The US dollar- scenario of a world currency

The exchange rate of the US dollar fell sharply last year. What part was played by the adverse “fundamentals” of the US economy, the large current account deficit, the country’s heavy foreign indebtedness and the substantial budget deficit? How will the dollar behave in future?     

The natural rate moves! A review essay of Edmund Phelps' structural slumps

Summary This review essay of Edmund Phelps' Structural Slumps.The Modern Equilibrium Theory of Unemployment, Interest and Assets argues thatStructural Slumps is an important book, which enriches neoclassical economics and has substantive things to say about the persistence of high unemployment rates in many industrial countries. However, the book does not substantiate Phelps' own claims that the structural approach represents a new paradigm in economic theory and that the new paradigm is the only convincing explanation for persistently high levels of unemployment. With respect to the first claim it is argued that the structuralist approach is not fundamentally different from neo-classical macroeconomics. With respect to the second claim it is illustrated that the empirical evidence is inconclusive as far as the alleged superiority of the structuralist approach is concerned.We would like to thank Lex Hoogduin, Simon Kuipers and an anonymous referee for useful comments. Of course, the usual disclaimer applies.     

State-Building in Resource-Rich Economies

One of the most significant differences between developing countries and today’s advanced states is the fact that many developing countries rely heavily on one or several natural resources. That such dependence shapes the state’s ability to tax—its fiscal capacity—is commonly argued in the political science and applied development literatures. This paper approaches the issue from an economic angle. Our analytical foundation builds upon a novel theoretical framework, and allows us to model fiscal capacity as an ex ante investment under uncertainty. For our panel of 30 hydrocarbon-rich economies, instrumental-variables results provide strong empirical support for our theoretical proposition: resource intensification weakens state-building by impeding the state’s fiscal capacity. This result provides an inaugural validation of the economic analytics of state-capacity determinants: understanding these determinants serves to build stronger states and support sustainable paths of development. Our result also suggests that one of the main tools of fiscal policy-analysis in resource-rich economies, namely optimal taxation, could gain in practical relevance by incorporating capacity-constraints into the analytical fiscal-framework.     

Duplication without constraints: Álvarez‐Nogal and Chamley's analysis of debt policy under Philip II

Carlos Álvarez‐Nogal and Christophe Chamley recently published an article in the Economic History Review on ‘Debt policy under constraints: Philip II, the Cortes, and Genoese bankers’. In this note, we show that several claims in their article are very similar to earlier research results, published or circulated long before Álvarez‐Nogal and Chamley's original submission, by ourselves and other scholars (section I). These results are repeated without attribution or even mention of the earlier work. In addition, we show that what Álvarez‐Nogal and Chamley present as new quantitative insights are actually replications of earlier results of ours (section II). Finally, Álvarez‐Nogal and Chamley misrepresent our contributions, as well as those of several other scholars (section III).     

Consumer Affairs Departments in the United States and the Netherlands: A Comparative Analysis

Over a decade ago Hansen and Schoenheit (1986), in their Journal of Consumer Policy article, concluded that Consumer Affairs Departments (CADs) offer potential for improving organisational performance in the market place and that their transferability to the European context would be warranted. In this article we trace and analyse the development of Consumer Affairs Departments in the United States and the Netherlands on the basis of fourteen case studies. On the basis of a comparative analysis we conjecture that the application of information technology, the application of communication technology, and personnel management style could be considered as major determinants of differences with regard to CADs in the aforementioned countries. We conclude the article with a number of building blocks that organisations may use in preparing their CADs for the decade to come.     

Fictitious Play in Extensive Form Games

This article analyzes the fictitious play process originally proposed for strategic form games by Brown (1951) and Robinson (1951). We interpret the process as a model of preplay thinking performed by players before acting in a one-shot game. This model is one of bounded rationality. We discuss how fictitious play should then be defined for extensive form games and conclude that this is somewhat problematic. We therefore study two alternative definitions. For either of these, under a weak condition of initial uncertainty, a convergence point of a fictitious play sequence is a sequential equilibrium. For generic games of perfect information initial uncertainty also implies convergence of fictitious play.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: C72.     

The right answers to the wrong question? An assessment of the microfoundations debate

Summary In this paper we discuss several conceptual features of the microfoundations debate. The recent revival of this debate, with its emphasis on specific characteristics of markets (partial economics), tends to shift attention away from more fundamental considerations about the workings of a market economy (the issue of coordination). In fact, the coordination issue has been neglected because Walrasian general equilibrium theory serves as a benchmark in the microfoundations debate and in this theory perfect coordination is simply assumed. In our view the debate has therefore mainly provided the right answers to the wrong question since the coordination issue is essential for the analysis of the economy as a whole.We would like to thank T. Cate, M.C.W. Janssen, L.H. Hoogduin, J. Pen and, especially, S.K. Kuipers for their comments on a previous version of this paper. The useful comments of an anonymous referee are also gratefully acknowledged. Of course, the usual disclaimer applies.