This article reviews recent productivity trends in foreign industrial countries. The focus of the... more This article reviews recent productivity trends in foreign industrial countries. The focus of the analysis is on whether productivity abroad has accelerated to an extent comparable to that observed in the United States. The authors find that foreign labor productivity, unlike that of the United States, has not accelerated in the latter half of the 1990s and discuss the role played by information technology in influencing foreign productivity trends as well as cyclical and methodological factors that are important in the analysis of these trends.
The deficit's growth in 2005 was for the most part the consequence of a sharp acceleration of imp... more The deficit's growth in 2005 was for the most part the consequence of a sharp acceleration of import purchases, up nearly $225 billion, in a fast growing economy. Exports also increased in 2005, but by a smaller $122 billion. Together this has resulted in the trade deficit reaching another record size in 2005. The investment income component of the trade balance deteriorated from a surplus of $30.4 billion in 2004 down to a surplus of $1.6 billion in 2005. The large and growing size of U.S. foreign indebtedness suggests that the longer term trend will be toward investment income deficits. 1 The balance on current account is the nation's most comprehensive measure of international transactions, reflecting exports and imports of good and services, investment income (earnings and payments), and unilateral transfers. 2 Trade balance data for the full year 2004 are not yet available, but through three quarters the trade deficit on current account has been running at an annual rate of near $650 billion.
This paper examines the relevancy of price measurement for characterizing the relation between re... more This paper examines the relevancy of price measurement for characterizing the relation between real oil prices and real exchange rates. The current empirical literature shows a consensus on using the U.S. CPI to deflate the nominal oil price simply because of its numerous advantages. However, reliance on the U.S. CPI assumes that the worldwide alternative to a barrel of oil is the U.S. consumption basket. There are, however, alternative baskets, and I consider two: the price of gold and the IMF Global Commodity Price Index. Inspection of the results reveals that the relation between real oil prices and real exchange rates is sensitive to the choice of deflator for the price of oil and to the use of effective or bilateral exchange rates. Specifically, using the IMF’s Global Commodity Price Index as a deflator reveals that real oil prices and real exchange rates (effective or bilateral) are clustered along a long-run relation with unitary elasticity. Further, this choice of deflator h...
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Fifty years of econometric work on trade assumes that trade elasticities are invariant to changes... more Fifty years of econometric work on trade assumes that trade elasticities are invariant to changes in spending patterns, that prices can be taken as given, and that expenditures on domestic and foreign goods can be studied independently of each other. To relax these assumptions, this paper assembles a simultaneous model explaining trade among Canada, Japan, and the United States. Spending behaves according to the Rotterdam model which, by design, embodies all of the properties of utility maxiÂÂmization and does not treat trade elasticities as autonomous parameters. Pricing behaves according to the pricing-to-market hypothesis which recognizes exporters' incentives to discriminate across export markets. Parameter estimation relies on the Full Information Maximum Likelihood approach and uses bilateral price data for 1965-1987. According to the evidence, treating trade elasticities as autonomous parameters and ignoring the statistical implications of simultaneity and optimization un...
This paper examines empirically whether foreign holdings of US Treasury securities are relevant t... more This paper examines empirically whether foreign holdings of US Treasury securities are relevant to explaining US Treasury yields. Interest in this topic is motivated by the failure of the long&term interest rate to rise during 2004&2005 in response to increases in the ...
This paper provides a comprehensive study of the interplay between the Federal Reserve's balance ... more This paper provides a comprehensive study of the interplay between the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and overnight interest rates. We model both the supply of and the demand for excess reserves. Treating outright securities holdings of the Federal Reserve as a policy tool, we estimate the effects of unconventional monetary policy on overnight funding rates. Further, we offer the first empirical assessment of the FOMC's principles of the exit strategy. Assuming a path for removing monetary policy accommodation that is consistent with the FOMC's exit principles, we project that the federal funds rate increases to 70 basis points by 2016, settling in a corridor bracketed by the discount rate and the interest rate on excess reserves, as excess reserves of depository institutions decline to near zero.
