Author: Peter J. N. Sinclair
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135179778
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 402
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Book Description
Inflation is regarded by the many as a menace that damages business and can only make life worse for households. Keeping it low depends critically on ensuring that firms and workers expect it to be low. So expectations of inflation are a key influence on national economic welfare. This collection pulls together a galaxy of world experts (including Roy Batchelor, Richard Curtin and Staffan Linden) on inflation expectations to debate different aspects of the issues involved. The main focus of the volume is on likely inflation developments. A number of factors have led practitioners and academic observers of monetary policy to place increasing emphasis recently on inflation expectations. One is the spread of inflation targeting, invented in New Zealand over 15 years ago, but now encompassing many important economies including Brazil, Canada, Israel and Great Britain. Even more significantly, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Japan and the United States Federal Bank are the leading members of another group of monetary institutions all considering or implementing moves in the same direction. A second is the large reduction in actual inflation that has been observed in most countries over the past decade or so. These considerations underscore the critical – and largely underrecognized - importance of inflation expectations. They emphasize the importance of the issues, and the great need for a volume that offers a clear, systematic treatment of them. This book, under the steely editorship of Peter Sinclair, should prove very important for policy makers and monetary economists alike.
Author: Douglas Kenneth Pearce
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Prices
Languages : en
Pages : 390
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Book Description
Author: Richard Thomas Curtin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108576931
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Richard Curtin has directed the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment surveys for more than four decades. His analyses of recent trends in consumer expectations are regularly covered in the worldwide press. In this book, Curtin presents a new theory of expectations. Whereas conventional theories presume that consumers play a passive role in the macro economy, simply reacting to current trends in incomes, prices, and interest rates, Curtin proposes a new empirically consistent theory. He argues that expectations are formed by an automatic process that utilizes conscious and nonconscious processes, passion and reason, information from public and private sources, and social networks. Consumers ultimately reach a decision that serves both the micro decision needs of individuals and reflects the common influence of the macro environment. Drawing on empirical observations, Curtin not only demonstrates the importance of consumer sentiment, but also how it can foreshadow the cyclical turning points in the economy.
Author: Mr.Rudolfs Bems
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 148439223X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 31
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Book Description
Understanding the sources of inflation persistence is crucial for monetary policy. This paper provides an empirical assessment of the influence of inflation expectations' anchoring on the persistence of inflation. We construct a novel index of inflation expectations' anchoring using survey-based inflation forecasts for 45 economies starting in 1989. We then study the response of consumer prices to terms-of-trade shocks for countries with flexible exchange rates. We find that these shocks have a significant and persistent effect on consumer price inflation when expectations are poorly anchored. By contrast, inflation reacts by less and returns quickly to its pre-shock level when expectations are strongly anchored.
Author: Mark Gertler
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262572217
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
The NBER Macroeconomics Annual presents pioneering work in macroeconomics by leading academic researchers to an audience of public policymakers and the academic community. Each commissioned paper is followed by comments and discussion. This year's edition provides a mix of cutting-edge research and policy analysis on such topics as productivity and information technology, the increase in wealth inequality, behavioral economics, and inflation.
Author: Paul De Grauwe
Publisher: CEPS
ISBN: 929079819X
Category : Monetary policy
Languages : en
Pages : 22
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Book Description
The question of whether central banks should target stock prices so as to prevent bubbles and crashes from occurring has been hotly debated. This paper analyses this question using a behavioural macroeconomic model. This model generates bubbles and crashes. It analyses how 'leaning against the wind' strategies, which aim to reduce the volatility of stock prices, can help in reducing volatility of output and inflation. We find that such policies can be effective in reducing macroeconomic volatility, thereby improving the trade-off between output and inflation variability. The strength of this result, however, depends on the degree of credibility of the inflation-targeting regime. In the absence of such credibility, policies aiming at stabilising stock prices do not stabilise output and inflation.
Author: International Monetary Fund. Research Dept.
