{"title":"Comment","authors":"C. Pissarides","doi":"10.1086/596014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/596014","url":null,"abstract":"Much effort in modern labor economics is devoted to finding “natural experiments,” which can be peculiarities in legislation that give rise to different treatments of otherwise similar subjects. When the interest is labor market policy, in Europe usually the unit of analysis is the nation. Countries are small and policies are national, but there are still significant policy differences across countries. Cross‐country analyses, usually with panels of data going back to the 1970s, have shed important light on the impact of labor market policies on the economy. But they have been plagued by the fact that despite the convergence that is taking place in the context of the European Union, there are still large differences in many other dimensions across the union. Identifying the impact of policy from that of other national characteristics has been difficult. Chemin and Wasmer’s paper identifies a peculiarity in the coverage of legislation in France across its regions that enables a more reliable analysis of the impact of policy, on the assumption that other regional differences within France are less important than, say, differences between France and Germany. An area of France, Alsace‐Moselle, was under German jurisdiction between 1870 and 1918, and many laws that were brought in at that time are still in force. Subsequent changes in French legislation sometimes applied differently in Alsace‐Moselle than in the rest of France, and so one can do a “difference‐in‐difference” comparison of the response to the legislation change in Alsace‐Moselle with the response in the rest of France. Given that the reason that policy coverage is different in Alsace‐Moselle than in the rest of France is exogenous, this would be a valid comparison. Of course, a simple comparison without any correction requires that Alsace‐Moselle be identical in all other respects to the rest of France. This, however, is not likely to be the case. For example, they are the only regions in France that share a border with Germany, and this alone","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131424876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"F. Smets","doi":"10.1086/596003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/596003","url":null,"abstract":"The implications of globalization and increased openness for optimal monetary policy have been the subject of a rapidly growing literature. In this paper, Richard Clarida uses the New Keynesian two‐country model of Clarida, Gali, and Gertler (2002) to partly address such questions. The paper focuses on the degree of trade openness. It does not address the implications of financial globalization, which is arguably an equally important feature of the current wave of globalization. The Clarida et al.model has become a benchmark for studying the interaction of monetary policy in a two‐country world. The model is extremely elegant and allows seeing exactly what is going on. At the same time, it is very stylized, focusing on the terms of trade as the main international transmission channel. International risk sharing is assumed to be perfect. In the second part of the paper, Clarida then performs an empirical analysis of recent Fed behavior. This exercise is in the spirit of Taylor’s (1993) original analysis using “eyeball econometrics.” Themain question asked is whether the Taylor rule can fit recent Fed behavior. Clarida argues that globalizationmay have affected some of the necessary inputs for calibrating a policy rule such as the equilibrium real interest rate and expectations of inflation. He therefore uses expectations data from financial markets to overcome this problem. These expectations measures should be immune to breaks and changes in regime that may plague the use of traditional instrumental generalized method of moment estimation of forward‐looking Taylor rules. The Clarida et al. model gives hints about how openness may affect the optimal reaction coefficients in a Taylor rule. It would therefore be useful to explore some of those hints in the empirical part of the paper.However, in the second part the reaction coefficients in the closed‐economy Taylor rule are basically kept constant. How does openness affect the optimal relative weight on output gap versus inflation stabilization? In the stylized model of Clarida et al.","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131393596","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"S. Kalemli‐Ozcan","doi":"10.1086/595997","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/595997","url":null,"abstract":"Reinhart and Reinhart provide a systematic study of the episodes of influx of capital, namely a “capital flow bonanza.” The authors develop an algorithm, following the work of Kaminsky and Reinhart (1999), to date the incidence of bonanzas. This algorithm allows them not only to detect the smooth deterioration of the current account but also to analyze the macroeconomic developments surrounding the bonanzas. The study suggests a strong link between flows, global interest rates, and commodity prices. Using data from 181 countries from 1980 to 2007 and a core sample of 66 countries from 1960 to 2007, the authors show that (a) the path of the current account around bonanzas is V‐shaped, (b) bonanza periods are associated with a higher incidence of banking and currency crises in developing countries only, (c) bonanzas precede sovereign default episodes, and (d) fiscal policy is procylical around bonanzas. I think that this paper is an extremely valuable study for anyone who is interested in capital flows and sovereign debt. My main comments will be about the data issues, robustness, and the generalization of the results. Most of the analysis is done for 66 countries, during 1960–2007: 58 are middle‐ (emerging) and high‐ (industrialized) income and eight are low‐income (Africa) countries. Are there really data from 1960–2007 for all these countries? It would be nice to indicate which countries have how many years of data in appendix table A1. If a certain set of countries have more years