Conventional explanations of monetary policy decisions in the United States assume that the longe... more Conventional explanations of monetary policy decisions in the United States assume that the longer-run Federal funds rate is determined by a representative central banker (i.e., the Fed) using longer-term forecasts of economic activity and unemployment. This assumption is inconsistent with the federalist structure of the Federal Reserve in which the Federal funds rate is determined by a committee made up of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. This inconsistency would be irrelevant if differences in the Fed participants’ longer-run projections were small or constant, but they are not: disparities in these longer-run projections are large and volatile. This finding raises several questions: Are FOMC participants relying on the same forecasting framework (i.e., model or rules of thumb) but using different values for the forecast drivers? Or are these participants using the same forecast drivers but relying on different frameworks?
This paper uses the transcripts from the FOMC meetings to characterize the interactions between p... more This paper uses the transcripts from the FOMC meetings to characterize the interactions between policymakers and macro models in the formulation of U.S. monetary policy. We develop a taxonomy of these interactions and present two case studies. The first case focuses on the debate on the choice of monetary target and the second case focuses on the 1990/1991 recession. The analysis reveals that U.S. monetary policy relies on models for information. Models give estimates of both the outlook and the response of the economy to policy changes. Models also evolve to recognize the changing context in which policymakers operate % exchange rate flexibility, financial deregulation, and international trade agreements.
We study whether aggregation residuals in U.S. private investment in information technology (IT) ... more We study whether aggregation residuals in U.S. private investment in information technology (IT) exhibit a predictable pattern that is consistent with Hicks\u27 composite-good theorem and that may be used for forecasting. To determine whether one can extract such a pattern, we apply the general-to-specific strategy developed by Krolzig and Hendry (2001). This strategy combines ordinary least squares with a computer-automated algorithm that selects a specification based on coefficients\u27 statistical significance, residual properties, and parameter constancy. Then, we derive the testable implications from Hicks\u27 theorem and evaluate them with econometric formulations; we find qualified support for these implications. Having obtained these formulations, we evaluate their ex-post predictive accuracy and compare it to that of an autoregressive model. The key finding is that ignoring movement in relative prices results in a loss of information for predicting aggregation residuals
This paper offers an empirical characterization of the relation between the international price o... more This paper offers an empirical characterization of the relation between the international price of oil and exchange rates that is both useful and reliable. Our characterization is useful because it rests on information of asset prices that are determined in functioning asset markets. Our characterization is reliable because its maintained assumptions are not rejected by the data. Four features differentiate our work from previous analyses. First, our reliance on bilateral rates opens previously ignored financial arbitrage opportunities between oil prices and exchange rates. Second, our emphasis on statistical testing makes our characterization empirically reliable. Specifically, we use a vector-error correction modeling strategy in which both oil prices and exchange rates are endogenous. This framework allows testing for the existence of an arbitrage relation, for the direction of causality, for parameter constancy, for white noise residuals, and for forecast accuracy. Third our rel...
Monetary policy is forward looking and, in its pursuit of transparency, it communicates its econo... more Monetary policy is forward looking and, in its pursuit of transparency, it communicates its economic projections to the public at large. As a result, there is interest in whether these projections are credible. We argue that central to that credibility is the public’s ability to replicate the FOMC’s projections using publicly available data only. In other words, is it possible to anticipate, reliably and independently, what the FOMC will anticipate for the federal funds rate? To address this question, we assemble FOMC projections from 1992 to 2017; examine their statistical properties; postulate models to predict FOMC projections; and estimate the parameters of these models. We are not arguing that the FOMC determines their projections using these models. Rather, these equations are the ones that the public could use to forecast FOMC forecasts and to anticipate interest-rate decisions.
Summarizing Hendry's forty years of work on taming uncertainty is "clear and distinct": Test, tes... more Summarizing Hendry's forty years of work on taming uncertainty is "clear and distinct": Test, test, test. Sure-but test what? Test the maintained assumptions of the disturbances. Test the parameter restrictions of a given model. Test the explanatory power of a model against a rival model. In brief, test everything that is not clear and distinct. We implement Hendry's view to forecast FOMC forecasts. Specifically, monetary policy is forward looking and, in its pursuit of transparency, it communicates its economic projections to the public at large. As a result, there is interest in whether these projections are credible. We argue that central to that credibility is the public's ability to replicate FOMC's projections using publicly available data only. In other words, is it possible to anticipate, reliably and independently, what the FOMC will anticipate for the federal funds rate? To address this question, we assemble FOMC projections from 1992 to 2017; examine their statistical properties; postulate models to predict FOMC projections; estimate the parameters of these models; and generate out-of-sample predictions for inflation, unemployment, and the federal funds rate for 2018. As the reader will soon realize, there is a lot more testing to be done.
That the global market for derivatives has expanded beyond recognition is well known. What is not... more That the global market for derivatives has expanded beyond recognition is well known. What is not know is how this market interacts with economic activity. We provide the first empirical characterization of interdependencies between OECD economic activity and the global OTC derivatives market. To this end, we apply a vector-error correction model to OTC derivatives disaggregated across instruments and counterparties. The results indicate that with one exception, the heterogeneity of OTC contracts is too pronounced to be reliably summarized by our measures of economic activity. The one exception is interest-rate derivatives held by Other Financial Institutions.
This paper reports the results of a project to estimate and test the stability properties of conv... more This paper reports the results of a project to estimate and test the stability properties of conventional equations relating real imports and exports of goods and services for the G-7 countries to their incomes and relative prices. We begin by estimating cointegration vectors and the error-correction formulations. We then test the stability of these equations using Chow and Kalman-Filter tests. The evidence suggests three findings. First, conventional trade equations and elasticities are stable enough, in most cases, to perform adequately in forecasting and policy simulations. Equations for German trade, as well as equations for French and Italian exports are an exception. Second, income elasticities of U.S. trade have not been shifting in a direction that will tend to ease the trend toward deterioration in the U.S. trade position. The income-elasticity gap for Japan found in earlier studies was not confirmed in this analysis. Finally, the price channel is weak, if not wholly ineffective, in the case of continental European countries.
This article reviews recent productivity trends in foreign industrial countries. The focus of the... more This article reviews recent productivity trends in foreign industrial countries. The focus of the analysis is on whether productivity abroad has accelerated to an extent comparable to that observed in the United States. The authors find that foreign labor productivity, unlike that of the United States, has not accelerated in the latter half of the 1990s and discuss the role played by information technology in influencing foreign productivity trends as well as cyclical and methodological factors that are important in the analysis of these trends.
The deficit's growth in 2005 was for the most part the consequence of a sharp acceleration of imp... more The deficit's growth in 2005 was for the most part the consequence of a sharp acceleration of import purchases, up nearly $225 billion, in a fast growing economy. Exports also increased in 2005, but by a smaller $122 billion. Together this has resulted in the trade deficit reaching another record size in 2005. The investment income component of the trade balance deteriorated from a surplus of $30.4 billion in 2004 down to a surplus of $1.6 billion in 2005. The large and growing size of U.S. foreign indebtedness suggests that the longer term trend will be toward investment income deficits. 1 The balance on current account is the nation's most comprehensive measure of international transactions, reflecting exports and imports of good and services, investment income (earnings and payments), and unilateral transfers. 2 Trade balance data for the full year 2004 are not yet available, but through three quarters the trade deficit on current account has been running at an annual rate of near $650 billion.
This paper examines the relevancy of price measurement for characterizing the relation between re... more This paper examines the relevancy of price measurement for characterizing the relation between real oil prices and real exchange rates. The current empirical literature shows a consensus on using the U.S. CPI to deflate the nominal oil price simply because of its numerous advantages. However, reliance on the U.S. CPI assumes that the worldwide alternative to a barrel of oil is the U.S. consumption basket. There are, however, alternative baskets, and I consider two: the price of gold and the IMF Global Commodity Price Index. Inspection of the results reveals that the relation between real oil prices and real exchange rates is sensitive to the choice of deflator for the price of oil and to the use of effective or bilateral exchange rates. Specifically, using the IMF’s Global Commodity Price Index as a deflator reveals that real oil prices and real exchange rates (effective or bilateral) are clustered along a long-run relation with unitary elasticity. Further, this choice of deflator h...
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
Fifty years of econometric work on trade assumes that trade elasticities are invariant to changes... more Fifty years of econometric work on trade assumes that trade elasticities are invariant to changes in spending patterns, that prices can be taken as given, and that expenditures on domestic and foreign goods can be studied independently of each other. To relax these assumptions, this paper assembles a simultaneous model explaining trade among Canada, Japan, and the United States. Spending behaves according to the Rotterdam model which, by design, embodies all of the properties of utility maxiÂÂmization and does not treat trade elasticities as autonomous parameters. Pricing behaves according to the pricing-to-market hypothesis which recognizes exporters' incentives to discriminate across export markets. Parameter estimation relies on the Full Information Maximum Likelihood approach and uses bilateral price data for 1965-1987. According to the evidence, treating trade elasticities as autonomous parameters and ignoring the statistical implications of simultaneity and optimization un...
This paper examines empirically whether foreign holdings of US Treasury securities are relevant t... more This paper examines empirically whether foreign holdings of US Treasury securities are relevant to explaining US Treasury yields. Interest in this topic is motivated by the failure of the long&term interest rate to rise during 2004&2005 in response to increases in the ...
This paper provides a comprehensive study of the interplay between the Federal Reserve's balance ... more This paper provides a comprehensive study of the interplay between the Federal Reserve's balance sheet and overnight interest rates. We model both the supply of and the demand for excess reserves. Treating outright securities holdings of the Federal Reserve as a policy tool, we estimate the effects of unconventional monetary policy on overnight funding rates. Further, we offer the first empirical assessment of the FOMC's principles of the exit strategy. Assuming a path for removing monetary policy accommodation that is consistent with the FOMC's exit principles, we project that the federal funds rate increases to 70 basis points by 2016, settling in a corridor bracketed by the discount rate and the interest rate on excess reserves, as excess reserves of depository institutions decline to near zero.
Conventional explanations of monetary policy decisions in the United States assume that the longe... more Conventional explanations of monetary policy decisions in the United States assume that the longer-run Federal funds rate is determined by a representative central banker (i.e., the Fed) using longer-term forecasts of economic activity and unemployment. This assumption is inconsistent with the federalist structure of the Federal Reserve in which the Federal funds rate is determined by a committee made up of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks. This inconsistency would be irrelevant if differences in the Fed participants’ longer-run projections were small or constant, but they are not: disparities in these longer-run projections are large and volatile. This finding raises several questions: Are FOMC participants relying on the same forecasting framework (i.e., model or rules of thumb) but using different values for the forecast drivers? Or are these participants using the same forecast drivers but relying on different frameworks?
This paper uses the transcripts from the FOMC meetings to characterize the interactions between p... more This paper uses the transcripts from the FOMC meetings to characterize the interactions between policymakers and macro models in the formulation of U.S. monetary policy. We develop a taxonomy of these interactions and present two case studies. The first case focuses on the debate on the choice of monetary target and the second case focuses on the 1990/1991 recession. The analysis reveals that U.S. monetary policy relies on models for information. Models give estimates of both the outlook and the response of the economy to policy changes. Models also evolve to recognize the changing context in which policymakers operate % exchange rate flexibility, financial deregulation, and international trade agreements.
We study whether aggregation residuals in U.S. private investment in information technology (IT) ... more We study whether aggregation residuals in U.S. private investment in information technology (IT) exhibit a predictable pattern that is consistent with Hicks\u27 composite-good theorem and that may be used for forecasting. To determine whether one can extract such a pattern, we apply the general-to-specific strategy developed by Krolzig and Hendry (2001). This strategy combines ordinary least squares with a computer-automated algorithm that selects a specification based on coefficients\u27 statistical significance, residual properties, and parameter constancy. Then, we derive the testable implications from Hicks\u27 theorem and evaluate them with econometric formulations; we find qualified support for these implications. Having obtained these formulations, we evaluate their ex-post predictive accuracy and compare it to that of an autoregressive model. The key finding is that ignoring movement in relative prices results in a loss of information for predicting aggregation residuals
This paper offers an empirical characterization of the relation between the international price o... more This paper offers an empirical characterization of the relation between the international price of oil and exchange rates that is both useful and reliable. Our characterization is useful because it rests on information of asset prices that are determined in functioning asset markets. Our characterization is reliable because its maintained assumptions are not rejected by the data. Four features differentiate our work from previous analyses. First, our reliance on bilateral rates opens previously ignored financial arbitrage opportunities between oil prices and exchange rates. Second, our emphasis on statistical testing makes our characterization empirically reliable. Specifically, we use a vector-error correction modeling strategy in which both oil prices and exchange rates are endogenous. This framework allows testing for the existence of an arbitrage relation, for the direction of causality, for parameter constancy, for white noise residuals, and for forecast accuracy. Third our rel...
Monetary policy is forward looking and, in its pursuit of transparency, it communicates its econo... more Monetary policy is forward looking and, in its pursuit of transparency, it communicates its economic projections to the public at large. As a result, there is interest in whether these projections are credible. We argue that central to that credibility is the public’s ability to replicate the FOMC’s projections using publicly available data only. In other words, is it possible to anticipate, reliably and independently, what the FOMC will anticipate for the federal funds rate? To address this question, we assemble FOMC projections from 1992 to 2017; examine their statistical properties; postulate models to predict FOMC projections; and estimate the parameters of these models. We are not arguing that the FOMC determines their projections using these models. Rather, these equations are the ones that the public could use to forecast FOMC forecasts and to anticipate interest-rate decisions.
Summarizing Hendry's forty years of work on taming uncertainty is "clear and distinct": Test, tes... more Summarizing Hendry's forty years of work on taming uncertainty is "clear and distinct": Test, test, test. Sure-but test what? Test the maintained assumptions of the disturbances. Test the parameter restrictions of a given model. Test the explanatory power of a model against a rival model. In brief, test everything that is not clear and distinct. We implement Hendry's view to forecast FOMC forecasts. Specifically, monetary policy is forward looking and, in its pursuit of transparency, it communicates its economic projections to the public at large. As a result, there is interest in whether these projections are credible. We argue that central to that credibility is the public's ability to replicate FOMC's projections using publicly available data only. In other words, is it possible to anticipate, reliably and independently, what the FOMC will anticipate for the federal funds rate? To address this question, we assemble FOMC projections from 1992 to 2017; examine their statistical properties; postulate models to predict FOMC projections; estimate the parameters of these models; and generate out-of-sample predictions for inflation, unemployment, and the federal funds rate for 2018. As the reader will soon realize, there is a lot more testing to be done.
That the global market for derivatives has expanded beyond recognition is well known. What is not... more That the global market for derivatives has expanded beyond recognition is well known. What is not know is how this market interacts with economic activity. We provide the first empirical characterization of interdependencies between OECD economic activity and the global OTC derivatives market. To this end, we apply a vector-error correction model to OTC derivatives disaggregated across instruments and counterparties. The results indicate that with one exception, the heterogeneity of OTC contracts is too pronounced to be reliably summarized by our measures of economic activity. The one exception is interest-rate derivatives held by Other Financial Institutions.
This paper reports the results of a project to estimate and test the stability properties of conv... more This paper reports the results of a project to estimate and test the stability properties of conventional equations relating real imports and exports of goods and services for the G-7 countries to their incomes and relative prices. We begin by estimating cointegration vectors and the error-correction formulations. We then test the stability of these equations using Chow and Kalman-Filter tests. The evidence suggests three findings. First, conventional trade equations and elasticities are stable enough, in most cases, to perform adequately in forecasting and policy simulations. Equations for German trade, as well as equations for French and Italian exports are an exception. Second, income elasticities of U.S. trade have not been shifting in a direction that will tend to ease the trend toward deterioration in the U.S. trade position. The income-elasticity gap for Japan found in earlier studies was not confirmed in this analysis. Finally, the price channel is weak, if not wholly ineffective, in the case of continental European countries.
Uploads
Papers by Jaime Marquez