Showing papers in "Journal of Macroeconomics in 2008"

TL;DR: In this paper, the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor has been studied for 75 years and there is a strong case for the importance of substitution in the analysis of growth and other economic issues, much less agreement exists on the value of σ.

TL;DR: In this paper, the relevance of the credit channel depends on the structural features of the housing finance system, in particular efficiency and institutional organisation, and they employ a VAR approach to analyse this issue in four housing markets (Finland, Germany, Norway and the UK).

TL;DR: This article examined the effects of monetary policy shocks on output in the three largest euro area economies (Germany, France and Italy) by applying a new VAR identification procedure, and concluded that monetary policy innovations play, at most, a modest role in generating fluctuations in output for the EMU3.

TL;DR: In this paper, the effects of exogenous fiscal policy shocks in Spain in a VAR framework are investigated. And the authors find that government expenditure expansionary shocks are found to have positive effects on output in the short-term at the cost of higher inflation and public deficits and lower output in medium and long term.

TL;DR: In this article, the optimal allocation of government spending between infrastructure and health (which affects labor productivity as well as household utility) in an endogenous growth framework is studied, where infrastructure affects not only the production of goods but also the supply of health services.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined the impact of monetary policy shocks on the US housing market using an identification procedure similar to the one suggested by Uhlig, and found that the magnitude of the impact is sensitive to the selection of the horizon for which the restrictions hold.

TL;DR: In this article, the impact of exchange rate volatility on the volume of bilateral US trade (both exports and imports) using sectoral data was investigated, and the authors found that separating trade into differentiated goods and homogeneous goods results in the most appropriate sectoral division.

TL;DR: This paper showed that measured rates of growth in real per capita income differ drastically depending on the data source and that data sets differ in whether and how they adjust for changes in relative prices across countries.

TL;DR: This paper showed that for the period since 1986, oil shocks have had a negative effect on stock returns, regardless of whether the oil shock is defined as the percentage change in the price of oil or a nonlinear transformation of that series.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present empirical evidence of a structural break during the 1990s in the relationship between the real exchange rate and CPI inflation for a set of fourteen OECD countries and propose an explanation for this phenomenon.

TL;DR: In this paper, a lifetime consumption profile with a hump of roughly the same relative size and peak location as empirical consumption profiles can be obtained in a general equilibrium model where mortality risk is the only active mechanism that can account for the hump.

TL;DR: In this article, the effects of population growth on per-capita income growth within a Romerian (1990)-type endogenous growth model with human capital accumulation were investigated. And the authors found that both the growth rate and the level of real per-Capita income are independent of population size, depending on the size of the degree of altruism of agents towards future generations.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the in-sample and out-of-sample properties of linear and nonlinear Taylor rules using real-time US data and found that the in sample and out of sample performance measures generally select the same functional form for the Taylor rule and that the form of the Taylor rules differs across the pre-Greenspan and Greenspan sample periods.

TL;DR: Diks et al. as mentioned in this paper investigated the linear and nonlinear causal linkages among six currencies denoted relative to United States dollar (USD), namely Euro (EUR), Great Britain Pound (GBP), Japanese Yen (JPY), Swiss Frank (CHF), Australian Dollar (AUD) and Canadian Dollar (CAD).

TL;DR: This article employed dynamic panel generalized method of moment (GMM) technique to empirically examine the causal relationship between democracy and growth volatility for a sample of 138 countries over the 1968-2002 period.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate a long run supply-side system incorporating a CES production function with time-varying factor-augmenting technical progress for the euro area over the period 1970-2005.

TL;DR: In this paper, a testable present-value representation of the current account that encompasses the Harberger-Laursen-Metzler (HLM) effect was derived.

TL;DR: In this article, the impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on economic growth in Spain using a dynamic general equilibrium approach was studied, and it was shown that the contribution of ICT to Spanish productivity growth is very relevant.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that the observed correlation between growth and liberalization will underestimate the impact of capital account openness, and they instrument capital account liberalization with the average level of openness of other countries to capture the "fad" element in financial liberalization.

TL;DR: The authors assesses the effectiveness of communication, or oral interventions, by the G3 monetary authorities to influence exchange rates and find that the effectiveness is strongly related to the degree of uncertainty and the positioning of participants in FX markets.

TL;DR: In this paper, a dynamic, general equilibrium model designed to gauge the importance of contractual imperfections in the form of limited enforcement for international differences in the organization of production is presented, where limited enforcement constrains agents to operate establishments below their optimal scale and as a result, economies where contracts are enforced more efficiently tend to be richer and emphasize large scale production.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate a Phillips curve model taking into account the non-stationary properties in inflation and identify a small but significant positive relationship between inflation and unemployment, and they also provide some evidence that the trade-off between price inflation and the rate of unemployment in the short-run worsens as the mean rate of inflation increases.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors claim that a take-off is possible even though the initial capital stock is zero and capital is essential, since the marginal product of capital is initially infinite.

TL;DR: Calvo and Reinhart as mentioned in this paper analyzed exchange rates, reserves, interest rates and inflation across 88 exchange rate regimes for 20 countries and found that credible IT is empirically distinguishable from fixed, floating, managed floating, and FF regimes.

TL;DR: In this paper, the implications of consumer overconfidence in a life-cycle consumption/saving model were studied. But they focused on the long-run average behavior of consumption over the life cycle, and their main analytical result is a necessary and sufficient condition under which any degree of overconfidence concerning the mean return on savings can produce a hump in the work life consumption profile.

TL;DR: This paper found that a high degree of preference for inflation stability is significantly correlated only with central bank independence and membership to the European Economic and Monetary Union for low inflation countries, whereas for high inflation countries only strict inflation targeting and, to some extent, Central bank independence are relevant for inflation stabilizing policies.

TL;DR: This article showed that disinflations in LAC have been carried out at no cost to output, and that LAC episodes exhibit a larger speed than G7 experiences, which explains why disinflation costs in developed nations are on average larger than LAC's.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze the incentives of a government facing electoral uncertainty to implement structural reforms in the presence of a deficit restriction and find that the government faces a trade-off between enhancing its electoral chances by providing compensation to private individuals and the cost of violating the deficit restriction.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors consider the effects of lifetime uncertainty on investment in both physical and human capital and analyze the relevance of government expenditure on health and education to counter such growth-reducing forces.

TL;DR: In this article, an investment model with informational frictions and uncertainty is developed to capture the asymmetric dynamics of business cycles, and the role for fiscal policy in smoothing the effects of business cycle fluctuations depends on initial conditions at the time of the shock.