of data than others, then these sets might be biasing the results. More important, most of the low‐income and some of the middle‐income countries are heavily indebted poor countries, which have received a lot of aid that shows up as capital inflows. Côte d’Ivoire, Bolivia, Honduras, and Mauritius are some examples. There are also some countries with debt forgiveness that will show up as capital outflows. I think that there needs to be a robustness exercise in which these countries are excluded. At the moment","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134070738","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Real Variables, Nonlinearity, and European Real Exchange Rates","authors":"Mark P. Taylor, Hyeyoen Kim","doi":"10.1086/596004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/596004","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we carry out an analysis of European real exchange rate behavior before and after the implementation of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), that is, the single European currency, in January 1999. In particular, we model real exchange rates for a number of EMU and non-EMU countries against Germany in an explicitly nonlinear framework and allowing for variation in the equilibrium level of the long-run equilibrium real exchange rate using either relative productivities or real diffusion indices. The relative productivity specification derives from the well-known Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect (Harrod 1933; Balassa 1964; Samuelson 1964). According to the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect, countries with rapidly expanding economies should tend to have rapidly appreciating real exchange rates. However, while the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect focuses on a few series in order to explain the equilibrium level of the real exchange rate, the long-run equilibrium real exchange rate may be affected by a wider range of real variables in the macroeconomy. Including the wide range of available real variables in an econometric specification, however, raises a number of practical problems for a modeler, notably the lack of degrees of freedomaswell as potentialmulticollinearity. One way of circumventing this approach is to construct diffusion indices or factors that capture the core variability in a set of macroeconomic time series in a parsimonious fashion (Stock andWatson 1998, 2002a, 2002b; Bernanke and Boivin 2003; Bernanke, Boivin, and Eliasz 2005). In this paper we explore both approaches. The remainderof thepaper is organized as follows. In Section IIwe examine the underlying rationale for nonlinear real exchange rate adjustment, and in Sections III and IVwe briefly discuss theHarrod-Balassa-Samuelson","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133853992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"John M. Abowd","doi":"10.1086/597194","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/597194","url":null,"abstract":"Chemin and Wasmer attempt the first evaluation, to my knowledge, of French labor market interventions using the technique known as regional difference-in-differences, first popularized in labor economics by Ashenfelter (1978) and now one of theworkhorses of empirical labor economics. Their paper uses regional variation in labor market institutions, long thought to be nonexistent in France, to make a first pass at evaluating three interventions: the 1989welfare law that established aminimum income for individuals above age 25 regardless of employment status (RevenuMinimum d’Insertion), the 1978 changes to the national sick leave policy (indemnisation complémentaire), and the 1998–2000 phase-in of the French 35-hour workweek (réduction du temps de travail). My discussion will focus on the last of these experiments because it was the one that motivated the present paper and because the authors' other work indicates that they have studied this intervention more carefully than the first two. In each case, the preliminary evaluation, which is all they provide in this paper, makes use of institutional differences in the Alsace-Moselle region of France (technically a political region, Alsace, and a political département, Moselle). This region has been (infamously) disputed between France and Germany and was last subject to German national law from 1870 to 1918. As a vestige of this era, the political entities (départements) within Alsace-Moselle retain as local law some of the original German laws. Essentially, whenever the historical German laws were more generous than the prevailing French national laws, the AlsaceMoselle region was permitted to retain the more generous provisions. This regional variation provides the setting for the authors’ differencein-difference evaluation of the three interventions. As French national laws became more generous over time, they created changes in the rest of the country that did not occur as sharply in Alsace-Moselle because in that region the applicable laws were already more generous.","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128782782","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"Francesco Giavazzi","doi":"10.1086/595996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/595996","url":null,"abstract":"Reinhart and Reinhart offer an important contribution to our understanding of the effects of large capital inflows. The algorithm they develop allows us to classify and analyze episodes of capital inflow bonanzas in a very large sample of countries, both advanced and emerging economies. The sample includes 181 countries during 1980–2007 and a subset of 66 over 1960–2007. It is the largest so far analyzed in the literature. I have two small concerns with the paper and one more interesting query. Let us start by considering the results for advanced economies. As the authors themselves say, the results for this group of countries are less stark than for developing economies. They also seem to be driven by a few odd observations concerning not the definition of “bonanzas,” but of their effects. In the data (table 6) most euro area countries appear to have experienced a currency crash (defined as an annual