Melody Lo

Ranking Economics Journals, Economics Departments, and Economists Using Teaching- Focused Research Productivity

This note constructs a new ranking of economics departments that employs a measure of teaching-focused research productivity, an area of growing importance in recent years. The ranking methodology presented here aggregates and orders citations to an institutions research output that is published in the Journal of Economic Education, the leading journal in economic education. Among the top 40 institutions using this approach are Vanderbilt and Indiana, two universities that often rank high using quality indices of more traditional forms of economics research. Others that rank high here, such as Denison and Occidental College, do not often fare as well using methodologies that evaluate more traditional types of economics research.

Testing Monetary Policy Intentions In Open Economies

Temple (2002) argues that the inflation level used in Romer (1993) lacks power in revealing the policy intentions of monetary authorities. Temple also points out that Romers use of the openness–inflation correlation cannot be explained by time consistency theory. In this article, we demonstrate that more open economies experience less inflation volatility and persistence. We attribute our findings to the hypothesis that monetary authorities in more open economies adopt more aggressive monetary policies. This pattern emerges strongly after 1990. Our results indicate that the near-universal regime shift in 1990 is not just a simple process of increased monetary policy aggressiveness, but an increased response to economic openness.

A note on Romer's openness-inflation relation: the responsiveness of AS and AD to economic openness and monetary policy

Temple (2002) empirically challenges Romers (1993) negative openness-inflation relation on empirical grounds. This article links economic openness to the slopes of aggregate supply (AS) and aggregate demand (AD) to explain why the openness-inflation relation can be ambiguous. Starting with a widely used assumption initiated by Romer (1993) that more open economies face greater output inflation tradeoffs, we demonstrate that greater output-inflation tradeoffs in more open economies (reflected in the steeper AS) induce policymakers to adopt more aggressive optimal monetary policy (reflected in the flatter AD). Empirical results from 15 developed countries’ data support our theoretical explanation on the recent empirical failure in finding the negative openness-inflation relation.

Are Overall Journal Rankings a Good Mapping for Article Quality in Specialty Fields

Overall journal rankings, which are generated with sample articles in different research fields, are commonly used to measure the research productivity of academic economists. In this article, we investigate a growing concern in the profession that the use of the overall journal rankings to evaluate scholars’ relative research productivity may exhibit a downward bias toward researchers in some specialty fields if their respective field journals are under-ranked in the overall journals rankings. To address this concern, we constructed new journal rankings based on the intellectual influence of research in 8 specialty fields using a sample consisting of 26,401 articles published across 60 economics journals from 1998 to 2007. We made various comparisons between the newly constructed journal rankings in specialty fields and the traditional overall journal ranking. Our results show that the overall journal ranking provides a considerably good mapping for the article quality in specialty fields. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

SELECTIVE ASYMMETRIC CAPITAL FINANCING BEHAVIOR: PREFERENCE TOWARDS EQUITY FINANCING

Using data from 1,217 publicly traded Chinese companies from 1994–2006, we show that the capital financing behavior of Chinese firms deviates substantially from the pecking order theory in that equity issues are always the preferred financing source for funding requirements. We further document the existence of a stylized asymmetric financing pattern — equity issues are used much more heavily over debt issues under the condition of a fund flow surplus versus a fund flow deficit, which is the result of Chinese firms selecting the degree of inherent equity-issue preference feasible to pursue given their fund flow condition.

Selective asymmetric intervention and sterilization

Monetary authorities commonly use interventions in foreign exchange markets to influence exchange rates. This paper uses Taiwans data to show that how interventions respond to external shocks representing depreciation or appreciation pressures depends on other objectives of the monetary authority. If maintaining low inflation is important, then when authorities consider inflation to be too high, asymmetrical interventions are likely to result with more vigorous unsterilized interventions to offset depreciation pressures than to offset appreciation pressures. Empirical evidence from Taiwan supports these patterns when external shocks occur in the yen/US

Openness and Aggressive Monetary Policy: A Study of Inflation Volatility and Persistence

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Openness and Monetary Policy: The Responsiveness of Aggregate Supply and Aggregate Demand

This paper investigates the relation between economic openness and the aggressiveness of monetary authorities to ensure price stability. In a sample of 114 countries for the period 1949-2001, we find that more open economies tend to have more aggressive monetary policies which results in less inflation volatility and persistence. We find this pattern emerges strongly after 1990. This latter finding suggests that the universal regime shift in 1990 is not just a simple process of increased policy aggressiveness. Countries also conduct more aggressive monetary policies in response to increased economic openness.

QTM and PPP Effect on Long-run Price Behavior: The Importance of Openness

This paper investigates how economic openness affects the responsiveness of aggregate supply (AS) and aggregate demand (AD). We show that AD is flatter in more-open economies when economic openness is positively associated with the slope of AS (Romer, 1993).

Impacts of Intervention Incorporates with Interest Rate Policy on Taiwan's Economy in E-commerce Environment

We study the effect of economic openness on domestic prices by linking the quantity theory of money (QTM) with purchasing power parity (PPP). Our model pertains to long run domestic price movements, and shows that economic openness has a negative relation with QTM and a positive relation with PPP. Cointegration estimations show that the deviation from QTM rises and that from PPP falls as the economy becomes more open. We also find that QTM and PPP have a strongly negative one-to-one relation. The policy implications center on the use of exchange rate targets in monetary policy.