Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Inflation Asymmetries

This paper re-examines evidence relating mean inflation to cross- sectional inflation asymmetry, and investigates longitudinal asymmetry in disaggregated price series. The asymmetry test used possesses two important characteristics: it has high power, and it is not dominated by outliers. In contrast to Bryan and Cecchetti (1996), the results here suggest that there does exist significant positive correlation between mean inflation and cross-sectional inflation asymmetry. However, the explanatory power of median inflation is small. Longitudinal inflation asymmetry is evident in almost all the price series investigated here, regardless of frequency. This finding is intriguing, as neither money nor output growth is asymmetric.

A cross-country investigation of macroeconomic asymmetries

Using a recently introduced nonparametric test, I investigate two important and distinct asymmetries in cross-country quarterly macroeconomic time series. Asymmetries are suggested by many theories (old and new), and those discovered aid in the selection of the appropriate nonlinear time series representation (useful, for example, in both forecasting and policy guidance). Further, asymmetries can help determine underlying economic mechanisms. The key findings: positive growth rate asymmetry is nearly ubiquitous in price level data (but is not caused by money growth asymmetry); and the pattern of asymmetries varies dramatically across countries (making widespread reliance on US data to study fluctuations worrisome).triples test; nonlinear time series; inflation; business cycles

A Framework for Studying Economic Interactions (with applications to corruption and business cycles)

Most economic models implicitly or explicitly assume that interactions between economic agents are 'global' - in other words, each agent interacts in a uniform manner with every other agent. However, localized interactions between microeconomic agents are a pervasive feature of reality. What are the implications of more limited interaction? One set of mathematical tools which appears useful in exploring the economic implications of local interactions is the theory of interacting particle systems. Unfortunately, the extant theory mainly addresses the long-time behavior of infinite systems, and focuses on the issue of ergodicity; many economic applications involve a finite number of agents and are concerned with other issues, such as the extent of shock amplification. In this paper, I introduce a framework for studying local interactions that is applicable to a wide class of games. In this framework, agents receive shocks which are stochastically independent; payoffs depend both upon the shocks and the strategies of other agents. In finite games, ergodicity is straightforward to determine. In finite games which evolve in continuous time, the stationary distribution (if it exists) may be computed easily; furthermore, in this class of games, I prove that any stationary distribution may be attained by suitable choice of payoff functions using shocks which are distributed uniform on (0, 1). In systems in which all interactions are global, I prove that nonlinear behavior can arise even in the infinite limit (thus demonstrating that laws of large numbers can fail in systems characterized by interaction), despite the fact that the only driving forces are agent-level iid disturbances. Using numerical methods, I investigate the properties of the processes as one passes from discrete to continuous time, as one alters the pattern of interaction, and as one increases the number of interacting agents. In so doing, I provide further evidence that the existence of local interactions can change the aggregate behavior of an economic system in fundamental ways, and that the form of that interaction has important implications for its dynamic properties.

Mis-Specification and Frequency Dependence in a New Keynesian Phillips Curve

Phillips Curve, spectral regression, time series analysis

Mis-Specification in Phillips Curve Regressions: Quantifying Frequency Dependence in This Relationship While Allowing for Feedback.

Phillips Curve, spectral regression, time series analysis.

Frequency Dependence in Regression Model Coefficients: An Alternative Approach for Modeling Nonlinear Dynamic Relationships in Time Series

Phillips Curve, spectral regression, time series analysis

What Drives People's Choices in Turn-Taking Games, if not Game-Theoretic Rationality?

In an earlier experiment, participants played a perfect information game against a computer, which was programmed to deviate often from its backward induction strategy right at the beginning of the game. Participants knew that in each game, the computer was nevertheless optimizing against some belief about the participant's future strategy. In the aggregate, it appeared that participants applied forward induction. However, cardinal effects seemed to play a role as well: a number of participants might have been trying to maximize expected utility. In order to find out how people really reason in such a game, we designed centipede-like turn-taking games with new payoff structures in order to make such cardinal effects less likely. We ran a new experiment with 50 participants, based on marble drop visualizations of these revised payoff structures. After participants played 48 test games, we asked a number of questions to gauge the participants' reasoning about their own and the opponent's strategy at all decision nodes of a sample game. We also checked how the verbalized strategies fit to the actual choices they made at all their decision points in the 48 test games. Even though in the aggregate, participants in the new experiment still tend to slightly favor the forward induction choice at their first decision node, their verbalized strategies most often depend on their own attitudes towards risk and those they assign to the computer opponent, sometimes in addition to considerations about cooperativeness and competitiveness.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2017, arXiv:1707.0825

Migration to next generation access networks: a real option approach

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RECODIS : Resilient communication services protecting end-user applications from disaster-based failures

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