During the 1980s, the European Union, the US, and Japan followed policies designed to limit the production of grain. In so doing, the production and stock of grain declined during the decade in developed countries. However, grain production increased in developing countries during the 1980s, causing the overall world supply of grain to grow faster than demand. International market prices for...

This paper uses over two years of weekly scanner data from two small US cities to characterize time and state dependence of grocers’ pricing decisions. In these data, the probability of a nominal adjustment declines with the time since the last price change even after controlling for heterogeneity across store-product cells and replacing sale prices with regular prices. We also detect state dep...

Immigration and House Prices in the UK This article studies the effect of immigration on house prices in the UK. It finds that immigration has a negative effect on house prices and presents evidence that this negative effect is due to the mobility response of the native population. Natives respond to immigration by moving to different areas and those who leave are at the top of the wage distrib...

This paper evaluates the impact of China’s WTO accession on patterns of world trade and economic growth by a recursive dynamic, 17-region, 25-sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model with import embodied technology transfer based on actual market access commitments that China and Taiwan have made to date. The simulation results show that the major gains from WTO accession would accrue ...

An important feature of bond markets is the relationship between initial public offering prices and the probability of the issuer defaulting. First, this probability affects bond prices. Second, IPO prices determine the default probability. Though the market equilibrium has been shown to predict well for other assets, it is a priori unclear whether markets will yield competitive prices when suc...

We estimate the impact of large changes in the relative prices of natural gas and coal from 2005-2011, due primarily to “fracking,” on regional electricity marginal costs and air pollution emissions from electricity producers. We find strong evidence that natural gas is displacing coal as baseload. We estimate marginal emissions over the generation profile for each region in the U.S. using a no...

The paper presents a bivariate SVAR model including growth rates of industrial production and of stock prices. Imposing a long-run restriction à la Blanchard and Quah (1989) that excludes long-run influences of the stock market on real activity allows to decompose stock prices in a fundamental and a nonfundamental component. The results of the forecast error variance decompositions as well as o...

Noise is essential for the existence of a liquid market, and if noise traders are not present in the market, the trade volume will drop severely and an important aspect of the market philosophy will be lost. However, these noise traders bring noise to the market, and the existence of noise in prices indicates a temporary deviation in prices from their fundamental values. In particular, high-fre...

Asset prices observed in financial markets combine equilibrium prices and market microstructure noise. In this paper, we study how to tell apart large shifts in equilibrium prices from noise using high frequency data. We propose a new nonparametric test which allows us to asymptotically remove the noise from observable price data and to discover jumps in fundamental asset values. We provide its...

We show that a profit maximizing monopolistic intermediary may behave approximately like a Walrasian auctioneer by setting bid and ask prices nearly equal to Walrasian equilibrium prices. In our model agents choose to trade either through the intermediary or privately. Buyers (sellers) trading through the intermediary potentially trade immediately at the ask (bid) price, but sacrifice the sprea...