Technology, institutions and allocation of time in Swedish households 1920-1990

The modernisation of Swedish households during the twentieth century prompted a considerable productivity growth in household production, which reduced the time input for a fixed volume of routine household work by about 35 per cent 1920-1990. Much of that time was gradually transferred to the labour market, but no evidence can be found for an increase in leisure time. What has been termed a "Cowan paradox" appears in the Swedish data: the output of household services increased significantly with productivity-enhancing technical change. This was, however, the case only in households where small children constituted an impediment to labour market entry. Increased returns to market work induced women who did not face this restriction to allocate more time to the labour market from the mid-1940s. A set of new formal and informal institutions associated with the family eventually redefined the concept of "small children" and so shifted the position of homemaker from being a more or less permanent status of some women to a clearly temporary position of most women.Time allocation; labour supply; household technologies; family policy

The Zero Bound in an Open Economy: A Foolproof Way of Escaping from a Liquidity Trap

The paper examines the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in an open economy with and without a binding zero bound on nominal interest rates. In particular, a foolproof way of escaping from a liquidity trap is presented, consisting of a price-level target path, a devaluation of the currency and a temporary exchange rate peg, which is later abandoned in favor of price-level or inflation targeting when the price-level target has been reached. This will jump-start the economy and escape deflation by a real depreciation of the domestic currency, a lower long real interest rate, and increased inflation expectations. The abandonment of the exchange-rate peg and the shift to price-level or inflation targeting will avoid the risk of overheating. Some conclusions for Japan are included.

Inflation targeting as a monetary policy rule

The purpose of the paper is to survey and discuss inflation targeting in the context of monetary policy rules. The paper provides a general conceptual discussion of monetary policy rules, attempts to clarify the essential characteristics of inflation targeting, compares inflation targeting to the other monetary policy rules, and draws some conclusions for the monetary policy of the European system of Central Banks

The First Year of the Eurosystem: Inflation Targeting or Not?

This paper is a brief evaluation of the Eurosystem's monetary-policy regime after its first year, in particular of the extent to which it is similar to inflation targeting as practiced by an increasing number of central banks. I examine the Eurosystem's goals, framework for monetary-policy decisions and communication with outsiders. Criteria for evaluation are whether the goals are unambiguous and appropriate; whether the decision framework is efficient in collecting and processing information and reaching decisions that are appropriate relative to the goals; and whether the communication is effective in motivating decisions, simplifying external evaluation and thereby improving transparency and accountability. I also consider whether the actual instrument setting has been appropriate, given the information available at the times of decision.

Monetary Policy with Flexible Exchange Rates and Forward Interest Rates as Indicators

In the new situation with flexible exchange rates, monetary policy in Europe will have to rely more on indicators than previously under fixed rates. One of the potential indicators, the forward interest rate curve, can be used to indicate market expectations of the time-paths of future short interest rates, monetary policy, inflation rates and currency depreciation rates. The forward rate curve separates market expectations for the short, medium and long term more easily than the standard yield curve. Monetary policy in France, Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and the United States is interpreted with the help of forward rates.

Portfolio Choice and Asset Pricing With Nontraded Assets

This paper examines portfolio choice and asset pricing when some assets are nontraded, for instance when a country cannot trade claims to its output on world capital markets, when a government cannot trade claims to future tax revenues, or when an individual cannot trade claims to his future wages. The close relation between portfolio choice with and implicit pricing of nontraded assets is emphasized. A variant of Cox, Ingersoll and Ross's Fundamental Valuation Equation is derived and used to interpret the optimal portfolio. Explicit solutions are presented to the portfolio and pricing problem for some special cases, including when income from the nontraded assets is a diffusion process, not spanned by traded assets, and affected by a state variable.

Targeting versus instrument rules for monetary policy: what is wrong with McCallum and Nelson?

