Interest rate corridors and reserves

This paper evaluates reserves regimes versus interest rate corridors, which have become competing frameworks for monetary policy implementation. Rate corridors, relying on lending and deposit facilities to create ceilings and floors for overnight interest rates, evince mixed results on controlling volatility. Reserve requirements allow period-average smoothing of interest rates but, even if remunerated, are subject to reserve avoidance activities. A system of voluntary, period-average reserve commitments could offer equivalent rate-smoothing advantages. If central banks created symmetric opportunity costs of meeting or falling short of period-average reserve requirements (or commitments), they could achieve flat reserve demand on settlement day.     

The future of social security

We analyze the effect of the projected demographic transition on the political support for social security, and equilibrium outcomes. Embedding a probabilistic-voting setup of electoral competition in the standard OLG model with capital accumulation, we find that intergenerational transfers arise in the absence of altruism, commitment, or trigger strategies. Closed-form solutions predict population ageing to lead to higher social security tax rates, a rising share of pensions in GDP, but eventually lower social security benefits per retiree. The response of equilibrium tax rates to demographic shocks reduces old-age consumption risk. Calibrated to match features of the U.S. economy, the model suggests that, in response to the projected demographic transition, social security tax rates will gradually increase to 16%. Other policies that distort labor supply will become less important; labor supply therefore will rise, in contrast with frequently voiced fears.     

Some Evidence on the Adjustment of Producer Prices*

We document producer price adjustment using a low‐inflation micro price dataset. On average 24% of prices adjust each month, with an average increase/decrease of 6%. Producer prices adjust more frequently than consumer prices, but their size of adjustment is typically smaller. Sectoral heterogeneity in the frequency of price adjustment is strongly related to heterogeneity in the cost structure. Fluctuations in aggregate producer price inflation occur to a large extent through variation in the relative share of upward and downward price adjustment.     

THE CHANGING VOLATILITY OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN ECONOMY

During the last decade economic literature explored the presence of and reasons for what became known as “the great moderation” in the US and other G7 countries. “The great moderation” describes the decrease in economic volatility experienced in many of the G7 countries. This paper finds that in South Africa volatility is also not constant (it even finds that there are autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic effects present) and that volatility also decreased, particularly since 1994. Following the literature, the paper explores several reasons for this decrease and finds that smaller shocks, better monetary policy and improvements in the financial sector that place less liquidity constraints on individuals and allow them to manage their debt better are some of the main reasons for the reduction in the volatility of the South African economy. The literature on the G7 also suggests that better inventory management contributed to the lower volatility. However, this seems not to be true for South Africa.     

Inflation dynamics: A cross-country investigation

We document that “persistent and lagged” inflation (with respect to output) is a world-wide phenomenon in that these short-run inflation dynamics are highly synchronized across countries. In particular, the average cross-country correlation of inflation is significantly and systematically stronger than that of output, while the cross-country correlation of money growth is essentially zero. We investigate whether standard monetary models driven by monetary shocks are consistent with the empirical facts. We find that neither the new Keynesian sticky-price model nor the sticky-information model can fully explain the data. An independent contribution of the paper is to provide a simple solution technique for solving general equilibrium models with sticky information.     

REVISITING INFORMAL EMPLOYMENT AND SEGMENTATION IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN LABOUR MARKET

This study revisits the definition of informal employment, and it investigates the puzzle of high open unemployment co‐existing with relatively limited informal employment in South Africa. We estimate earnings equations using data from the September 2004 Labour Force Survey and present evidence of persistent earnings differentials not only between formal and informal employment, but also between types of informal employment. These persistent earnings differentials are suggestive of complex segmentation in the South African labour market and challenge the presentation of informal employment as an undifferentiated residual with no barriers to entry or mobility.     

A First Assessment of Some Measures of Core Inflation for the Euro Area

Abstract. Core inflation plays an important role in the deliberations of monetary policy-makers. In this paper we evaluate a number of measures of core inflation constructed using euro-area data. In addition to the traditional exclusion-type core measures, we examine two newer ones, documenting their properties and evaluating their performance in terms of their ability to track underlying or trend inflation in real time. We focus on core measures derived from the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) as the European Central Bank has chosen to define its mandate for price stability in terms of this index, and because this is the only index of consumer prices that is compiled in a comparable manner across all members of the European Union. We document significant excess kurtosis in the cross-section distribution of price changes in the euro area, and show that several categories of prices are more volatile than those typically excluded from traditional measures of core inflation. Contrary to what one might expect, traditional measures of core inflation are not significantly less volatile than headline measures. We document the superior performance of alternative measures of core inflation in tracking trend inflation on average, but show that none of the various measures of core gave significant advance warning of the pickup in trend inflation at the beginning of 1999.     

Ambiguity aversion and the absence of wage indexation

This paper analyzes optimal wage contracting assuming agents are not subjective expected utility maximizers but are, instead, ambiguity (or uncertainty) averse decision makers who maximize Choquet expected utility. We show that such agents will choose not to include any indexation coverage in their wage contracts even when inflation is uncertain, unless the perceived inflation uncertainty is high enough. Significantly, the exercise does not presume any exogenous costs (e.g., transactions costs) of including indexation links.     

The term structure of real interest rates: theory and evidence from UK index-linked bonds

This paper studies the behavior of the default-risk-free real term structure and term premia in two general equilibrium endowment economies with complete markets but without money. In the first economy there are no frictions as in Lucas (Econometrica 46 (1978) 1429) and in the second risk-sharing is limited by the risk of default as in Alvarez and Jermann (Econometrica 68 (2000) 775; Rev. Financial Studies 14 (2001) 1117). Both models are solved numerically, calibrated to UK aggregate and household data, and the predictions are compared to data on real interest rates constructed from the UK index-linked data. While both models produce time-varying risk or term premia, only the model with limited risk-sharing can generate enough variation in the term premia to account for the rejections of expectations hypothesis.     

Sunspot fluctuations in dynamics with predetermined variables

Summary. In this paper, I study the existence of Sunspot Equilibria in a general framework whose dynamics allow for the presence of predetermined variables in the system. The main motivation for this research comes from the fact that previous studies did not allow for such predetermined variables which, nevertheless, appear quite naturally in economic models. I show, for a non-negligible subset of dynamics with predetermined variables verifying usual assumptions, the existence of Stationary Sunspot Equilibria fluctuating between an arbitrary finite number of states arbitrarily close to a steady state. Received: March 1, 1995; revised version September 18, 1996