Ultra-Easy Money: Digging the Hole Deeper?

The global situation we face today is arguably more fraught with danger than was the case when the crisis first began. By encouraging still more credit and debt expansion, monetary policy has “dug the hole deeper.” The fundamental analytical mistake has been to model the economy as an understandable and controllable machine rather than as a complex, adaptive system. This mistake also implies that the suggestion that central banks should necessarily reduce the “financial rate of interest,” in response to a presumed fall in the “natural rate,” is overly simplistic. In practice, ultra-easy policy has not stimulated aggregate demand to the degree expected but has had other unexpected consequences. Not least, it poses a threat to financial stability and to potential growth going forward. Further, “exit” threatens to be delayed in many countries, underlining the dangerous fact that the global economy has no nominal anchor. Much better would be policies, introduced by other arms of government, that would recognize that the fundamental problem is not inadequate liquidity but excessive debt and possible insolvencies. The policy stakes are now very high.     

Integration of Financial Services

Abstract

Integration financial services is a term with many meanings. Definitions might include:

• ownership of different segments of financial services,

• the distribution of products of one segment by another, and

• a consumer-centric strategy driven to satisfy the needs of the customer regardless of organizational structures.

For the purposes of my paper, I will define it as the erasing of boundaries leading to consumers receiving value propositions that are not restricted by traditional industry segment barriers.     

Cultural Political Economy: Logics of Discovery,Epistemic Fallacies,the Complexity of Emergence,and the Potential of the Cultural Turn

As a result of a long-running internal debate there have been notable incremental changes to how the International Monetary Fund (IMF) treats capital controls, particularly those directed at inflows. These changes combine new acceptance of these policy instruments with an older emphasis on their negative consequences and on the desirability of free movement of capital. Policy change of this sort is puzzling from the standpoint of the existing literature on international organisations (IOs), which has thus far paid little attention to transformative incremental change associated with long-term contestation. This article departs from this tendency by drawing on insights from principal–agent theory, constructivism and historical institutionalism to identify the conditions under which such change may originate. I argue that actors within IOs are likely to pursue incremental change by layering new policies on to old ones as a way to build coalitions and to respond to external organisational insecurity imperatives and diverse member state preferences and to internal path-dependent organisational cultural features. Over time the incremental shifts brought by layering can induce transformative rather than reproductive change because they fit with consequentialist and appropriateness behavioural logics. I illustrate this argument by investigating recent changes in IMF policy on capital controls.     

Environmental dynamism and strategic decision‐making rationality: an examination at the decision level

Several approaches have been used to explore environmental dynamism as a contingent predictor of the relationship between rational‐comprehensive strategic decision‐making and firm‐level performance. At the decision level of analysis, however, small sample sizes, low statistical power, and statistical dependence have plagued the research. Through the use of a simulated decision‐making environment and multilevel analysis, this study examined 400 decisions from 54 executive teams. Consistent with much of the existing firm‐level research, the results indicated that environmental dynamism may moderate the relationship between rational‐comprehensive decision making and decision quality. Surprisingly, the form of the relationship differed from much of the firm‐level research. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Large lot zoning and subdivision costs: A test

This paper tests two hypotheses: (1) that large lot zoning is a binding constraint on the residential land market and (2) that subdivision costs are inversely related to lot size. The paper shows that, in general, the two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive but that they can be distinguished in the case of a test conducted across tracts of unsubdivided vacant land. A hedonic price model for vacant land is developed and then estimated using disaggregate data from a New York City suburb.     

LOWER OIL PRICES AND THE UK ECONOMY

Demand for oil remains weak, and OPEC production is running ahead of quota in most member countries, so the possibility that oil prices could fall in the near future has increased. In this Forecast Release we examine the medium-term impact on the UK economy of lower oil prices. We find that, if the government does not intervene to protect the exchange rate, there is an immediate stimulus to output growth. The inflation rate, though, is 1–2 percentage points higher after three years.     

How good are two-point estimates of urban density gradients and central densities?

Some researchers have estimated urban density gradients and central densities using only information on the population and area of the inner city and the outer ring of suburbs. The statistical properties of these two-point estimates have not been previously analyzed. This paper shows the difficulties in providing a definitive analysis of these properties and provides, as an alternative, some Monte Carlo experiments. It appears that the two-point density gradients are mildly biased downward (toward zero), while the bias on the central density depends on the underlying error structure. Two-point estimates are compared with OLS and nonlinear least-squares estimates. Some results for actual cities are also provided.