In their paper "Targeting versus Instrument Rules for Monetary Policy," McCallum and Nelson critique targeting rules for the analysis of monetary policy. Their arguments are rebutted here. First, McCallum and Nelson's preference to study the robustness of simple monetary policy rules is no reason at all to limit attention to simple instrument rules; simple targeting rules may have more desirable properties. Second, optimal targeting rules are a compact, robust, and structural description of goal-directed monetary policy, analogous to the compact, robust, and structural consumption Euler conditions in the theory of consumption. They express the very robust condition of equality of the marginal rates of substitution and transformation between the central bank's target variables. Indeed, they provide desirable micro foundations of monetary policy. Third, under realistic information assumptions, the instrument rule analog to any targeting rule that McCallum and Nelson have proposed results in very large instrument rate volatility and is also, for other reasons, inferior to a targeting rule.Monetary policy

Monetary Policy and Japan’s Liquidity Trap

During the long economic slump in Japan, monetary policy in Japan has essentially consisted of a very low interest rate (since 1995), a zero interest rate (since 1999), and quantitative easing (since 2001). The intention seems to have been to lower expectations of future interest rates. But the problem in a liquidity trap (when the zero lower bound on the central bank’s instrument rate is strictly binding) is rather to raise private-sector expectations of the future price level. Increased expectations of a higher future price level are likely to be much more effective in reducing the real interest rate and stimulating the economy out of a liquidity trap than a further reduction of already very low expectations of future interest rates. Therefore, monetarypolicy alternatives in a liquidity trap should be assessed according to how effective they are likely to be in affecting private-sector expectations of the future price level. Expectations of a higher future price level would lead to current depreciation of the currency. Quantitative easing would induce expectations of a higher price level if it were expected to be permanent. The absence of a depreciation of the yen and other evidence indicates that the quantitative easing is not expected to be permanent. In an open economy, the Foolproof Way (consisting of a price-level target path, currency depreciation and commitment to a currency peg and a zero interest rate until the price-level target path has been reached) is likely to be the most effective policy to raise expectations of the future price level, stimulate the economy, and escape from a liquidity trap. It is the first-best policy to end stagnation and deflation in Japan. The Foolproof Way without the explicit exchange-rate policy, namely a price-level target path and a commitment to a zero interest rate until the price-level target path has been reached, would be a second-best policy. The current policy, a commitment to a zero interest rate until inflation has become nonnegative is at best a third-best policy, since it accommodates all deflation that has occurred before inflation turns nonnegative and therefore is not effective in inducing inflation expectations.

Leverhulme Lecture: Regulating Complexity in Financial Markets

Lecture given November 9, 2010, the second of three delivered by Prof. Schwarcz as Leverhulme Visiting Professor of Law, Oxford University. Complexity is the greatest challenge to 21st Century financial regulation, having the potential to impair markets and investments in several interrelated ways. Furthermore, complexity can cause failures that individual market participants cannot, or will not have incentive to, remedy. These failures are driven by information uncertainty, misalignment of interests and incentives among market participants, and nonlinear feedback and tight coupling that result in sudden unexpected market changes. These are the same types of failures that engineers have long faced when working with complex engineering systems. The lecture uses engineering solutions such as chaos theory to examine how financial regulation should be structured to correct those failures

Trade in Risky Assets

This paper develops a theory of the international trade pattern in risky assets by applying the law of comparative advantage to asset trade. According to this law there is a tendency for a country to import assets that have relatively high autarky prices. The autarky price of an asset is high if the autarky real interest rate is low, or if the asset's autarky risk measure (the product of the risk premium and the asset price) is low. It is examined how autarky interest rates and risk measures are affected by international differences in (i) stochastic properties of output/endowment s , (ii) the rate of time preference, (iii) the degree of risk aversion, and (iv) subjective beliefs, and how such differences predict overall capital account deficits or surpluses as well as the composition of the capital account into trade in arbitrary risky assets and the special cases of sure indexed bonds, stocks (claims to output), and Arrow- Debreu securities.