Changes in the informational content of term spreads: Is monetary policy becoming less effective?

We examine the predictive power of term spreads as predictors of economic recessions in Europe and the US. Using a battery of methodologies that include endogenous changepoint detection we find that the predictive power of spread-type variables has changed significantly during the 1980s and 1990s: in the most advanced countries the domestic spread has lost its informative content in favor of international – US and German – spreads, whereas in less developed countries this informational content has appeared during the late 1980s. Given the theoretical arguments for the predictive power, these findings suggest that domestic monetary policy may have become less effective in the most developed countries of the sample.     

Dynamic provision of public goods

Summary. This paper deals with implementing the efficient level of public good provision in a dynamic setting. First, we prove that when the good is provided in several stages, no sequence of Groves' mechanisms guarantees that agents will reveal their true valuations as a dominant strategy. The contribution of this paper is the characterization of those mechanisms which guarantee truthful revelation in this environment.Received: 30 December 2001, Revised: 27 March 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: D61, D78, D82, H41.This paper has greatly benefited from the ideas and comments of Sandro Brusco, Luis Corchón and Roberto Burguet. I would also like to thank José Alcalde, Luis J. Alías, Javier López-Cuñat, Juan Vicente Llinares, Ashley Piggins, Juan Perote and Antonio Quesada for very helpful suggestions. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee whose suggestions aided the quality of exposition in the paper and led me to Proposition 4.     

Banking in computable general equilibrium economies

In this paper we develop a computable general equilibrium economy that models the banking sector explicitly. Banks intermediate between households and between the household sector and the government sector. Households borrow from banks to finance their purchases of houses and they lend to banks to save for retirement. Banks pool households' savings and they purchase interest-bearing government debt and non-interest-bearing reserves. We use this structure to answer two sets of questions: one normative in nature that evaluates the welfare costs of alternative monetary and tax policies, and one positive in nature that studies the real effects of following a procyclical interest-rate policy rule.     

International migration,non-traded goods and economic welfare in a two-class economy: A reply

This paper sketches a formal model of an economy producing traded and non-traded goods in which two classes of individuals are differentiated, each owning different endowments of capital and labor and allocating different proportions of their income to the consumption of each commudity. The effects of emigration on prices, income distribution and the real income of each class is then examined.     

Towards endogenous science and technology for another development

Basing his arguments on a historical survey of the development of science and technology, the author argues for the strengthening of the autonomous S and T capacity of the Third World and gives special attention to the need for a recovery and development of traditional technologies. Such a policy would call for a reorientation of production away from an imitative pattern of consumption that favors a great diversity of goods for higher-income groups, and thus requires a widespread importation of technologies. A different productive structure, based on the satisfaction of basic human needs and with greater emphasis on collective rather than individual consumption, could reduce substantially the need for imported technology and lead to an increased demand for local scientific and technological activities.