Julia Darby

The Impact of Exchange Rate Uncertainty on the Level of Investment

Conventional wisdom has it that increasing price or exchange rate uncertainty will depress investment. Using the Dixit-Pindyck (1994) model, the authors find that there are situations where this will happen and situations where it does not. There are threshold effects, which allows them to identify when rising volatility would increase or decrease investment and also to identify which types of industries would gain, and which would suffer, from a move to fixed exchange rates. This is important for monetary union in Europe since it is likely that, even if trade is insensitive to exchange rate volatility, investment with its longer horizon will be affected. Coauthors are Andrew Hughes Hallett, Jonathan Ireland, and Laura Piscitelli.

Social spending and automatic stabilizers in the OECD

The macroeconomic literature on automatic stabilization tends to focus on taxes and dismiss the relevance of government expenditure except for unemployment compensation. Our results go sharply contrary to this view. We engage in an empirical analysis of 21 OECD countries from 1982 to 2003 and find that age and health-related social expenditure as well as incapacity and sick benefits all react to the cycle in a stabilizing manner. While possibly new in the macro literature, this conforms to many results in studies in labour economics. The policy implications are broad since much previous analysis of discretionary fiscal policy rests on official figures for automatic stabilization. There are also major implications for efforts to incorporate automatic fiscal policy in simulation models.

Is There a Cointegrating Vector for UK Wages

An understanding of the determination of real wages is crucial in analysing the determination of the natural rate of unemployment or NAIRU. Uses cointegration techniques to examine a core theoretical model of the long-run determinants of real wages involving unit labour costs, unemployment, union power and the replacement ratio. Considers the different measures of union power and the duration of unemployment and alternative specifications involving the “wedge” but a robust cointegrating relationship is not found. These results can be interpreted in several ways: concepts such as union power or the “generosity” of benefits may be measured inadequately; the theoretical understanding of the long-run determinants of real earnings may remain seriously incomplete; alternatively the short spans of data examined may be insufficient for the application of cointegration techniques, although the sample sizes examined here are fairly typical of most macroeconomic time series.

Labour force participation and the business cycle: a comparative analysis of France, Japan, Sweden and the United States

This paper investigates the cyclical responsiveness of participation in the labour force. We examine systems of equations, disaggregated by age and gender, for France, Japan, Sweden and the US, using data from the OECD Labour Force Statistics, 1970–1995. We use measures of country specific business cycles following Harvey and Jaeger (1993) and test for asymmetric responses of participation to expansionary and contractionary phases of the cycle. Our results show that discouraged worker effects are prevalent. These effects are strongest in the downward phase of the cycle and are essentially a female phenomenon, with a particular concentration among 45–54 year olds.

COMPACT: a rational expectations, intertemporal model of the United Kingdom economy

Abstract COMPACT is a quarterly macro econometric model of the UK primarily designed for policy analysis. The model includes a consumption function derived explicitly from intertemporal optimisation, a vintage production technology, nominal rigidities in wage and price setting, and trade equations which are influenced by the variety and quality of production relative to the rest of the world. We discuss the overall properties of the model, as well as features of major equations. We stress the importance of relating these properties to simpler theoretical paradigms. Several simulations illustrating key properties of COMPACT are presented. A complete equation listing is provided in an Appendix.

Market familiarity and the location of South and North MNEs

We use a systematic empirical analysis of the determinants of South-South (SS) and North-South (NS) foreign direct investment (FDI) as a canvas to explore how multinational enterprises’ (MNEs) location decisions are shaped by better acquaintance with a foreign market resulting from bilateral ties, experience of international expansion, and knowledge of how to deal with poor governance. We find that these various aspects of market familiarity, which can interact together, are important to explain and differentiate the location behaviors of South MNEs (S-MNEs) and North MNEs (N-MNEs) in developing countries.

Uncertainties Surrounding Natural Rate Estimates in the G7

It is four decades since Phelps (1967) and Friedman (1968) unveiled the natural rate of unemployment hypothesis, and the concept of an equilibrium rate of unemployment is central to the prevailing theories of labour market behaviour and the relationship between unemployment and inflation. Moreover, the natural rate and associated unemployment gaps are seen as important reference points, typically as part of a broad range of indicators, by policy makers who need to assess short-term inflation developments and/or consider appropriate decompositions of fiscal balances into their structural and cyclical components. Yet, as surveys and symposia have illustrated (Bean 1994, Cross 1995, Journal of Economic Perspectives 1997), there remains much uncertainty both about which factors do and do not determine equilibrium rates of unemployment, and about the corresponding numerical values.

Spending and Saving

Consumption and saving decisions have important effects on individuals and on the whole economy. The chapter begins by examining recent trends in consumption and saving in the major European economies, before setting up a framework for analysis. It then examines the life cycle and permanent income hypotheses, and the Keynesian consumption function. An explanation is given of recent patterns of European consumption and saving, for example, by discussing the effect of financial liberalization. Finally comes an analysis of changes in the UK patterns of spending and saving, including the effect of recent building society windfalls.

Forecasting volatility in developing countries’ nominal exchange returns

This article identifies the best models for forecasting the volatility of daily exchange returns of developing countries. An emerging consensus in the recent literature focusing on industrialized countries has noted the superior performance of the Fractionally Integrated Generalized Autoregressive Conditionally Heteroscedastic (FIGARCH) model in the case of industrialized countries, a result that is reaffirmed here. However, we show that when dealing with developing countries’ data the IGARCH model results in substantial gains in terms of the in-sample results and out-of-sample forecasting performance.

Changing Trends in International Manufacturing Productivity

The paper estimates underlying labour-productivity growth for each of the G7 countries over the last two decades. Underlying productivity is proxied by a stochastic trend, which is estimated using the Kalman filter. This technique allows the data to determine when changes in growth have occurred and is therefore less ad hoc than the split trends or dummy variables normally used. The results show that the decline in underlying productivity growth in the 1970s was far from uniform across countries. While relative growth rates in Europe in the 1980s are broadly consistent with the convergence hypothesis, US trends do not appear at present to be significantly below average.