PDP Number 16
Estimating GSP and Labor Productivity by State
by Paul W. Bauer and Yoonsoo Lee
In gauging the health of state economies, arguably the two most important series to track are employment and output. While employment by state is available about three weeks after the end of a month, data on output, as measured by Gross State Product (GSP), are only available annually and with a significant lag. This Policy Discussion Paper details how more current estimates of GSP can be generated using U.S. Gross Domestic Product and personal income along with individual states’ personal income. A straightforward share approach yields reasonable GSP estimates, but a more sophisticated econometric approach, at a cost of imposing more structure, yields even better ones. Both techniques are also applied to estimate nonfarm-business GSP in order to calculate a measure of labor productivity at the state level that follows as closely as possible the method used by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to calculate the national measure of labor productivity. We then briefly examine how labor productivity varies across states.
PDF file 908k
PDP Number 15top
The 2005 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, and Payments: An Overview
by Ed Nosal, Guillaume Rocheteau, and Randall Wright
This PDP summarizes the papers presented at the 2005 Summer Workshop on Money, Banking, and Payments at the Cleveland Fed. Papers covered a wide variety of topics in monetary theory and policy, banking, and payments systems research. Topics ranged from optimal monetary policy, optimal bank contracts, the private supply of money, the coexistence of credit, money, and capital, the design of payment systems, and international currencies. Effort was made to calibrate models and bring them closer to the data. These contributions illustrate the progress made in the field of monetary theory.
PDF file 228k
PDP Number 14top
The Economics of Payments
by Ed Nosal and Guillaume Rocheteau
In this paper we provide a survey of the payment literature in a unified framework. The environment is a variant of the Lagos and Wright (2005) model of monetary exchange, where some trades occur in bilateral meetings while others occur in more or less decentralized markets. We use this basic environment to introduce alternative sets of trading frictions that give rise to different payments instruments and/or payments institutions. We investigate credit economies, monetary economies, and economies in which money and credit coexist. We also study alternative assets, such as foreign exchange, capital (equity), and government liabilities, which can be used as payment instruments in conjunction with money. We introduce banks as deposit-taking institutions whose liabilities circulate in the economy. We also provide an extension in which the process of the settlement of debt for money is modeled and the potential social costs of settlement are characterized. Finally, we investigate government policy responses to the social costs introduced by various trading frictions.
PDF file 521k
PDP Number 13top
Globalization and Imbalances in Historical Perspective
by Michael D. Bordo
Global imbalances associated with the U.S. current account deficit have given rise to speculation about the nature of the impending adjustment: Will it be smooth and gradual, or will it be sudden and costly? This paper summarizes the two views and then considers three historical periods with similar pressures--an earlier era of globalization from 1870 to 1914, the interwar gold standard, and Bretton Woods. A comparison of the periods and their outcomes suggests current global imbalances might resolve themselves quietly.
PDF file 119k
PDP Number 12top
Inflation and Welfare: A Search Approach
by Ben Craig and Guillaume Rocheteau
This paper extends recent findings in the search-theoretic literature on monetary exchange regarding the welfare costs of inflation. We present first estimates of the welfare cost of inflation using the "welfare triangle" methodology of Bailey (1958) and Lucas (2000). We then derive a money demand function from the search-theoretic model of Lagos and Wright (2005) and we estimate it from U.S. data over the period 1900-2000. We show that the welfare cost of inflation predicted by the model accords with the welfare-triangle measure when pricing mechanisms are such that buyers appropriate the social marginal benefit of their real balances. For other mechanisms, welfare triangles underestimate the true welfare cost of inflation because of a rent-sharing externality. We also point out other inefficiencies associated with noncompetitive pricing, which matter for estimating the cost of inflation. We then illustrate how endogenous participation decisions can mitigate or exacerbate the cost of inflaion, and we provide calibrated examples in which a deviation from the Friedman rule is optimal. Finally, we discuss distributional effects of inflation.
PDF file 600k | Updated paper in PDF
2005 2006 | top