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1451956029
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 229
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Book Description
This paper discusses effects of inflation on economic development. A mild inflation may well encourage little, or no, evasion of the “inflation tax.” On the other hand, a strong inflation, and frequently a mild one also, will lead to community reactions which have effects like those of widespread tax evasion. A development policy may have wider aims than the encouragement of a high level of investment. Inflation has two effects on the desire for liquidity, which are related to the two basic reasons why individuals and businesses wish to hold liquid assets—the speculative and precautionary motives. Inflation increases the value of effective liquidity, thereby raising the community's desire for it, but it makes the most generally accepted store of liquidity unacceptable sources of protection. The control of inflation is only one of the problems facing a government wishing to encourage rapid economic development. The fight against illiteracy, the reform of bureaucratic practices, the building of basic sanitary facilities for the eradication of endemic diseases, the substitution of competitive for monopolistic trade practices, the encouragement of a widespread spirit of entrepreneurship, and the creation of an adequate amount of social capital, may be important prerequisites for rapid growth.
Author: George W. Evans
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400824265
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 440
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Book Description
A crucial challenge for economists is figuring out how people interpret the world and form expectations that will likely influence their economic activity. Inflation, asset prices, exchange rates, investment, and consumption are just some of the economic variables that are largely explained by expectations. Here George Evans and Seppo Honkapohja bring new explanatory power to a variety of expectation formation models by focusing on the learning factor. Whereas the rational expectations paradigm offers the prevailing method to determining expectations, it assumes very theoretical knowledge on the part of economic actors. Evans and Honkapohja contribute to a growing body of research positing that households and firms learn by making forecasts using observed data, updating their forecast rules over time in response to errors. This book is the first systematic development of the new statistical learning approach. Depending on the particular economic structure, the economy may converge to a standard rational-expectations or a "rational bubble" solution, or exhibit persistent learning dynamics. The learning approach also provides tools to assess the importance of new models with expectational indeterminacy, in which expectations are an independent cause of macroeconomic fluctuations. Moreover, learning dynamics provide a theory for the evolution of expectations and selection between alternative equilibria, with implications for business cycles, asset price volatility, and policy. This book provides an authoritative treatment of this emerging field, developing the analytical techniques in detail and using them to synthesize and extend existing research.
Author: I. Visco
Publisher: Elsevier
ISBN: 1483295834
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
It is claimed in this book that expectations should not necessarily be treated as unobservable variables and that there is much to be learned from survey data. A unique data set is examined, the output of surveys conducted twice a year since 1952, among informed Italian businessmen and economic experts. The predictive accuracy, rationality and determinants of inflation expectations are investigated, following an extensive analysis of measurement issues.The estimate of inflation expectations are evaluated for both wholesale and consumer price changes, comparing them with those held by respondents to other surveys for different countries and with the forecasts generated by alternative predictors of the inflation process. The expectations considered in the study are shown to be remarkably accurate, anticipating all major price changes, even if during the years of high and rising inflation which have followed the first oil crisis they appear to underestimate on a number of occasions the inflation rates actually experienced, as the alternative predictors also do.An accurate testing of the rational expectations hypothesis is conducted, rejecting it over the entire sample period but not for the period of mild, but variable inflation which preceded the first oil crises.It is shown that a mixed adaptive-regressive model, with both error-learning and return-to-normality components adapts very well to the data considered in this study and that inflation expectations are also influenced by an uncertainty component which affects the adaptive coefficient. Furthermore, regression towards normality is slowed down when industrial capacity is utilized above normal, and vice-versa. Many other issues such as the dispersion of individual answers, the problems of aggregation and measurement error are also considered and an extensive bibliography of other works where use is made of direct information on expectations, is included.
Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309182158
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in late 2002 and 2003 challenged the global public health community to confront a novel epidemic that spread rapidly from its origins in southern China until it had reached more than 25 other countries within a matter of months. In addition to the number of patients infected with the SARS virus, the disease had profound economic and political repercussions in many of the affected regions. Recent reports of isolated new SARS cases and a fear that the disease could reemerge and spread have put public health officials on high alert for any indications of possible new outbreaks. This report examines the response to SARS by public health systems in individual countries, the biology of the SARS coronavirus and related coronaviruses in animals, the economic and political fallout of the SARS epidemic, quarantine law and other public health measures that apply to combating infectious diseases, and the role of international organizations and scientific cooperation in halting the spread of SARS. The report provides an illuminating survey of findings from the epidemic, along with an assessment of what might be needed in order to contain any future outbreaks of SARS or other emerging infections.
