Oil Price Uncertainty

The theories of investment under uncertainty and real options predict that uncertainty about, for example, oil prices will tend to depress current investment. We reinvestigate the relationship between the price of oil and investment, focusing on the role of uncertainty about oil prices. We find that volatility in oil prices has had a negative and statistically significant effect on several measures of investment, durables consumption, and aggregate output. We also find that accounting for the effects of oil price volatility tends to exacerbate the negative dynamic response of economic activity to a negative oil price shock, while dampening the response to a positive oil price shock.     

Divisia Monetary Aggregates,the Great Ratios,and Classical Money Demand Functions

King et al. ( 1991 ) evaluate the empirical relevance of a class of real business cycle models with permanent productivity shocks by analyzing the stochastic trend properties of postwar U.S. macroeconomic data. They find a common stochastic trend in a three‐variable system that includes output, consumption, and investment, but the explanatory power of the common trend drops significantly when they add money balances and the nominal interest rate. In this paper, we revisit the cointegration tests in the spirit of King et al., using improved monetary aggregates whose construction has been stimulated by the Barnett critique. We show that previous rejections of the balanced growth hypothesis and classical money demand functions can be attributed to mismeasurement of the monetary aggregates.     

The Demand for Assets and Optimal Monetary Aggregation

This paper uses a highly disaggregated demand system to estimate the degree of substitutability among monetary assets and to address the issue of optimal monetary aggregation in the United States. We address the problems of dimensionality and nonlinearity, estimating a very detailed monetary asset demand system encompassing the full range of assets based on the locally flexible normalized quadratic expenditure function. We treat the concavity property as a maintained hypothesis and provide evidence consistent with neoclassical microeconomic theory. Statistical tests reject the appropriateness of the aggregation assumptions for all the money measures published by the Federal Reserve as well as for a large number of groupings suggested by earlier studies. This supports and reinforces Barnett's (2016) assertion that we should employ the broadest M4 monetary aggregate published by the Center for Financial Stability.     

Chaos in East European black market exchange rates

In this paper we test for deterministic chaos in seven East European black market exchange rates, using Koedijk and Kool's (1992, Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, 10, 83-96) monthly data from January 1955 through May 1990. In doing so we use three (non-parametric) inference methods, the BDS (Brocket al., 1996, Econometric Reviews, 15, 197-235) test for whiteness, the Lyapunov exponent estimator of Nychkaet al.(1992, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 12, 135-136) as well as the Lyapunov exponent estimator of Gencay and Dechert (1992, Physica D, 59, 142-157). We find some consistency in inference across methods, and we conclude, based on the Nychkaet al.(1992) estimator, that there is evidence consistent with a chaotic non-linear generation process in only two out of seven series.