Globalization and labor market integration in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Asia

This chapter uses new data sets to analyze labor market integration between 1882 and 1936 in an area of Asia stretching from South India to Southeastern China and encompassing the three Southeast Asian countries of Burma, Malaya, and Thailand. We find that by the late nineteenth century, globalization, of which a principal feature was the mass migration of Indians and Chinese to Southeast Asia, gave rise to both an integrated Asian labor market and a period of real wage convergence. Integration did not, however, extend beyond Asia to include core industrial countries. Asian and core areas, in contrast to globally integrated commodity markets, showed divergent trends in unskilled real wages

Long Memory and Non-Linearities in International Inflation

This paper investigates inflation dynamics in a panel of 20 OECD economies using an approach based on the sample autocorrelation function (ACF). We find that inflation is characterized by long-lasting fluctuations, which are similar across countries and that eventually revert to a potentially time-varying mean. The cyclical and persistent behavior of inflation does not belong to the class of linear autoregressive processes but rather to a more general class of nonlinear and long memory models. Recent theoretical contributions on heterogeneity in price setting and aggregation offer a rationale to our results. Finally, we draw the monetary policy implications of our findings.AutoCorrelation Function, long-memory, inflation persistence, inflation targeting, heavy tails.

Migration and Elastic Labour in Economic Development: Southeast Asia before World War II

Between 1880 and 1939, Burma, Malaya and Thailand received inflows of migrants from India and China comparable in size to European immigration in the New World. This article examines the forces that lay behind this migration to Southeast Asia and asks if experience there bears out Lewis' unlimited labor supply hypothesis. We find that it does and, furthermore, that immigration created a highly integrated labor market stretching from South India to Southeastern China. Emigration from India and China and elastic labor supply are identified as important components of Asian globalization before the Second World War.

A note on the empirics of the neoclassical growth model

This paper shows that the widely used log-linearization of the neoclassical model of growth implies a relevant loss in terms of the ability of the model in replicating the patterns of convergence of an economy to its equilibrium level.

Estimating Fiscal Multipliers: News From A Non-linear World

open4siCaggiano acknowledges the financial support received by the Visiting Research Scholar programme offered by the University of MelbourneWe estimate non-linear VARs to assess to what extent fiscal spending multipliers are countercyclical in the US. We deal with the issue of non-fundamentalness due to fiscal foresight by appealing to sums of revisions of expectations of fiscal expenditures. This measure of anticipated fiscal shocks is shown to carry valuable information about future dynamics of public spending. Results based on generalised impulse responses suggest that fiscal spending multipliers in recessions are greater than one, but not statistically larger than those in expansions. However, non-linearities arise when focusing on 'extreme' events, that is, deep recessions versus strong expansionary periods.openCaggiano, Giovanni; Castelnuovo, Efrem; Colombo, Valentina; Nodari, GabrielaCaggiano, Giovanni; Castelnuovo, Efrem; Colombo, Valentina; Nodari, Gabriel

Nelson-Plosser Revisited: the ACF Approach

We detect a new stylized fact about the common dynamics of macroeconomic and financial aggregates. The rate of decay of the memory (or persistence) of these series is depicted by their autocorrelation functions (ACFs), and they all fit very closely a parsimonious four-parameter functional form that we present. Not only does our formula fit the data better than the ones that arise from autoregressive models, but it also yields the correct shape of the ACF. This can help policymakers understand the lags with which an economy evolves, and its turning points.

Conservar el vacío: Imágenes de la desaparición de los negros en el Archivo General de la Nación

El Departamento de Documentos Fotográficos del Archivo General de la Nación contiene uno de los fondos visuales más importantes de Argentina y, como fuente de imágenes históricas, juega un papel clave en la imaginación del pasado nacional. En este trabajo exploro el sector correspondiente a la presencia negra en Argentina, interrogando qué fotografías son conservadas en el archivo y qué dimensiones de clasificación y división social las ordenan: ¿qué juegos de sentido se configuran entre las imágenes y los sistemas y categorías de clasificación? ¿Persiste visualmente el mito fundante de la nación argentina moderna blanca europea y, como uno de sus componentes, la invisibilización de los negros?, ¿pueden advertirse quiebres respecto de esta narrativa maestra? Analizo dos aspectos que caracterizan el modo en que el Departamento preserva las imágenes de negros en Argentina, e intento llamar la atención precisamente sobre la coexistencia de ambos, en la medida en que aparentemente divergen en su orientación. De un lado, una renovación en el modo de nombrar a este sector de la población, abandonando la categoría "negros" para dar lugar a "afroamericanos", más acorde a los usos extendidos internacionalmente en las últimas décadas. Del otro, una operación sutil que insiste en la invisibilización de los negros en Argentina, y que consiste en la mostración de su desaparición y de su ausencia.Fil: Caggiano, Sergio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Parque Centenario. Centro de Investigaciones Sociales. Instituto de Desarrollo Económico y Social. Centro de Investigaciones Sociales; Argentin

Nelson-Plosser revisited: the ACF approach

We detect a new stylized fact about the common dynamics of macroeconomic and financial aggregates. The rate of decay of the memory of these series is depicted by their Auto-Correlation Functions (ACFs). They all share a common four-parameter functional form that we derive from the dynamics of an RBC model with heterogeneous firms. We find that, not only does our formula fit the data better than the ACFs that arise from autoregressive models, but it also yields the correct shape of the ACF. This can help policymakers understand better the lags with which an economy evolves, and the onset of its turning points. Classification-JEL: JEL E32, E52, E63