Suchergebnisse

The purpose in this article is to examine some implications which arise from assuming agents faced a mixed information structure for some standard tests of the rational expectations hypothesis.

The purpose of this note is to examine the impact of US money‐supply announcements on United Kingdom interest rates using weekly data over the period 1977 to 1982. We find some evidence for the proposition that surprise increases in the US money supply increased UK interest rates over our sample period.

PREVIOUS EMPIRICAL WORK ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICAL POPULARITY AND ECONOMIC EVENTS HAS EITHER NOT ATTEMPTED TO MODEL THE ALTERNATIVE POLICIES OF THE DIFFERENT PARTIES, OR HAS MODELLED THEM IN A RATHER SIMPLISTIC MANNER. IT HAS ALSO TYPICALLY ASSUMED THAT VOTERS ARE BACKWARD-LOOKING IN CONTRAST TO RECENT WORK ON EXPECTATIONS THEORY. AN APPROACH IS OUTLINED WHICH IS BASED ON A FORWARD-LOOKING COMPARISON OF THE PARTIES AND INCORPORATES THE EFFECT OF NEWS. AN ALTERNATIVE DERIVATION RELYING ON THE EVALUATION OF THE STOCK OF GOODWILL BUILT UP FOR EACH PARTY IS ALSO SUGGESTED. EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE FROM THE GALLUP OPINION POLL PROVIDES SOME SUPPORT FOR THESE HYPOTHESES.

W.S. Reece (5) has commented on our recent study in this Journal (2) in which we attempted to compare a more comprehensive measure of excess demand for labour in the UK manufacturing sector and then applied the resulting series to help explain money wage inflation. Whilst agreeing with our argument for using excess demand for labour services in preference to the level of unemployment, Reece is unhappy with our estimates of the respective labour and hours demand functions and is also critical of our second stage procedure of deriving excess demand indices from the computed functions. We recognise the validity of Reece's objection to our method of obtaining the excess demand series and indeed, we conceded the difficulty of our approach in the original study (2, pp. 33–35). However, we do not consider that his criticism of our estimation of the labour and hours demand functions is correct, or that our subsequent application of this result need invalidate the original derivation of the input demands. Although we welcome new research which will permit superior methods for separately estimating demand and supply functions for markets in disequilibrium, we believe there remain some significant difficulties with the methods which Reece cites (3 and 4) as providing the basis for his 'superior' approach.

Whilst it is generally agreed that the key determinant of the current money wage inflation is anticipated increases in prices, there remains a significant role for excess demand variables. Many of the studies on inflation which have appeared following the original expositions of the Phillips curve relationship have been concerned with producing efficient measures of excess demand variables. In the basic model developed by Phillips and Lipsey, the key determining variable of the rate of growth of money wages was taken to be the percentage rate of unemployment in the labour force. However, several recent contributors to the literature on this type of relationship have challenged the efficiency of the level of unemployment as a measure of excess demand for labour and specifically they have produced evidence which contradicts the central assumption of stability between unemployment and aggregate excess demand. In the U.K. it has been observed how since the end of 1966, Phillips type relationships between levels of unemployment and the rate of change of money wages appear to have broken down and apparent 'discontinuities' in the aggregate unemployment series have been noted. All these findings taken together with some earlier U.S. studies which found poor relationships between changes in wages and unemployment levels (see, for example, the discussion in) have concentrated attention on the search for superior measures of excess demand.

A strike is not the only available collective sanction open to a dissatisfied workforce, which may have recourse to alternative forms of militant action such as the go‐slow or overtime ban. Nevertheless, despite their well known limitations, strike statistics constitute the only available quantitative barometer of overt and organised industrial conflict. In order to explain the incidence of strike action at an aggregative level a number of studies have been carried out in recent years which test quantitative relationships via the use of multiple regression techniques and which postulate an economic interpretation of strike activity. The advantage of the quantitative approach as a method of analysis and insight into the relationships involved is that it "replaces improvised ad hoc explanations of strike activity with a behavioural model which….does yield refutable implications". That is, in terms of providing more solid and systematic empirical knowledge, its performance is testable and, by amendments and refinements, capable of improvement.