Apostolos Serletis - Böcker

Almost half a century has elapsed since the demand for money began to attract widespread attention from economists and econometricians, and it has been a topic of ongoing controversy and research ever since. Interest in the topic stemmed from three principal sources. Firstofall,therewasthematter oftheinternaldynamicsofmacr- conomics, to which Harry Johnson drew attention in his 1971 Ely Lecture on “The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter- Revolution,” American Economic Review 61 (May 1971). The main lesson about money that had been drawn from the so-called “Key- sian Revolution” was — rightly or wrongly — that it didn’t matter all that much. The inherited wisdom that undergraduates absorbed in the 1950s was that macroeconomics was above all about the determination of income and employment, that the critical factors here were saving and investment decisions, and that monetary factors, to the extent that they mattered at all, only had an in?uence on these all important variables through a rather narrow range of market interest rates. C- ventional wisdom never goes unchallenged in economics, except where its creators manage to control access to graduate schools and the jo- nals,anditiswithnocynicalintentthatIcon?rmJohnson’ssuggestion that those of us who embarked on academic careers in the ’60s found in this wisdom a ready-made target.

The series "International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics" publishes quality proceedings of conferences and symposia. Since all articles published in these volumes are refereed relative to the standards of the best journals, not all papers presented at the symposia are published in these proceedings volumes. Occasionally these volumes include articles that were not presented at a symposium or conference, but are of high quality and are relevant to the focus of the volume. The topics chosen for these volumes are those of particular research importance at the time of the selection of the topic. Each volume has different co-editors, chosen to have particular expertise relevant to the focus of that particular volume. Most of the chapters in this volume were delivered as papers in two sessions that William Barnett organized at a conference held in Vigo (Spain) in July 2005, sponsored by the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. The volume brings together fundamental new research in economics, including relevant significant innovations in microeconometrics, macroeconomics, and monetary and financial economics, thereby making substantive contributions to the literature. This book: presents original, innovative research; covers a number of issues in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and financial economics; and is part of the ISETE series.

This title investigates developments in Canada since the 1960s, using contemporary advances in the field of applied econometrics. In particular, the book analyses the theoretical foundations of public sector activities and evaluates the several theories of government growth. Issues of convergence are also investigated as they manifest themselves in per capita income across Canadian provinces, and as to how successful government income equalization policies have been in furthering such convergence. Moreover, the openness of the Canadian economy is investigated in terms of the importance of exports on GDP growth and of its participation in the world of an internationally integrated capital market. The book also analyses monetary policy issues and investigates the role of monetary aggregates and the effectiveness of monetary policy. Finally, it addresses the issue of the existence or not of electoral and partisan cycles in Canada, by incorporating both fiscal and monetary principles and applying them to the lively world of Canadian politics.

Almost half a century has elapsed since the demand for money began to attract widespread attention from economists and econometricians, and it has been a topic of ongoing controversy and research ever since. Interest in the topic stemmed from three principal sources. Firstofall,therewasthematter oftheinternaldynamicsofmacr- conomics, to which Harry Johnson drew attention in his 1971 Ely Lecture on “The Keynesian Revolution and the Monetarist Counter- Revolution,” American Economic Review 61 (May 1971). The main lesson about money that had been drawn from the so-called “Key- sian Revolution” was — rightly or wrongly — that it didn’t matter all that much. The inherited wisdom that undergraduates absorbed in the 1950s was that macroeconomics was above all about the determination of income and employment, that the critical factors here were saving and investment decisions, and that monetary factors, to the extent that they mattered at all, only had an in?uence on these all important variables through a rather narrow range of market interest rates. C- ventional wisdom never goes unchallenged in economics, except where its creators manage to control access to graduate schools and the jo- nals,anditiswithnocynicalintentthatIcon?rmJohnson’ssuggestion that those of us who embarked on academic careers in the ’60s found in this wisdom a ready-made target.

