Fiscal Adjustment, The Real Exchange Rate and Australia's External Imbalance

This article examines issues of relevance to Australia's external imbalance. We investigate the sharp fiscal consolidation over the past five years and examine why it did not reduce the current account deficit. We show that a disproportionate part of the fiscal consolidation was achieved by cutting public investment spending, and we discuss some of the negative consequences of such cuts. We compare the macroeconomic behaviour of six OECD countries which have recently increased net government savings. It has been a common experience that an increase in net government saving has not been associated with a reduction in the current account deficit. For Australia, we establish that the link between fiscal consolidation and a smaller current account deficit was severed by a private sector investment surge. This leads us to examine the behaviour of the relative price critical to the allocation of this investment between the traded and non-traded sectors - the real exchange rate. Over the medium term, we argue that a substantial real depreciation is necessary as part of the adjustment required to stabilise the ratio of net external liabilities to GDP.     

Information Technology and Productivity Growth in the 2000s

Abstract. US productivity growth experienced continued productivity growth after 2000 even as investment, particularly in information technology (IT), slowed. This paper uses industry-level data to examine the link between average labor productivity (ALP) growth and IT in the post-2000 period. We use difference-in-difference and cross-sectional regressions to show that the link between ALP growth and IT-intensity is weaker after 2000 than before. These results are robust to alternative measures of IT-intensity such as the IT share of capital services, the level of IT capital depth, and the share of IT capital services in total output. We conclude that the post-2000 productivity gains in the United States do not appear to have been driven directly by IT.     

Bailouts,Inflation, and Risk-Sharing in Monetary Unions

This paper presents a new rationalization for bailouts of sovereign debt in monetary unions, such as those observed during the recent Euro crisis. It introduces a model where member countries of the monetary union are ex-ante identical, and each derives utility from consumption and disutility from the union-wide inflation rate. The union’s central bank is utilitarian and lacks commitment. Countries borrow or save in a market for nominal sovereign debt in response to idiosyncratic income shocks, with countries that receive positive income shocks saving and countries that receive negative income shocks borrowing. Ex post, the monetary union’s central bank will attempt to devalue sovereign debt through surprise inflation, as this will redistribute income from rich creditor countries to poor debtor countries. Creditor countries choose to bailout debtor countries because bailouts will weaken the redistributive motives of the central bank and forestall surprise inflation. As bailouts in this environment constitute a payment from lucky creditor countries to unlucky debtor countries, they mimic a risk-sharing arrangement that insures against income shocks. The payments made by creditor countries are incentive-compatible due to the shared currency and inflation rate in the monetary union. This ability of countries to provide each other with incentive-compatible insurance constitutes a novel theory of optimal currency areas. This insurance benefit of the monetary union is largest for countries with negatively correlated income shocks, in contrast to the classic Mundell-Friedman optimal currency area criterion.

     

Procurement mechanisms and the emergence of new governance structures in the CEECs: evidence from the Bulgarian wine industry

During transition, Bulgaria witnessed the dismantling of communist agri-food supply channels and a weakening of contract enforcement mechanisms. Wineries have had to establish grape procurement and purchasing relationships with a more diverse set of growers and intermediaries. In an attempt to overcome the weaknesses of procurement via spot markets, they have sought more interdependent contractual forms that secure greater control over the quality of inputs and minimise the possibility of opportunistic behaviour. The desired option by wineries is complete backward integration but attempts to achieve this have been limited by fragmented land ownership, credit constraints and incomplete property rights.     

Identification of first-price auctions with non-separable unobserved heterogeneity

We propose a novel methodology for identification of first-price auctions, when bidders’ private valuations are independent conditional on one-dimensional unobserved heterogeneity. We extend the existing literature ( and ) by allowing the unobserved heterogeneity to be non-separable from bidders’ valuations. Our central identifying assumption is that the distribution of bidder values is increasing in the state. When the state-space is finite, such monotonicity implies the full-rank condition needed for identification. Further, we extend our approach to the conditionally independent private values model of Li et al. (2000), as well as to unobserved heterogeneity settings in which the implicit reserve price or the cost of bidding varies across auctions.     

EU preferential market access conditions for the least developed countries

The EU has opened up its market to duty and quota free imports from the least developed countries. This article outlines the key elements of this initiative and the factors determining its likely effects and argues that the EU must also liberalise and reform its prefernntial rules of origin if the initiative is to be effective in achieving its objectives.     

SOCIAL NORMS,LOCAL INTERACTION,AND NEIGHBORHOOD PLANNING*

This article examines optimal social linkage when each individual's repeated interaction with each of his neighbors creates spillovers. Each individual's discount factor is randomly determined. A planner chooses a local interaction network or neighborhood design before the discount factors are realized. Each individual then plays a repeated Prisoner's Dilemma game with his neighbors. A local trigger strategy equilibrium (LTSE) describes an equilibrium in which each individual conditions his cooperation on the cooperation of at least one “acceptable” group of neighbors. Our main results demonstrate a basic trade‐off in the design problem between suboptimal punishment and social conflict. Potentially suboptimal punishment arises in designs with local interactions since in this case monitoring is imperfect. Owing to the heterogeneity of discount factors, however, greater social conflict may arise in more connected networks. When individuals' discount factors are known to the planner, the optimal design exhibits a cooperative “core” and an uncooperative “fringe.”“Uncooperative” (impatient) types are connected to cooperative ones who tolerate their free riding so that social conflict is kept to a minimum. By contrast, when the planner knows only the ex ante distribution over individual discount factors, then in some cases the optimal design partitions individuals into maximally connected cliques (e.g., cul‐de‐sacs), whereas in other cases incomplete graphs with small overlap (e.g., grids) are possible.     

Parametric and Semiparametric Modeling of the Off-Farm Labor Supply of Agrarian Households in Transition Bulgaria

The reaction of labor markets to economic reforms is an important indicator of the progress of transition. Because of diminished government support and the breakup of state and collective enterprises, labor market adjustments in the transition economies have been particularly severe in the agricultural sector. This article evaluates the off-farm labor market for a sample of agrarian households in transition Bulgaria. We give particular attention to the distributional assumptions that underlie standard approaches to the evaluation of labor supply. A variety of specification tests are considered and support for standard maximum likelihood estimates which rely on normality as a maintained hypothesis is mixed. Alternative semiparametric (distribution-free) estimators are also considered. The empirical results indicate that, five years after the initiation of the transition, off-farm labor supply patterns for Bulgarian agricultural households are similar to what is commonly observed in developed market economies. Labor supply is positively affected by factors such as education and work experience which are hypothesized to increase off-farm wages. Social benefit programs providing monetary or in-kind support payments are shown to significantly decrease off-farm work.     

Undominated Nash Implementation in Bounded Mechanisms

We study implementation in undominated Nash equilibrium by bounded mechanisms. (An undominated Nash equilibrium is a Nash equilibrium in which no agent uses a weakly dominated strategy. A mechanism is bounded if every dominated strategy is dominated by some undominated strategy.) We identify necessary conditions and sufficient conditions for such implementation. These conditions are satisfied in virtually all economic environments, and are also satisfied by interesting correspondences from the social choice literature. For economic settings, we provide a particularly simple implementing mechanism for which the undominated equilibrium outcomes coincide with those obtained from the iterative elimination of weakly dominated strategies. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: 022, 025, 026.