer's best possible pricing policy, when retailers self-select quantities, is a quantity discount. However, this policy does not maximize channel profit. Driven by the manufacturer's inclination to reduce the quantity sold through a high-cost or low-demand retailer, this result holds whether or not retailers compete. We discuss implications of our analysis for the manufacturer.