Tinbergen in De Economist

Jan Tinbergen's scientific writings cover six main areas of research. His articles in De Economist represent these areas; in some cases the contributions to De Economist were of a pioneering nature (business cycles, economic models, economic integration); in others De Economist was the first or even single outlet for Tinbergen's work. This article provides an overview of these contributions. The wide scope of Tinbergen's areas of research goes together with a unity in approach, the characteristics of which are: policy relevance, quantification and measurement, balance in analysis and presentation, and learning from experience. Tinbergen's articles in De Economist bear witness to this approach which at the time also met with scepticism and resistance as this overview shows. According to Houthakker, Tinbergen's main contribution may be that, amidst the pleas of interest groups and the slogans of the laity, an attempt is made that the voice of the professional economic researcher be heard. Tinbergen's work still sets an agenda for both economic research and policy making.     

Economic development and Indigenous Australia: contestations over property,institutions and ideology*

Economic development for remote Indigenous communities cannot be understood unless the relative importance of customary activity, potentially enhanced by native title legal rights in resources, is recognised. The present article uses a three‐sector hybrid economy framework, rather than the usual two‐sector private (or market) and public (or state) model to more accurately depict the Indigenous economy. Examples are provided of the actual and potential significance of the customary sector of the hybrid economy. Focusing on the concepts of property and institutions, it is demonstrated that significant local, regional, and national benefits are generated by the Indigenous hybrid economy. A role is foreshadowed for resource economists and the New Institutional Economics in quantifying these benefits, including positive externalities, so that they might be more actively supported by the state.     

Dynamics of the federal funds target rate: a nonstationary discrete choice approach

We apply a discrete choice approach to model the empirical behaviour of the Federal Reserve in changing the federal funds target rate, the benchmark of short‐term market interest rates in the US. Our methods allow the explanatory variables to be nonstationary as well as stationary. This feature is particularly useful in the present application as many economic fundamentals that are monitored by the Fed and are believed to affect decisions to adjust interest rate targets display some nonstationarity over time. The chosen model successfully predicts the majority of the target rate changes during the time period considered (1994–2001) and helps to explain strings of similar intervention decisions by the Fed. Based on the model‐implied optimal interest rate, our findings suggest that there is a lag in the Fed's reaction to economic shocks during this period. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Impact of the 9/11 Events on the American and French Stock Markets

Markets reacted strongly to the World Trade Center attacks both in Europe and in the United States. The extent of this crisis was difficult to assess at the time, underlining the need for a specific tool to measure the magnitude of financial crises. A first measure was recently proposed and applied to the foreign exchange market by Zumbach et al. (2000a,b ). Their measure relies on an analogy with geophysics; the related index of market shocks (IMS) that we propose here is also the counterpart of the Richter scale used for earthquakes. We apply this measure on the French and the American stock markets to put large market events into perspective. The crisis triggered by the September attacks was actually the worst since 1987, and the ninth worst when compared to major historical ones.     

The Intergenerational Supply of Loggers Under Conditions of Declining Economic Well-Being

This paper addresses the supply-side explanations of a logger shortage by estimating an occupational choice model that considers the role of earnings, nonpecuniary determinants and intergenerational factors. Our results showed that: (1) relative earnings have no statistically significant effect on career choice; (2) improvement in the public image of loggers substantially increases entry into logging; and (3) a strong intergenerational supply linkage exists but is currently being eroded.