On Keynes's Theory of the Aggregate Price Level in the Treatise: Any Help for Modern Aggregate Analysis?

The paper explores the theory of the aggregate price and profit in Keynes's Treatise for its implications for modern macroeconomic analysis. Here profits are defined in terms of aggregate investment and saving. Deriving aggregate total revenue and aggregate total cost from this price theory, the paper shows how to construct a version of the Keynesian cross diagram. It then examines an IS-LM model from the perspective of the Treatise's price theory, focusing on an interpretation of the business cycle in which savings and investment may not equal. Comparing the Treatise's price theory with a neoclassical definition of profit, the paper reconstructs the cross diagram and reconsiders a related IS-LM model, with a focus on fiscal policy. This clarifies how microfoundations affect the standard cross and IS model. Further, the reconstructed cross diagram allows for derivation of neoclassical aggregate supply, to which the derivation of neoclassical aggregate demand can be added. Comparative statics of this AS-AD analysis suggests that a focus on profit might be useful in identifying the manifestation of exogenous technology shocks of real business cycle theory.Aggregate Price Level, Keynes

Evaluating Government Policy in Transition Countries

The paper examines neoclassical measures to evaluate government policy in transition countries: 1) marginal factor prices and the return to capital, 2) growth rates and taxes, 3) inflation rates, and 4) debt/GDP ratios, related to international real business cycle and endogenous growth theory. It further postulates a way to consider the debt/equity position of the government, related to a risk-yield framework. This gives a potentially more useful indicator than the debt/GDP ratio alone. Empirically these measures are examined in an illustrative way for a set of Central European countries plus Germany and the US for comparison, for the period of 1990-1998, using an internally standardized data set from the on-line International Financial Statistics.government policy, transition countries

Inflation and Balanced-Path Growth with Alternative Payment Mechanisms

The paper shows that contrary to conventional wisdom an endogenous growth economy with human capital and alternative payment mechanisms can robustly explain major facets of the long run inflation experience. A negative inflation-growth relation is explained, including a striking nonlinearity found re-peatedly in empirical studies. A set of Tobin (1965) effects are also explained and, further, linked in magnitude to the growth effects through the interest elasticity of money demand. Undis-closed previously, this link helps fill out the intuition of how the inflation experience can be plausibly explained in a robust fashion with a model extended to include credit as a payment mechanism.Human capital, cash-in-advance, interest-elasticity, credit production

Inflation, Investment and Growth: a Money and Banking Approach

Output growth, investment and the real interest rate in long run evidence tend to be negatively affected by inflation. Theoretically, inflation acts as a human capital tax that decreases output growth and the real interest rate, but increases the investment rate, opposite of evidence. The paper resolves this puzzle by requiring exchange for investment as well as consumption. Inflation then decreases the investment rate, and still decreases both output growth and real interest up to some moderately high rate of inflation, above which increasingly low investment finally causes capital to fall relative to labor, and the real interest rate to rise.inflation, investment, growth, Tobin

Inflation, Financial Development and Human Capital-Based Endogenous Growth: an Explanation of Ten Empirical Findings

The paper presents a general equilibrium that can explain ten related sets of empirical results, providing a unified approach to understand usually disparate effects typically treated separately. These are grouped into two sets, one on financial development, investment and inflation, and one on inflations effect on other economy-wide variables such as growth, real interest rates, employment, and money demand. The unified approach also contributes a systematic explanation of certain nonlinearities that are found across these results, as based on the production function for financial intermediary services and the resultant money demand function.Inflation, financial development, growth, exchange credit production

Inflation and Endogenous Growth in Underground Economies

The paper examines the effect of inflation on the growth rate in economies with underground, or ”non-market”, sectors. The model incorporates a non-market good into an endogenous growth cash-inadvance economy with human capital. Taxes on labor and capital induce substitution into the non-market sector which avoids such taxes. However the non-market sector uses only cash for exchange and cannot avoid the inflation tax, while the market sector allows costly credit use. We estimate a MIMIC model for latent underground economy using monthly data for Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. Furthermore, we estimate a dynamic structural equation model and investigate short-run effects of the underground economy on output growth and test for Granger causality and long-run cointegrating relationships using bivariate Granger-causality tests and Johansen’s maximum likelihood technique. The result indicate different shares of underground economies across the three countries and a positive long-run effect of underground economy on output growth.Shadow economy, endogenous growth, dynamic structural equation modelling, latent variables

Flat Tax Reform.The Baltics 2000 – 2007.

The paper presents an endogenous growth economy with a representation of the tax rate system in the Baltic countries. Assuming that government spending is a given fraction of output, the papershows how a flat tax system balanced between labor and corporate tax rates can be second best optimal. It then computes how actual Baltic tax reforms from 2000 to 2007 affect the growth rate and welfare, including transition dynamics. Comparing the actual reform effects to hypothetical tax experiments, it results that equal flat tax rates on personal and corporate income would have increased welfare in all three Baltic countries by 24% more on average than the actual reforms. This shows how equal, balanced, flat rate taxes can be optimal in both theory and practice. Further, movement towards a more equal balance between labor and capital tax rates, through changing just one tax rate, achieved almost as high or higher utility gains as in actual law for all three countries under both open and closed economy cases. This shows benefits of moving towards the optimum.tax reform, endogenous growth, transitional dynamics, flat taxes

Tax Evasion and Growth: a Banking Approach

The paper formalizes the relation between flat taxes and growth when there is a competitive equilibrium tax evasion. A decentralized tax evasion service is supplied by the banking sector. The bank production function follows the financial intermediation microfoundation approach, with deposits as an input. Across a class of endogenous growth models, tax evasion decreases the effective tax rate, and thereby lessens the negative effect of taxes on growth. And as the tax rate rises, tax evasion causes the growth rate to fall by less. Underlying the results is a fiscal principle whereby tax evasion creates, or magnifies, a rising demand price sensitivity to higher tax rates.Tax evasion, financial intermediation, endogenous growth, and flat taxes.

Inflation, Financial Development and Endogenous Growth

The paper extends the literature on financial development, inflation, and growth by using the idea that both the rates of return on physical and human capital affect growth. This leads to the introduction of the investment rate into the model, as a proxy for the return to physical capital, along with the inflation rate as a variable affecting the return to human capital. As a result financial development plays a different role from the typical growth-enhancing effect found pervasively in the literature. Instead the results suggest a new hypothesis linking financial development to the nature of the effect of inflation on growth.Investment rate, return on capital, panel data, fixed effects

The Effect of Inflation on Growth - Evidence from a Panel of Transition Countries

The paper examines the effect of inflation on growth in transition countries. It presents panel data evidence for 13 transition countries over the 1990-2003 period; it uses a fixed effects panel approach to account for possible bias from correlations among the unobserved effects and the observed country heterogeniety. The results find a strong, robust, negative effect on growth of inflation or its standard deviation, and one that appears to decline in magnitude as the inflation rate increases, as seen for OECD countries. And the results include a role for a normalized money demand in affecting growth, as well as for a convergence variable, a trade variable and a government share variable. And robustness of the baseline single equation model is examined by expanding this into a three equation simultaneous system of output growth, inflation and money demand that allows for possible simultaneity bias in the baseline model.growth, transition, panel data, inflation, money demand, endogeneity