Essays In Macroeconomics Of An Open Economy

The large aggregates in the economy - consumption, investment, production of the domestic and the international sectors, international capital flows, financial accumulation and indebtedness - are analysed in this book as problems in time-optimisation for enterprises and households. The effects of fiscal and monetary policies along with exchange-rate variation are examined, and their simultaneous use for stabilizing demand are found to be necessary. All household decisions on consumptions, savings, and financial disposition are conditioned by uncertainty, and similarly for firms, who make more complex simultaneous decisions on production, real investment, financing, and market strategy. The marginal efficiency-of-investment function derived from these decisions is fundamentally different from the marginal productivity of capital in the neoclassical sense. An economy which grows through the accumulation of capital, increase in labor supply, and technological progress is the framework in which all of these variables move. This codetermines the allocation of factors between domestic and international production, and the development of foreign trade. The growth both of the public debt and of international investment are treated in depth.

This book provides a comprehensive overview, in the form of eight long essays, of the evolution of monetary theory over the three-quarters of century, from the time of Keynes to the present day. The essays are originally based on lecture notes from a graduate course on Advanced Monetary Economics offered at York University, Toronto, written in the style of academic papers. The essays are mathematical in method — but also take a historical perspective, tracing the evolution of monetary thought through the Keynesian model, the monetarist model, new classical model, etc, up to and including the neo-Wickesellian models of the early 21st century. The book will be an essential resource for both graduate and advanced undergraduate students in economics, as well as for individual researchers seeking basic information on the theoretical background of contemporary debates.

This dissertation consists of two independent essays on open economy macroeconomics. The first chapter of the dissertation is motivated by the question: "What rationalizes the stylized facts of emerging market business and credit cycles?" Business and credit cycles in emerging countries display very volatile consumption, highly volatile and countercyclical net exports, strongly countercyclical real interest rates, and procyclical flows of credit to the household sector and to the business sector. The standard small-open-economy (SOE) model cannot generate this cyclical pattern of the interest rate and the change in credit market liabilities of households. In order to correct this irregularity and account for the data pattern, this paper augments the SOE model to include collateral constraints for the household sector and limited enforcement constraints for the banking sector. The model generates business and credit cycles consistent with Korean data and gives a rationale for highly volatile consumption, countercyclical country interest rates, and procyclical credit flows. In the counterfactual experiments, we find that the output volatility in Korea is reduced by 11% and welfare gains amount to 0.17% increase in one quarter's steady-state consumption when the default risk in the financial sector is completely eliminated. The second chapter investigates how the presence of pricing-to-market and the degree of imperfect financial market integration affects the effectiveness of optimal monetary policy. Global resource allocation can be inefficient because exporting firms may set different prices among markets and households in different countries may pay different prices for identical goods. On the other hand, political, technological, or informational barriers may hinder capital flows across countries, leading to deviations from perfect cross-country risk sharing. Considering this stylized setting, we augment a standard monetary open economy model to include the failure of the law of one price and imperfect financial market integration. We characterize the optimal monetary policy and assess its effectiveness in compared to inward-looking policies

'This book should be on the reading list of every graduate course in monetary economics. The distinguished contributors not only examine and discuss the nature of money and the conduct of monetary policy in a modern credit economy, but also take an historical perspective through the writings of Cassel, Wicksell, Sraffa and Hicks, as well as Keynes and Kaldor, and extend the theory of money endogeneity (or "horizontalism") to the open economy and economic growth. Interested readers have a feast before them.' - A.P. Thirlwall, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK The horizontalist perspective is an extension of the post-Keynesian approach, that has hitherto focused on a theory of credit and money. This book extends horizontalism beyond its traditional boundaries and makes it consistent with the post-Keynesian theories of output and the open economy. The authors compare and contrast the horizontalist position with various orthodox and non-orthodox views on money. They argue that horizontalism is perfectly compatible with liquidity preference, credit constraints, and a flexible interest-rate mark-up, and address recent developments in banking that reinforce the validity of a horizontal schedule of credit-money. The overall intention is to place horizontalism within the current heterodox tradition as a general theory of the creation of money that is consistent with the post-Keynesian view on macroeconomic policy.

Part 1 of this volume focusses on globalization. Gains from trade, international competitiveness, labour market issues in open economies, customs unions, dumping and intra-firm trade are the topics of this part. Part 2 puts a stronger emphasis on dynamic economics. Social income, intergenerational transfers, public pension systems, and bequest and gift motives in overlapping generation models are main topics. Economic policies are analyzed in Part 3, including the relation between wage rigidity and migration, several aspects of German financial and monetary policy, as well as tax competition. The volume concludes with institutional issues of globalization, a western view on eastern transition, social cost of rent seeking, and the evolution of social institutions.

Reflecting the diverse and profound changes triggered by the latest wave of economic globalization, this book highlights various governance responses at national, regional and global levels. The topics covered are wide-ranging and include economic history and development, European integration, exchange rate arrangements, industrial and labor economics, international cooperation and multilateralism, and public choice. The book is divided into three parts: The first part, which contains contributions by Barry Eichengreen and Marc Flandreau, is devoted to economic history. The second part examines open economy macroeconomics with a focus on Europe, including contributions by Jurgen von Hagen and Paul Krugman. The third part presents contributions to international political economy, and related interdisciplinary topics. This Festschrift is written in honor of Jorge Braga de Macedo, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Nova School of Business and Economics and a distinguished Portuguese academic whose work has an impressive global reach. The contributions, written by a selection of international authors, deal with his oeuvre covering the wide range of topics broached in this book, as his publication record amply attests.

Surveying the current state of knowledge on the international monetary system, this volume contains essays on the behaviour of exchange rates, current account adjustment, international debt, European monetary union, capital mobility, the reform of former planned economies, and more.