Price expectations, capital accumulation and employment: Lindahl's macroeconomics from the 1920s to the 1950s

Erik Lindahl's approach to macroeconomics focused on the non-neutralityof monetary policy (in the short and the long run) and on thedenial of the existence of natural rates of interest and unemployment.From the 1920s until his death in 1960, Lindahl advocated theuse of norms for monetary policy to fight inflation and deflationprecisely because he would not rely on the market system's returnto natural rates. Making use of hitherto unexplored material,this paper analyses the development of Lindahl's thinking aboutprice level changes, investment and employment from the 1920sto the 1950s.     

Su un piano ottimale d'ammortamento di un prestito diviso in obbligazioni

Viene considerato il problema della determinazione della «politica ottima» di un'impresa che deve ammortizzare un prestito diviso in obbligazioni, noti i tassi di interesse del prestito, la redditività del capitale disponibile e prefissati vincoli sul numero massimo di obbligazioni da rimborsare nei singoli anni. Il problema viene risolto coi metodi della programmazione lineare.     

International competitiveness,job creation and job destruction—An establishment-level study of German job flows

This study investigates the impact of international competitiveness on net employment, job creation, job destruction, and gross job flows for a representative sample of German establishments from 1993 to 2005. We find a statistically significant but economically small effect of real exchange rate shocks on employment, comparable to the one found in studies for the United States. However, contrary to the United States, the employment adjustment (among surviving firms) operates mainly through the job creation rather than the job destruction rate. Job destruction occurs essentially through discrete events such as restructuring, outsourcing and bankruptcy. We suggest that these findings are consistent with a highly regulated labor market, in which smooth adjustment is costly and possibly delayed.     

Monetary policy,ownership structure,and risk-taking at financial intermediaries

This paper examines how ownership structure interacts with monetary policy in shaping financial intermediaries' appetite for risk. By constructing a large panel of banks across Western Europe, we provide evidence that differences in bank ownership influence the transmission of monetary policy via the risk-taking channel. While shareholder banks actively adjust the riskiness of their portfolios to changes in interest rates, stakeholder banks appear to be less responsive to such changes. These findings call for greater attention to the nature of bank ownership when setting monetary policy.     

Disequilibrium models due to a “learning by doing” process

Sommario Si considerino fluttuazioni e crescita in un modello neo-keynesiano in tre diverse ipotesi macroeconomiche, che danno origine a diversi modelli matematici in tempo discreto, o mappe. In particolare si analizza un modello di crescita bidimensionale, rappresentato da un endomorfismo lineare a tratti. Separando il comportamento dinamico delle pendenze di rette che escono dall'origine, dalla dinamica dei punti su tali rette, si mostra che il comportamento dinamico del modello è governato dalla dinamica di un endomorfismo unidimensionale. Ciò semplifica lo studio dei valori di biforcazione che creano rette invarianti, su cui le traiettorie sono divergenti, e consente di determinare il bacino di attrazione di regioni assorbenti che contengono i cammini di crescita, regolari o caotici.

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Fluctuations and growth in a new-keynesian model are considered in three different macroeconomic assumptions, giving rise to different mathematical models in discrete time, or maps. In particular a two-dimensional growth model represented by a piecewise linear endomorphism is analysed. Separating the dynamics of the slopes of straight lines issuing from the origin, from those of the points on these lines, it is shown that the dynamics of the model are governed by the dynamics of a one-dimensional endomorphism. This simplifies the study of the bifurcation values which create invariant lines on which the trajectories are divergent, and enable us to determine the basin of attraction of the absorbing region which includes regular or chaotic growth paths.

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This paper relates to the activities of the M.U.R.S.T. Group Dinamiche Nonlineari ed Applicazioni alle Scienze Economiche e Sociali.     

沃顿商学院：中国的私有化之路

中国的全面经济改革,在短短四分之一世纪的时间内,就为中国赢得了在全球经济圈中举足轻重的地位;相对于其他国家而言,在中国的经济改革中,公司从国有化向私有化转变的这一过程更加平稳。与此同时,一个充满活力的富于     

Pass-through and Export Prices: an empirical test for the leading European countries

The paper presents an empirical investigation of the extent to which exchange rate movements affect export prices in the leading European countries. By extending the model proposed by Kasa (1992) to a context of monopolistic competition, an export price equation has been derived that allows us to clearly identify the effects of nominal exchange rate movements on the exporters' profit margins and therefore on his prices. This equation has then been estimated with reference to five different products (beer, car tyres, truck tyres, aluminium foil and cars) and six markets (United States, Germany, France, Italy, United Kingdom and Spain). The results show that the pass-through is more likely to occur and larger in absolute value for the less differentiated products, for which markets can plausibly be assumed to be more competitive. In line with previous empirical findings, the German and US markets are the ones in which it is most difficult for exporters to modify their prices expressed in local currency.     

Knowledge specialization and R&D collaboration

This paper contributes to the knowledge-based explanation of R&D networks. It argues that knowledge overlap and novelty are complementary inputs of a R&D alliance, in forms that depend upon the exploration breadth and depth of the R&D activity. The paper investigates how the hypothesis of specialization of the knowledge endowments can recover a number of characteristic empirical properties of a pattern of R&D collaboration in the economy. Implications for network evolution are discussed.     

Growth maximizing government size,social capital,and corruption

Our paper intersects two topics in growth theory: the growth maximizing government size and the role of Social Capital in development. We modify a simple overlapping generations framework by introducing two key features: a production function à la Barro together with the possibility that public officials steal a fraction of public resources under their own control. As underlined by the literature on corruption, Social Capital affects public officials' accountability through many channels which also affect the probability of being caught for embezzlement and misappropriation of public resources. Therefore, in our endogenous growth model such probability is taken as a proxy of Social Capital. We find that maximum growth rates are compatible with Big Government size, measured both in terms of expenditures and public officials, when associated with high levels of Social Capital.