Macroeconomic Policy in the Canadian Economy investigates developments in Canada over the last forty years, using recent advances in the field of applied econometrics. In particular, the book analyzes the theoretical foundations of public sector activities and evaluates the several theories of government growth. Issues of convergence are also investigated as they manifest themselves in per capita income across Canadian provinces, and as to how successful government income equalization policies have been in furthering such convergence. Moreover, the openness of the Canadian economy is investigated in terms of the importance of exports on GDP growth and of its participation in the world of an internationally integrated capital market.The book also analyzes monetary policy issues and investigates the role of monetary aggregates and the effectiveness of monetary policy. Finally, it addresses the issue of the existence or not of electoral and partisan cycles in Canada, by incorporating both fiscal and monetary principles and applying them to the lively world of Canadian politics.

This book provides a comprehensive and systematic introduction to the problem of the definition of money and investigates the gains that can be achieved by a rigorous use of microeconomic- and aggregation-theoretic foundations in the construction of monetary aggregates. It provides readers with key aspects of monetary economics and macroeconomics, including monetary aggregation, demand systems, flexible functional forms, long-run monetary neutrality, the welfare cost of inflation, and nonlinear chaotic dynamics.This book offers the following conclusions: the simple-sum approach to monetary aggregation and log-linear money demand functions, currently used by central banks, are inappropriate for monetary policy purposes; the choice of monetary aggregation procedure is crucial in evaluating the welfare cost of inflation; the inter-related problems of monetary aggregation and money demand will be successfully investigated in the context of flexible functional forms that satisfy theoretical regularity globally, pointing the way forward to useful and productive research.

Bringing together leading-edge research and innovative energy markets econometrics, this book collects the author's most important recent contributions in energy economics. In particular, the book:• applies recent advances in the field of applied econometrics to investigate a number of issues regarding energy markets, including the theory of storage and the efficient markets hypothesis• presents the basic stylized facts on energy price movements using correlation analysis, causality tests, integration theory, cointegration theory, as well as recently developed procedures for testing for shared and codependent cycles• uses recent advances in the financial econometrics literature to model time-varying returns and volatility in energy prices and to test for causal relationships between energy prices and their volatilities• explores the functioning of electricity markets and applies conventional models of time series analysis to investigate a number of issues regarding wholesale power prices in the western North American markets• applies tools from statistics and dynamical systems theory to test for nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos in a number of North American hydrocarbon markets (those of ethane, propane, normal butane, iso-butane, naptha, crude oil, and natural gas)

Bringing together leading-edge research and innovative energy markets econometrics, this book collects the author's most important recent contributions in energy economics. In particular, the book:• applies recent advances in the field of applied econometrics to investigate a number of issues regarding energy markets, including the theory of storage and the efficient markets hypothesis• presents the basic stylized facts on energy price movements using correlation analysis, causality tests, integration theory, cointegration theory, as well as recently developed procedures for testing for shared and codependent cycles• uses recent advances in the financial econometrics literature to model time-varying returns and volatility in energy prices and to test for causal relationships between energy prices and their volatilities• explores the functioning of electricity markets and applies conventional models of time series analysis to investigate a number of issues regarding wholesale power prices in the western North American markets• applies tools from statistics and dynamical systems theory to test for nonlinear dynamics and deterministic chaos in a number of North American hydrocarbon markets (those of ethane, propane, normal butane, iso-butane, naptha, crude oil, and natural gas)

Interfuel substitution is an issue that is — and will likely remain — an important topic of inquiry for many years, as governments around the world seek to set policies that are intended to restrain carbon emissions or steer economies toward or away from certain fuels. This book contributes to this issue by estimating short- and long-term interfuel substitution elasticities, at the aggregate and sector levels, through the use of the latest advances in microeconometrics as well as recent international data for a number of OECD and non-OECD countries.

The relationship between the price of oil and the level of economic activity is a fundamental issue in macroeconomics. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about whether positive oil price shocks cause recessions in the United States (and other oil-importing countries), and although there exists a vast empirical literature that investigates the effects of oil price shocks, there are relatively few studies that investigate the direct effects of uncertainty about oil prices on the real economy. The book uses recent advances in macroeconomics and financial economics to investigate the effects of oil price shocks and uncertainty about the price of oil on the level of economic activity.