depreciation vs. theU.S. dollar of 15%ormore) in 2005.During 2005 the euro depreciated against the dollar 12%, but beyond the size of the depreciation—which is below the 15% threshold—it is unclear whether one should relate the depreciation of the common European currency to the three bonanza episodes that occurredwithin a period spanning the previous 3 years: France, Portugal, and Spain (table 3). The weakening of the euro in 2005 mostly mirrored the divergence in growth between the euro area and the United States: it had little to do with the three bonanza episodes. I am similarly puzzled by two episodes of banking crises: France in 1994–95 and Italy in 1990–95. Although both events fit the definition of a banking crisis given in table 5, it is unclear whether one should relate them to a previous bonanza. In France the episode corresponds to the government recapitalization of Crédit Lyonnais, a state‐owned bank that ran into troublewhen it became known that, as a result of a financial scandal, it had become the de facto owner of Metro‐Goldwyn‐Mayer, the world’s most famous movie studio. In Italy it corresponds to the state bailout of BancodiNapoli,","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"27 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125971701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Relation of the Directors to the Work and Publications of the NBER","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/650339","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/650339","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124633360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Copyright","authors":"","doi":"10.1086/650337","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/650337","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"46 12","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"120923407","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Comment","authors":"George M. von Furstenberg","doi":"10.1086/596008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/596008","url":null,"abstract":"Bergin and Lin pick up a venerable distinction that, poorly represented with disaggregated trade data now accessible, has become the dernier cri of trade theory. The general issue of the new literature is what influences the division into intensive and extensive margin of the growth of a country’s share in the global exports going to another country. The specific issue raised in a subset of papers like the one here that is of interest is how, and then why, that division is influenced by the exchange rate regime between pairs of countries. This comment first conveys the essence of the historical distinction and then shows how the data currently used fail to reflect that distinction. This raises the question of what a contemporary implementation of the classical concept, largely preserved in Bergin and Lin’s model but not in its empirical implementation, could imply. It then discusses the absence of substantial uncertainty about future real exchange rates in the model, which detracts from the paper’s main theme. Other aspects that are crucial to the industrial organization of cross‐border trade, such as foreign direct investment (FDI) and trade in components, also are missing from the model. This makes it difficult to test hypotheses with it or to account for its findings. One crude validation test could be to check on the growth of trade shares for Canada and Mexico with the United States since the Canada‐ U.S. Free Trade Agreement 1988 or the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 1994 and examine how this growth has been divided between the extensive and intensivemargins. My hunch is that the expansion of the bilateral trade shares of these countries is about as large and as concentrated at the extensive margin as Bergin and Lin estimated for","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123883820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reflections on Monetary Policy in the Open Economy","authors":"Richard Clarida","doi":"10.1086/596001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/596001","url":null,"abstract":"Aperennial topic of discussion among scholars and policymakers is how best to think about a benchmark for macroeconomics as it applies to monetary policy. Should the benchmark for policy analysis be the open economy with international interest rate linkages and flexible exchange rates (after all, major economies are in fact open with flexible exchange rates), or should it be the closed economy in which such linkages and exchange rate adjustments are assumed away? Of course, few if any policy makers would seek to guide policy by ignoring capital flows and exchange rates, but in many cases it appears as though the starting point for analysis is the closed‐economy macro model, these days a variant of the dynamic new Keynesian model. Those who start from a closed‐economy framework often have questions about how “openness” influences the analysis. How does the neutral real interest depend on “global” developments? Is the Phillips curve trade‐off between inflation and domestic output better or worse in the open versus the closed economy? Is “potential GDP” a function of global developments, or only of domestic resources available and domestic productivity? Perhaps most important, how—if at all—does openness influence the optimalmonetary policy rule? Is a Taylor rule the rightmonetary policy for an open economy? In 2002 Jordi Gali, Mark Gertler, and I published a paper in the Journal of Monetary Economics that developed a benchmark (at least in ourway of thinking) dynamic two‐country optimizing macro model of optimal monetary policies in the open economy. Our focus in that paper was deriving optimal policy rules in the two‐country model and assessing the gains from international monetary policy cooperation. In that paper, we emphasized the following implications of the model:","PeriodicalId":353207,"journal":{"name":"NBER International Seminar on Macroeconomics","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115555807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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