摘要:

Some twenty‐five years ago, I suggested a model of business fluctuations that stresses occasional events producing contractions and subsequent revivals rather than a self‐generating cyclical process. Evidence for the past quarter century, like evidence presented in my earlier paper for a longer period, supports the view that the model is a useful way to interpret business fluctuations and has sufficiently important implications to justify further empirical work for both the United States and other countr

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00874.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Milton Friedman's theory of the business cycle implies two empirical regularities tested for here. One regularity is that business cycles are asymmetric: The size of a contraction affects the size of the following expansion, but not vice versa. The second regularity is that a supply‐side ceiling to aggregate output limits the size of expansions. Friedman's correlation methods yield only very weak support for the asymmetry hypothesis when applied to real GNP data of eight OECD countries. A time series model with a ceiling component fits the data well for a majority of the countrie

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00875.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00876.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00877.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

In his “Methodology of Positive Economics” Friedman aimed to provide a useful heuristic for working economists and not a sophisticated philosophical analysis. Hence, one should be cautious about reading specific philosophical positions, such as instrumentalism, into it. In the context of its time, it was a plea for a positivistic interplay of theory and observation. On such a reading Friedman's plea for unrealistic assumptions becomes much more defensible, and Friedman's essay is broadly consistent with the methodology that most economists now affirm, at least in princi

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00878.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

This paper distinguishes two types of asymmetry in business cycles: deepness and steepness. Deepness is defined as the characteristic that troughs are further below trend than peaks are above. Most previous research has focused exclusively on steepness, which refers to cycles in which contractions are steeper than expansions. A test for deepness is proposed and applied to U.S. post‐war quarterly unemployment, real GNP, and industrial production. Evidence of deepness is found for unemployment and industrial production, while the evidence for real GNP is weaker. Previous evidence of steepness in unemployment is confirme

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00879.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Consistent with a model of asymmetric risk aversion, subjects in first price auctions consistently bid above the risk neutral Nash prediction. It has been argued that this is due to low opportunity cost of deviating from the risk neutral bid. We increase opportunity cost (and payoff levels) by factors of 0, 1, 5, 10, and 20, from the normal levels generating payoffs up to $250 for risk neutral subjects and observe an insignificant increase in the slope of individual bid functions. The RMSE of bids declines significantly. This is consistent with a reward/decision cost model of bidding behavior.

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00880.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

A survey of thirty‐one experimental studies which report data on the comparative effects of monetary rewards and opportunity cost shows: (1) several studies in which increased rewards shift the central tendency of the data toward the predictions of rational models; (2) in virtually all cases rewards reduce the variance of the data around the predicted outcome. This is consistent with a model in which rewards are balanced against decision cost in agent behavior and explicates the argument that when rational models fail it can be attributed to low opportunity cost of deviations from the rational predictio

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00881.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

This paper examines the demand for money in Bolivia during the 1980s, a decade of extreme instability with annual inflation rates reaching over 20,000 percent, and a subsequent stabilization, with annual rates falling to less than 25 percent and remaining so for more than five years.Our empirical analysis makes use of error‐correction approaches, time‐varying‐parameter estimation with Kalman filtering, and GARCH models of expected inflation and inflation variance. We find that expected inflation and inflation uncertainty both matter for money demand. Time‐varying estimates show that the reaction to monetary disequilibria was significantly faster during hyperin

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00882.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY

摘要:

Incomplete contracts are motivated by difficulties in specifying contingent responses to unforeseen change in long‐term trading relationships. The issues can be parsimoniously represented in a two‐period model. Parties first make transaction‐specific investment that enhances value or reduces cost. Surplus is then realized, and bargaining divides the surplus and completes the contract. The testable hypothesis is that realized surplus shares are independent of sunk investments. This is strongly rejected using laboratory experimental methods. Failure of the prediction affects the expected profitability of cont

ISSN:0095-2583    

DOI:10.1111/j.1465-7295.1993.tb00883.x

出版商:Blackwell Publishing Ltd    

年代:1993

数据来源: WILEY