Japan’s imports of technology

Intereconomics - There are important reasons why Japan’s policy regarding imports of technology should find its place in the literature devoted to the economic development of Asia, Africa and...     

Budget surpluses and social security reform: U.S. fiscal policy issues in 1998

In 1997 the US President and Congress concluded an agreement that imposed caps on discretionary government spending and which was expected to balance the budget by the year 2002. Just one year later the tide has turned: the fiscal year 1998 resulted in a US budget surplus for the first time since 1969. This article discusses the causes for this surprising development and the link between budget surpluses and Social Security's finances. It also relates some recent proposals on how to preserve the budget surplus for Social Security to the sustainability of fiscal policy.     

Changing interest rate responses to money announcements: 1977–1983

This paper investigates when and how the response of interest rates to money announcements changed in recent years. The response of both short and long rates rises in October 1979, but drops during 1981. During mid-1982, the response of long rates raises again, but without a change in the response of short rates. Despite a number of ex post explanations for these shifts, none of the major hypotheses of why interest rates respond to money announcements provides a complete ex ante explanation of these response shifts.     

Bilateral Search and Vertical Heterogeneity

Just like perfect (frictionless) matching models, a search model is proposed that is characterized by bilateral search and vertical heterogeneity. It allows for a generally specified utility function. The equilibrium allocation is unique and exists in iterated strict dominance. The model is robust with the perfect matching model as frictions disappear. Nonetheless, the equilibrium allocations are surprisingly odd. For multiplicatively separable preferences, the distributions are partitioned endogenously. And for a wide range of preferences, matching sets are naturally disconnected.     

Dutch Economic Growth in Comparative-Historical Perspective, 1500–2000

Our knowledge of nineteenth century Dutch economic performance has been greatly improved by recent research. However, the interpretation of long-run Dutch economic development requires a reexamination of the concepts and generalizations used by economists, which derive mostly from the study of other nations, especially Britain. This article proposes both a reassessment of Dutch economic performance in the very long run, and a reconsideration of the concept of modern economic growth.     

Improving the business impact of foresight

Achieving an impact on business decision-makers with foresight does not appear to be an easy task. Therefore, the Macro Trends team at Deutsche Bank Research has formulated some criteria to guide foresight projects. They should aim to produce plausibility, provide convenience and inspiration as well as an appropriate time perspective with regard to the content of foresight results. In addition, a structured way of producing and delivering foresight, a seamless inclusion in organisational procedures, a high level of interaction with decision-makers, ideational entrepreneurship, innovation regarding communication with business people, and persistence and synchronisation with the business organisation are the key criteria for achieving a higher impact from foresight projects. To live up to these criteria, the Macro Trends team has developed a 'trend map' which provides a conceptual aggregation of trends - to provide orientation for decision-makers and stakeholders.     

Option Pricing in ARCH-type Models

ARCH models have become popular for modeling financial time series. They seem, at first, however, to be incompatible with the option pricing approach of Black, Scholes, Merton et al., because they are discrete-time models and possess too much variability. We show that completeness of the market holds for a broad class of ARCH-type models defined in a suitable continuous-time fashion. As an example we focus on the GARCH(1,1)-M model and obtain, through our method, the same pricing formula as Duan, who applied equilibrium-type arguments.