The Fisher Hypothesis and the Forecastability and Persistence of Inflation

For the period 1860 to 1939, the simple correlation of the U.S. commercial paper rate with the contemporaneous inflation rate is -.17. The corresponding correlation for the period 1950 to 1979 is .71. Inflation evolved from essentially a white noise process in the pre-World War I years to a highly persistent, nonstationary ARIMA process in the post-1960 period. I argue that the appearance of an ex post Fisher effect for the first time after 1960 reflects this change in the stochastic process of inflation, rather than a change in any structural relationship between nominal rates and expectedi nflation. I find little evidence of inflation non-neutrality in data from the gold standard period.This contradicts the conclusion of a frequently cited study by Lawrence Summers, who examined the low frequency relationship between inflation and interest rates using band spectrum regression. Deriving and implementing a frequency domain version of the Theil misspecification theorem, I find that neither high frequency nor low frequency movements in gold standard inflation rates were forecastable. Thus even if nominal rates responded fully to expected inflation, one would expect to find the zero coefficient obtained by Summers.

Do We Really Know that Oil Caused the Great Stagflation? A Monetary Alternative

This paper argues that major oil price increases were not nearly as essential a part of the causal mechanism that generated the stagflation of the 1970s as is often thought. There is neither a theoretical presumption that oil supply shocks are stagflationary nor robust empirical evidence for this view. In contrast, we show that monetary expansions and contractions can generate stagflation of realistic magnitude even in the absence of supply shocks. Furthermore, monetary fluctuations help to explain the historical movements of the prices of oil and other commodities, including the surge in the prices of industrial commodities that preceded the 1973/74 oil price increase. Thus, they can account for the striking coincidence of major oil price increases and worsening stagflation.

Real Wages Over The Business Cycle

This paper is an examination of cyclical real wage behavior in the United States since World War II. Like most previous aggregate studies. ours finds little cyclicalitv in aggregate industry real wage data. On the other hand, our analysis of longitudinal microdata from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics reveals substantial procyclicality. We find that this procyclicality is obscured in industry average wage statistics, and to a lesser extent in economywide averages, because those statistics are constructed in a way that gives greater weight to low-wage workers during expansions. The almost complete absence of evidence for countercyclical real wages suggests that movements along labor demand curves have not played a dominant role in cyclical employment fluctuations over the last 40 years. Instead, the procyclicality of real wages indicates that cyclical employment fluctuations have been generated mainly by shifts in labor demand. The sources of these shifts and of the positive slope of the effective labor supply curve, however, remain open to alternative interpretations.

Gibson's Paradox and the Gold Standard

This paper provides a new explanation for Gibson's Paradox -- the observation that the price level and the nominal interest rate were positively correlated over long periods of economic history. We explain this phenomenon interms of the fundamental workings of a gold standard. Under a gold standard, the price level is the reciprocal of the real price of gold. Because gold is adurable asset, its relative price is systematically affected by fluctuations inthe real productivity of capital, which also determine real interest rates. Our resolution of the Gibson Paradox seems more satisfactory than previous hypotheses. It explains why the paradox applied to real as well as nominal rates of return, its coincidence with the gold standard period, and the co-movement of interest rates, prices, and the stock of monetary gold during the gold standard period. Empirical evidence using contemporary data on gold prices and real interest rates supports our theory.

Forecasting Pre-World War I Inflation: The Fisher Effect Revisited

We consider the puzzling behavior of interest rates and inflation in the United States and the United Kingdom between 1879 and 1913. A deflationary regime prior to 1896 was followed by an inflationary one from 1896 until the beginning of World War I; the average inflation rate was 3.8 percentage points higher in the second period than in the first. Yet nominal interest rates were no higher after 1896 than they had been before. This nonadjustment of nominal interest rates would be consistent with rational expectations if inflation were not forecastable, and indeed univariate tests show little sign of serial correlation in inflation. However, inflation was forecastable on the basis of lagged gold production. Investors' expectations of inflation should have risen by at least three percentage points in the United States between 1890 and 1910. We consider in an information processing context alternative ways of accounting for this failure of interest rates to adjust, for example the possible beliefs that increases in gold production might be transitory. We conclude that the failure of investors to exhibit foresight with regard to the shift in the trend inflation rate after 1896 is not persuasive evidence that investors were negligent or naive in processing information.

The Japanese Bubble: A 'Heterogeneous' Approach

Employing the neutral Kindleberger definition of a bubble as "an upward price movement over an extended range that then implodes", this paper explores the causes of the "Japanese Bubble" of 1985 to 1990 without precluding the possibility that the bubble was due to perceptions of fundamentals. Survey evidence indicates that at the peak of the bubble in the second half of 1989, the majority of Japanese institutional investors thought that the Nikkei was not overvalued relative to fundamentals. Such a belief was not entirely unfounded. Long-term real interest rates fell sharply between 1985 and 1986, and the view that there was a significant increase in the permanent component of the growth rate was defensible though certainly not undeniable. Invoking the literature on asset prices with heterogeneous beliefs and limitations on short sales, the paper argues that in a period characterized by the arrival of news that is difficult to digest and subject to multiple interpretations, it is the more optimistic assessments of fundamentals that are likely to be reflected in the market equilibrium. At the same time, high prices resulting from the heterogeneity phenomenon are fragile and prone to collapse. From this vantage point it is perhaps not surprising that the Japanese Bubble, as well as the subsequent implosion, appeared when they did. Survey evidence on investor beliefs during the bubble period, as well as the covariation of price and volume, lend some support to the heterogeneity approach.

Ricardian Consumers With Keynesian Propensities

In this paper, we examine Ricardian equivalence of debt and tax finance in a world in which taxes are not lump-sum but are levied on risky labor income. First, we show that the marginal propensity to consume out of a tax cut, coupled with a future income tax increase, is positive under reasonable assumptions regarding preferences toward risk. Second, we document that the degree of income uncertainty facing the typical individual orfamily is large. Third, we show that, for plausible utility function parameters and distributions of future income, the MPC out of a tax cut is quantitatively large. Indeed, the MPC out of a tax cut, coupled with a future income tax increase, can be closer to the Keynesian value that ignores the future tax liabilities than to the Ricardian value that treats future taxes as if they were lump-sum.

The Seasonal Cycle and the Business Cycle

Almost all recent research on macroeconomic fluctuations has worked with seasonally adjusted or annual data. This paper takes a different approach by treating seasonal fluctuations as worthy of study in their own right. We document the quantitative importance of seasonal fluctuations, and we present estimates of the seasonal patterns in a set of standard macroeconomic variables. Our results show that seasonal fluctuations are an important source of variation in all macroeconomic quantity variables but small or entirely absent in both real and nominal price variables. The timing of the seasonal fluctuations consists of increases in the second and fourth quarter, a large decrease in the first quarter, and a mild decrease in the third quarter. The paper demonstrates that, with respect to each of several major stylized facts about business cycles, the seasonal cycle displays the same characteristics as the business cycle, in some cases even more dramatically than the business cycle. That is, we find that at seasonal frequencies as well as at business cycle frequencies, output movements across broadly defined sectors move together, the timing of production and sales coincide closely, labor productivity is procyclical, nominal money and real output are highly correlated, and prices vary less than quantities. There is a "seasonal business cycle" in the United States economy, and its characteristics mirror closely those of the conventional business cycle.Center for Research on Economic and Social Theory, Department of Economics, University of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100965/1/ECON040.pd