Measures of Shortage and Monetary Overhang in the Polish Economy.

This paper attempts to cast light on the debate about the existence and size of a monetary overhang in household money balances in command economies. Four measures of shortage or price deformation are constructed for the Polish economy and used to test for the existence of 'shortage' money balances in Poland 1965-89. The approach involves estimating relationships for household money balances 1965-93, a period that spans both central planning and the post-1990 period of liberalized prices. The principal finding is that the evolution of household money balances in Poland cannot be explained without invoking measures of shortage and an overhang during the planning period. The estimates suggest an overhang with a maximum of just over 40 percent of money balances

Evaluating the efficacy of migraine therapy.

In patient surveys and analyses of clinical trial data, patients with migraine cite rapid and complete relief of headache pain as the single most important attribute of a migraine medication. Other desirable attributes cited by patients include lack of migraine recurrence; absence of adverse effects; and relief of associated symptoms, such as nausea, vomiting, and increased sensitivity to light and noise. Data from most clinical trials of migraine drugs use standard endpoints of level of pain relief at 2 hours and percentage of patients who are pain free at 2 hours. Using these endpoints, however, a drug that relieves pain within 30 minutes after administration would be considered equivalent to a drug that does not relieve pain until 1.5 hours after administration. Because patients clearly want relief in less than 2 hours, a time to event analysis, which, in comparison trials, credits a drug for more rapid onset of effect, might be a more useful means of comparing the efficacy of 2 migraine medications. In studies using time to event analyses, the migraine medication rizatriptan has proved superior to sumatriptan in time to pain relief; time to pain-free state; and time to elimination of nausea, photophobia, and phonophobia. Based on these results, rizatriptan may better meet patients\u27 needs than sumatriptan

Estimates of Demand for Money and Consumption Functions for the Household Sector in Poland, 1967-1999

The paper analyses household money demand and consumption. Variables that measure shortage and expectations about its future course are introduced to capture the effects of the transition from centrally planned to market economy. The Johansen procedure is used to identify a system of the two cointegrating vectors. The Chow tests support stability in the error correction equations. The reported results show that disequilibrium in household sector money holdings has a strong influence on consumption

Is Soviet Capital Too Old?

This paper derives expressions for the length of output-maximizing service lives of capital assets in a steady-state economy. The main determinants are the rate of growth of the labor force, the rate of disembodied technical progress, the share of investment, and production-function parameters. Various data sources on the actua l length of service lives of Soviet industrial capital assets are ass essed. Calculations are presented which suggest that had the service lives of Soviet industrial capital assets been shorter, the level of Soviet industrial output would have been higher by a few percentage p oints. Copyright 1987 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

Zloty and Dollar Balances in Poland 1965-1993.

This paper advocates the use of what we term a CC (command control) method for explaining the behavior of economic systems in the transition from command to market economies. The specific implementation involves controlling Polish money balances for the effects of price deformation or shortage in the central planning period up to 1989, and asking whether the error-correction process for shortage-adjusted money balances is stable after the price liberalization and currency convertibility measures of January 1, 1990. We find no evidence of a structural break from 1990, suggesting that the CC method provides a basis for drawing at least tentative inferences about behavior under the new regime

Topics in the economics of money substitutes in developing and transition countries

Recent research has shown that money substitutes - whether in the form of foreign currency or of more exotic instruments such as privately-issued moneys - are common in developing and transition countries, and have important consequences for macroeconomic and financial sector policy. The aim of this thesis is to advance our theoretical and empirical understanding of the determinants of money substitution in developing and transition economies. We begin in Chapter 1 by addressing the need for a general theoretical framework for the analysis of money substitutes. Reviewing both the classical and the modern theoretical literature on money, we conclude that the Credit theory of money - an ancient but until recently neglected theory which conceives of money as a unilateral financial contract between its issuer and its bearer - is a useful framework for such analysis. In Chapter 2, we undertake an empirical analysis of non-cash settlements (NCS) in Croatia. Using time series econometric analysis, we demonstrate that the instruments used to settle NCS are at least in part substitutes for the national currency, created endogenously by the enterprise sector in response to constraints on their participation in the official monetary and banking system. We turn to the most important form of money substitute in developing and transition countries - foreign currency - in Chapter 3, where we present a new review of the theoretical and empirical literature on dollarisation. In particular, we track the evolution of theoretical models of dollarisation in response to the increasing empirical importance of financial dollarisation relative to currency substitution. In Chapter 4 we undertake an empirical study of the determinants of deposit dollarisation in the two transition economies of Estonia and Lithuania by building and interpreting dynamic, multiple equation, econometric models. We find that a simple, portfolio theoretic account of the dollarisation process furnishes a good explanation, but also that data availability limits the level of analytical detail that this approach can attain.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Measures Of Shortage And Monetary Overhang In The Polish Economy

This paper attempts to cast light on the debate about the existence and size of a monetary overhang in household money balances in command economies. Four measures of shortage or price deformation are constructed for the Polish economy and used to test for the existence of ''shortage''money balances in Poland 1965-1989. The approach involves estimating relationships for household money balances 1965-1993, a period that spans both central planning and the post-1990 period of liberalised prices. The principal finding is that the evolution of household money balances in Poland cannot be explained without invoking measures of shortage and an overhang during the planning period. The estimates suggest an overhang with a maximum of just over 40% of money balances. © 1997 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology