Browse

More than eight years after the global financial crisis began, the economy of Greece shows little sign of recovery, and its position in the eurozone seems tenuous. Between 2008 and 2014, incomes in Greece shrank by more than 25 percent, homes lost more than a third of their value, and the unemployment rate reached 27 percent. Most articles on Greece in the media focus on the effects of austerity, repayment of its debt, and its future in the eurozone. In this book, leading Greek economists from institutions both within and outside Greece take a broader and deeper view of the Greek crisis, examining the pathologies that made Greece vulnerable to the crisis and the implications for the entire eurozone. Each chapter takes on a specific policy area, examining it in terms of Greece's economic reality and offering possible directions for policy. The topics range from macroeconomic issues to markets and their regulation to finance to the public sector. Individual chapters address the costs and benefits of participation in the eurozone, Greece's international competitiveness, taxation, pensions, the labor market, privatization, product markets, finance, education, healthcare, corruption, the justice system, and public administration. The contributors argue that Greek institutions require a deep overhaul rather than quick fixes to enable long-term growth and prosperity.

In the wake of recent events, macroeconomics has come under intense scrutiny, often from non-economists. Yet because macroeconomics is now a highly technical undertaking, it will be very hard for non-specialists on their own to sift through the body of knowledge we have accumulated, or to assess the manner in which we structure inquiries. Unless one finds this satisfactory, and I do not, the profession has some work to do. This book is an attempt to describe, in entirely nontechnical (i.e. plain English) terms, where modern macroeconomics gets its ideas from and how it goes about its business. The target audience is that of thoughtful and curious readers who lack the narrow background or time needed to read either advanced textbooks or articles in academic economics journals.

The market for U.S. Treasury securities is a marvel of modern finance. In 2009 the Treasury auctioned $8.2 trillion of new securities, ranging from four-day bills to thirty-year bonds, in 283 offerings on 171 different days. By contrast, in the decade before World War I, there was only about $1 billion of interest-bearing Treasury debt outstanding, spread out over just six issues. New offerings were rare, and the debt was narrowly held, most of it owned by national banks. This book traces the development of the Treasury market from a financial backwater in the years before World War I to a multibillion dollar market on the eve of World War II. It focuses on Treasury debt management policies, describing the origins of several pillars of modern Treasury practice, including “regular and predictable” auction offerings and the integration of debt and cash management. The book recounts the actions of Secretaries of the Treasury, from William McAdoo in the Wilson administration to Henry Morgenthau in the Roosevelt administration, and their responses to economic conditions. His account covers the Treasury market in the two decades before World War I, how the Treasury financed the Great War, how it managed the postwar refinancing and paydowns, and how it financed the chronic deficits of the Great Depression. It concludes with an examination of aspects of modern Treasury debt management that grew out of developments from 1917 to 1939.

Developing local bond markets is high on the policy agenda of Latin America. Bond markets are an essential component of a well-functioning financial market. Facilitating the efforts of public and private borrowers to issue domestic-currency-denominated, long-term, fixed-rate bonds insulates them from the rollover and balance sheet risks that have been central elements in past financial crises. In addition, a robust bond market is a way for nonfinancial firms to retain their capacity to borrow when the banking system grows reluctant to lend. Latin American bond markets are growing, and may even approach a “big bang”-like surge, although significant challenges remain. This comprehensive examination of the importance of local bond market development in Latin America provides conceptual and comparative assessments, case studies of six countries, surveys of firms and investors, and a cross-country economic analysis of the determinants of bond market development. The book’s case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay, written by country experts, follow a common methodology, with each offering a history of that country’s bond market development, a comprehensive and unique data set on both private and public bond markets, surveys of firms and investors, and (in many chapters) firm-level analysis. A Web appendix makes available the unique data sets, including results of specially designed surveys of firms and investors participants, used in the book’s studies.

This book surveys the law and policy of regulating information flows in capital markets. Part I begins with an overview of the themes, regulatory principles, and challenges that animate information policy, and describes the principal industry, self-regulatory, and regulatory bodies that participate in the governance of information flows in capital markets. Part I further surveys four categories of information in the information production chain: corporate disclosures, quotation and transaction information, information used in credit analysis, and benchmarks. The book discusses how each category of information is generated and used and the reasons why regulators seek to intervene in its production or use. It also provides a summary of the relevant framework for securities regulation in the United States, European Union, and other jurisdictions. Part II articulates several objectives of information policy in capital markets—ensuring transparency and access, promoting standardization and higher orders of meaning, and upholding integrity. This Part considers how regulatory aims differ by category and surveys alternative regulatory strategies, often with a view to replacing relatively inflexible regulatory frameworks with more flexible market mechanisms. Part III considers three specific challenges to capital markets regulation—automation, information overload or anxiety, and globalization—and how they affect the utility, integrity, and availability of information flows. This Part assesses the strategies by which policy makers have confronted these challenges, and offers some concluding thoughts on the implications of these phenomena for financial regulation and information policy.

For decades the semiconductor industry has been a driver of global economic growth and social change. Semiconductors, particularly the microchips essential to most electronic devices, have transformed computing, communications, entertainment, and industry. This book traces the industry over more than twenty years through eight technical and competitive crises that forced it to adapt in order to continue its exponential rate of improved chip performance. The industry’s changes have in turn shifted the basis on which firms hold or gain global competitive advantage. These eight interrelated crises do not have tidy beginnings and ends. Most, in fact, are still ongoing, often in altered form. The US semiconductor industry’s fear that it would be overtaken by Japan in the 1980s, for example, foreshadows current concerns over the new global competitors China and India. The intersecting crises of rising costs for both design and manufacturing are compounded by consumer pressure for lower prices. Other crises discussed in the book include the industry’s steady march toward the limits of physics, the fierce competition that keeps its profits modest even as development costs soar, and the global search for engineering talent. Other high-tech industries face crises of their own, and the semiconductor industry has much to teach us about how industries are transformed in response to such powerful forces as technological change, shifting product markets, and globalization. The book also offers insights into how chip firms have developed, defended, and, in some cases, lost global competitive advantage.

Too rapidly rising carbon taxes or the introduction of subsidies for renewable energies induce owners of fossil fuel reserves to increase their extraction rates for fear of their reserves becoming worthless. Fossil fuel use is thus brought forward. The resulting acceleration of global warming and counter-productivity of well-intended climate policy has been coined the Green Paradox by Hans-Werner Sinn and is the intertemporal analogue of the often discussed problem of carbon leakage in the global economy. How robust are these insights? The answer is it depends. These policies typically induce fossil fuel owners to also leave more reserves unexploited in the crust of the earth, which limits the total stock of carbon in the atmosphere and thus curbs global warming ultimately. This volume presents a range of studies which extends the basic analysis to allow for clean energy alternatives such as solar and wind power, dirty energy alternative such as coal and the tar sands, the different elasticities of substitution between all these energy sources, and the intricate strategic issues between different countries on the globe. This offers deeper and more nuanced insights into the Green Paradox with some refreshing policy perspectives.

Corporate managers who face both strategic uncertainty and market uncertainty confront a classic trade-off between commitment and flexibility. They can stake a claim by making a large capital investment today, influencing their rivals’ behavior; or they can take a “wait and see” approach to avoid adverse market consequences tomorrow. This book describes an emerging paradigm that can quantify and balance commitment and flexibility—“option games” by which the decision-making approaches of real options and game theory can be combined. The book first discusses prerequisite concepts and tools from basic game theory, industrial organization, and real options analysis, bringing important materials and ideas together into a unified framework. It then presents the new approach in discrete time and later in continuous time, beginning with the building blocks of the basic ideas and tools and culminating in richer theoretical analyses.

Two widely heralded yet contested approaches to economics have emerged in recent years. One follows an older, rather neglected approach which emphasizes evolutionary theory in terms of individuals and institutions. The other emphasizes economies as complex adaptive systems. Important concepts from evolutionary theory include the distinction between proximate and ultimate causation, multilevel selection, cultural change as an evolutionary process, and human psychology as a product of gene–culture coevolution. Relevant concepts from complexity theory include self-organization, fractals, chaos, sensitive dependence, basins of attraction, and path dependence. This book explores these two bodies of theory and their potential impact on economics. Central themes include the challenges that emerge through integration, evolutionary behavioral economics, and the evolution of institutions. Practical applications are provided and avenues for future research highlighted.

The Dodd–Frank Act of 2010 was intended to reform financial policies in order to prevent another massive crisis such as the financial meltdown of 2008. Dodd–Frank is largely premised on the diagnosis that connectedness was the major problem in that crisis—that is, that financial institutions were overexposed to one another, resulting in a possible chain reaction of failures. This book argues that it is not connectedness but contagion that is the most significant element of systemic risk facing the financial system. Contagion is an indiscriminate run by short-term creditors of financial institutions that can render otherwise solvent institutions insolvent. It poses a serious risk because, as the book explains, our financial system still depends on approximately $7.4 to $8.2 trillion of runnable and uninsured short-term liabilities, 60 percent of which are held by nonbanks. The book argues that efforts by the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, and the Treasury to stop the contagion that exploded after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers lessened the economic damage. And yet Congress, spurred by the public's aversion to bailouts, has dramatically weakened the power of the government to respond to contagion, including limitations on the Federal Reserve's powers as a lender of last resort. Offering uniquely detailed forensic analyses of the Lehman Brothers and AIG failures, and suggesting alternative regulatory approaches, the book makes the case that we need to restore and strengthen our weapons for fighting contagion.

The European Union began with efforts in the Cold War era to foster economic integration among a few Western European countries. Today’s EU constitutes an upper tier of government that affects almost every level of policymaking in each of its twenty-seven member states. The recent financial and economic crises have tested this still-evolving institutional framework, and this book surveys key economic challenges faced by the EU. European economists examine such topics as the stability of the financial markets and possible policy options to reduce future vulnerability to crises, including Glass–Steagull-style narrow banking; the effect of emerging economies such as China and India on Europe’s economic position; the protection of national interests in industrial policy; reforming and preserving the welfare state in the face of unemployment, population aging, and worker mobility within the EU; and improving the EU’s institutional framework by reassigning responsibilities among supranational, national, and local governments. Among the conclusions that emerge from these analyses are the necessity for banking regulation as well as budgetary discipline; the need to consider global as well as European integration; and the idea that an environment which fosters internal competition will increase Europe’s competitiveness internationally.

Currency boards, more so than other exchange rate regimes, have come in and out of fashion. Defined by a fixed exchange rate with full convertibility, central bank liabilities backed with foreign exchange reserves, and a high cost of exiting the regime, they were common in colonial times—until most were cast off as countries gained independence after World War II. In the 1990s, currency boards enjoyed a revival as the cornerstone of various macroeconomic stabilization programs—including many in central and eastern European transition economies—only to fall into disfavor again with the collapse of the Argentine regime in 2002. This book takes a balanced look at the effects of currency board regimes on inflation, output growth, and macroeconomic performance more generally. Drawing on historical experience, economic theory, cross-country empirical analysis, and case studies of currency boards in Argentina, Estonia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, it concludes that currency boards deliver significant reductions in inflation compared to other regimes and do not seem to result in slower growth or a markedly higher vulnerability to crisis.

American monetary policy is formulated by the Federal Reserve and overseen by Congress. Both policy making and oversight are deliberative processes, although the effect of this deliberation has been difficult to quantify. This book provides a systematic examination of deliberation on monetary policy from 1976 to 2008 by the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee (FOMC) and House and Senate banking committees. The innovative account employs automated textual analysis software to study the verbatim transcripts of FOMC meetings and congressional hearings; these empirical data are supplemented and supported by in-depth interviews with participants in these deliberations. The automated textual analysis measures the characteristic words, phrases, and arguments of committee members; the interviews offer a way to gauge the extent to which the empirical findings accord with the participants’ personal experiences. Decade after decade, Fed chairman after Fed chairman, one feature is evident in the discourse between central bankers and US legislators: Fed chairmen tend to talk about the technicalities of monetary policy while senators and representatives talk about other things, such as jobs, fiscal policy, energy policy, education, and so on. All too often they simply talk past one another. Analyzing why and under what conditions deliberation matters for monetary policy in the FOMC, the book identifies several strategies of persuasion used by committee members, including Paul Volcker’s emphasis on policy credibility and efforts to influence economic expectations.

Over the last two hundred years, mortality and fertility levels in the Western world have dropped to unprecedented levels. This demographic transition was accompanied by an economic transition that led to widespread education and economic growth after centuries of near-stagnation. At the same time, other changes have occurred in family structures, culture, and the organization of society. Economists have only recently begun to take into account the demographic transition from high mortality and high fertility when modeling and researching economic development. This book reviews recent approaches to economic demography, considering such topics as the bio-geographic origins of comparative development differences; the role of health improvements and mortality decline; as well as physiological, familial, cultural, and social aspects. After an overview of the study of demography and economic demography, the chapters cover subjects including the Neolithic era and the period of the formation of states and social institutions; longevity and economic growth; household decision making and fertility; land inequality, education, and marriage in nineteenth century Prussia; and caste systems and technology in pre-modern societies. The book concludes with a call for further investigation of the institutional and social factors that influence demographics and economies, suggesting that unified growth theory offers a potential approach to studying development.

Explicit deposit insurance (DI) is widely held to be a crucial element of modern financial safety nets. For this reason, establishing a DI system is frequently recommended by outside experts to countries undergoing reform. Predictably, DI systems have proliferated in the developing world. The number of countries offering explicit deposit guarantees rose from twenty in 1980 to eighty-seven by the end of 2003. This book challenges the wisdom of encouraging countries to adopt DI without first repairing observable weaknesses in their institutional environment. The evidence and analysis presented confirm that many countries would do well to delay the installation of a DI system. Analysis shows that many existing DI systems are not adequately designed to control possible DI-induced risk taking by financial institutions, and the book provides advice on principles of good design for those countries in the process of adopting or reforming their DI systems. Empirical evidence on the efficiency of real-world DI systems has been scarce, and analysis has focused on the experience of developed countries. The contributors to this book draw on an original cross-country dataset on DI systems and design features to examine the impact of DI on banking behavior and assess the policy complications that emerge in developing countries. Chapters covers decisions about DI adoption, design, and pricing, and review individual country experiences with DI—including issues raised by the EU’s DI directive, banking reform in Russia, and policy efforts to protect depositors in China.

No names are more closely associated with modern trade theory than Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin. The basic Heckscher–Ohlin proposition, according to which a country exports factors in abundant supply and imports factors in scarce supply, is a key component of modern trade theory. This book traces the development of the HO model, describing the historical twists and turns that have led to the basic modern theoretical model in use today. It not only presents a cohesive view of the model’s evolution but also reviews the results of empirical tests its various versions. The book surveys the development of the HO model and then assesses empirical tests of its predictions. Most discussions of empirical work on HO models confine themselves to the basic theorem, but the book devotes a chapter to empirical tests of three related propositions: the Stolper–Samuelson theorem; the Rybczynski theorem; and the factor price equalization theorem. It concludes that although the formulation and testing of these later models have improved economists’ understanding of the forces shaping international trade, many empirical trade economists (himself included) were so enamored of the elegant but highly unrealistic factor price equalization models developed from the insights of Heckscher and Ohlin that they have neglected investigation of other models without this relationship.

