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Dealing with the Debt Crisis
The debt crisis in perspective; Debt management in the late 1980s; Debt reduction and recontracting.
Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain
An experimental new Internet-based form of money is created that anyone can generate at home; people build frightening firetrap computers full of video cards, putting out so much heat that one operator is hospitalised with heatstroke and brain damage. A young physics student starts a revolutionary new marketplace immune to State coercion; he ends up ordering hits on people because they might threaten his great experiment, and is jailed for life without parole. Fully automated contractual systems are proposed to make business and the law work better; the contracts people actually write are unregulated penny stock offerings whose fine print literally states that you are buying nothing of any v...
Debt Games
International debt rescheduling, both in earlier epochs and our present one, has been marked by a flurry of bargaining. In this process, significant variation has emerged over time and across cases in the extent to which debtors have undertaken economic adjustment, banks or bondholders have written down debts, and creditor governments and international organizations have intervened in negotiations. Debt Games develops and applies a situational theory of bargaining to analyze the adjustment undertaken by debtors and the concessions provided by lenders in international debt rescheduling. This approach has two components: a focus on each actor's individual situation, defined by its political and economic bargaining resources, and a complementary focus on changes in their position. The model proves successful in accounting for bargaining outcomes in eighty-four percent of the sixty-one cases, which include all instances of Peruvian and Mexican debt rescheduling over the last one hundred and seventy years as well as Argentine and Brazilian rescheduling between 1982 and 1994.
NBER Reporter
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The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial Markets
We use the revised estimates of U.S. GNP constructed by Christina Romer (1989) to assess the time-series properties of U.S. output per capita over the past century. We reject at conventional significance levels the null that output is a random walk in favor of the alternative that output is a stationary autoregressive process about a linear deterministic trend. The difference between the lack of persistence of output shocks either before WWII or over the entire century, on the one hand, and the strong signs of persistence of output shocks found by Campbell and Mankiw (1987) and by Nelson and Plosser (1982) for more recent periods is striking. It suggests to us a Keynesian interpretation of the large unit root in post-WWII U.S. output: perhaps post-WWII output shocks appear persistent because automatic stabilizers and other demand-management policies have substantially damped the transitory fluctuations that made up the pre-WWH Bums-Mitchell business cycle.
The Dynamic Effects of Aggregate Demand and Supply Disturbances
We interpret fluctuations in GNP and unemployment as due to two types of disturbances: disturbances that have a permanent effect on output and disturbances that do not. We interpret the first as supply disturbances, the second as demand disturbances. We find that demand disturbances have a hump shaped effect on both output and unemployment; the effect peaks after a year and vanishes after two to five years. Up to a scale factor, the dynamic effect on unemployment of demand disturbances is a mirror image of that on output. The effect of supply disturbances on output increases steadily over time, to reach a peak after two years and a plateau after five years. 'Favorab1e supply disturbances may...
Banks as Social Accountants and Screening Devices for the Allocation of Credit
This paper presents and alternative perspective on the role of banks. We emphasize the ways in which banks act as social accountants and screening devices. In this view monetary disturbances have their effects through the disturbances which they induce in society's accounting system and in the mechanisms by which it is ascertained who is credit worthy. Because of asymmetric information, giving rise to credit rationing, interest rates do not play the simple allocative role ascribed by the conventional paradigm, and as a result the equilibrating forces provided by market mechanisms may be weak or virtually absent. The paper provides a critique of the transactions based approach to monetary theory, and sketches a general equilibrium formulation of the theory. The paper traces out some of the policy implications of the theory. We show that certain financial innovations, such as allowing for the more rapid recording of transactions, may actually be welfare reducing.
On the Existence and Interpretation of a "unit Root" in U.S. GNP
We use the revised estimates of U.S. GNP constructed by Christina Romer (1989) to assess the time-series properties of U.S. output per capita over the past century. We reject at conventional significance levels the null that output is a random walk in favor of the alternative that output is a stationary autoregressive process about a linear deterministic trend. The difference between the lack of persistence of output shocks either before \VWII or over the entire century, on the one hand, and the strong signs of persistence of output shocks found by Campbell and Mankiw (1987) and by Nelson and Plosser (1982) for more recent periods is striking. It suggests to us a Keynesian interpretation of the large unit root in post-WWII U.S. output: perhaps post-WWII output shocks appear persistent because automatic stabilizers and other demand-management policies have substantially damped the transitory fluctuations that made up the pre-WWH Bums-Mitchell business cycle.
The C.F.A. Digest
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Why Don't the Elderly Live with Their Children?
Perhaps no single statistic raises more concern about post War changes in the U.S. family than the proportion of the elderly living alone. Since 1940 the proportion of elderly living alone and in institutions has risen dramatically. While demographics appear to explain much of the change in the living arrangements of the elderly, the rising income of the elderly is viewed by many as the chief or at least a chief reason why the elderly live alone. The analyses underlying this view have not, however, considered the incomes and preferences of the children of the elderly. This paper presents a model of the joint living arrangement choice of parents and children. It then uses a new set of data to consider how the preferences and income positions of the elderly and their children influence the living arrangements of elderly parents. The findings suggest that the preferences and income levels of children may be important factors in explaining why so many of the elderly live alone.