Competitiveness among nations is often approached as if it were a sports competition: Some countries win medals, others lose out. This view of countries fighting it out in the economic arena is especially popular in business circles and among politicians. Economists, however, take a very different approach to international economic relations, arguing that international trade leads not to winners and losers but to win–win situations in which all countries profit. This book takes on the sometimes-derided concept of competitiveness, demonstrating the value of systematic analysis in an area too often dominated by special interest groups who use (and abuse) the concept to advance hidden agendas. The chapters range from broad theoretical views to case studies, examining the multiple factors that drive competitiveness. Contributors consider the conceptual framework underlying the World Economic Forum’s approach to competitiveness; differences in per capita gross domestice product between the United States and the European Union; an integrated approach to measuring competitiveness and comparative advantage; divergent trends in price and cost competitiveness in the euro area; methodological issues in constructing competitiveness indicators; taxation and international competitiveness; and a case study of Mexico’s competitiveness in world markets in comparison to China’s.

Energy utilization, especially from fossil fuels, creates hidden costs in the form of pollution and environmental damages. The costs are well-documented but are hidden in the sense that they occur outside the market, are not reflected in market prices, and are not taken into account by energy users. Double Dividend presents a novel method for designing environmental taxes that correct market prices so that they reflect the true cost of energy. The resulting revenue can be used in reducing the burden of the overall tax system and improving the performance of the economy, creating the double dividend of the title. The authors simulate the impact of environmental taxes on the U.S. economy using their Intertemporal General Equilibrium Model (IGEM). This highly innovative model incorporates expectations about future prices and policies. The model is estimated econometrically from an extensive 50-year dataset to incorporate the heterogeneity of producers and consumers. This approach generates confidence intervals for the outcomes of changes in economic policies, a new feature for models used in analyzing energy and environmental policies. These outcomes include the welfare impacts on individual households, distinguished by demographic characteristics, and for society as a whole, decomposed between efficiency and equity.

Dynamic allocation and pricing problems appear in numerous frameworks such as the retail of seasonal/style goods, the allocation of fixed capacities in the travel and leisure industries (e.g., airlines, hotels, rental cars, holiday resorts), the allocation of a fixed inventory of equipment in a given period of time (e.g. equipment for medical procedures, bandwidth or advertising space in online applications), and the assignment of personnel to incoming tasks. Although dynamic pricing is a very old, modern Revenue Management (RM) techniques started with US Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. The basic RM issues are: 1) Quantity decisions: How to allocate capacity/output to different segments, products or channels? When to withhold products from the market? 2) Structural decisions: Which selling format to choose (posted prices, negotiations, auctions, etc..)? Which features to use for a particular format (segmentation, volume discounts, bundling, etc..)? 3) Pricing decisions: How to set posted prices, reserve prices? How to price differentiate? How to price over time? How to markdown over life time? Broadly speaking, all above questions deal in fact with issues treated in the Auction/Mechanism Design. Nevertheless, mechanism design has not been the tool of choice in RM: instead, most papers have focused on analyzing properties of restricted classes of allocation/pricing schemes. Recently, this challenge has been addressed by a more or less systematic body of work appearing under the heading of Dynamic Mechanism Design. This book illustrates some results of this strand of research, as reflected in the authors’ recent work.

Econometrics is a study of good and bad ways to measure economic relations. This book discusses the role economic theory ought to play in such measurements. The role theory should play, depends on the researcher’s ideas about the essence of an economic theory. A researcher who believes that his theory is about the actual workings of an economy, can identify his theory’s variables with objects in social reality and solve his measurement problems with the means that present-day econometrics provides. A researcher who believes that his theory is about imaginary matters that have uncertain relations to objects in social reality, faces measurement problems that he can solve with the means that formal econometrics provides. The book presents case studies thatcontrast the empirical analysis of present-day applied econometrics in the tradition of Trygve Haavelmo with the empirical analysis of formal econometrics in the tradition of Ragnar Frisch. The case studies are a varied lot in which the theory is static or dynamic and faces cross-section data or time-series data. In focus are the behaviour of data variables and the inferences about social reality which the empirical analyses yield. The case studies demonstrate that both the statistical analyses and the inferences of present-day and formal econometrics differ in striking ways. In doing that they provide a good basis for discussing the use of theory in measuring economic relations. The book is the last of three books in which the author develops and demonstrates the usefulness of a formal science of economics.