William A. Barnett - Böcker

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in index number and aggregation theory, since the two previously divergent fields have been successfully unified. The underlying aggregator functions which are weakly separable subfunctions of utility and production functions, are the building blocks of economic theory, and the derivation of index numbers based upon their ability to track those building blocks is now called the "economic theory of index numbers." William Barnett, the coeditor of this volume, introduced modern economic index number theory into monetary economics. His merger of economic index number theory, with monetary theory was based upon the use of Diewert's approach to producing "superlative" nonparametric approximations to the theoretically exact aggregator functions.This book comprises a focussed and unified collection of Barnett's most important publications in this area. The papers in the book have been organized into logical sections, with unifying introductions and overviews. The result is a systematic development of the state-of-the-art in monetary and financial aggregation theory. The sections cover the origin of the user cost price of monetary services. Exact aggregation of monetary assets on the demand side for consumers and firms, and on the supply side for financial intermediaries, general equilibrium of all economic agents' demands and supplies, dynamic solution of the exact system, and extension to monetary aggregation under risk. The extension of index number theory to the case of risk is completely general, and can be applied to tracking any exact economic aggregator under risk. In all cases, the criterion used for evaluation is the tracking ability of the approximation to the exact aggregator function of economic theory. Many of the empirical and policy puzzles in monetary economics disappear when simple sum monetary aggregates are replaced by index numbers that are coherent with theory. Simple sum monetary aggregates became incoherent with theory, when monetary assets began paying interest and therefore could no longer be viewed as perfect substitutes. This is a useful tool to those associated with economics departments within universities, business schools, central banks and federal governments, financial institutions including underwriters, bankers and stockbrokers.

Economic theory defines and constrains admissible functional form and functional structure throughout the economy. Constraints on behavioral functions of individual economic agents and on the recursive nesting of those behavioral functions often are derived directly from economic theory. Theoretically implied constraints on the properties of equilibrium stochastic solution paths also are common, although are less directly derived. In both cases, the restrictions on relevant function spaces have implications for econometric modeling and for the choice of hypotheses to be tested and potentially imposed. This book contains state-of-the-art cumulative research and results on functional structure, approximation, and estimation: for (1) individual economic agents, (2) aggregation over those agents, and (3) equilibrium solution stochastic processes. A: Functional Structure Modeling, Aggregation, and Estimation. Over the past 25 years, William Barnett, who is a coeditor of this volume, has advanced the state of the art of this subject in many directions. He has contributed many new modeling and inference approaches, such as the Laurent series flexible functional form approach, the Muntz-Szatz series seminonparametric approach, the generalized hypocycloidal utility tree approach, and an aggregated convergence approach within the space of stochastic differential equations. Many of Barnett's innovations contain the earlier Taylor series and CES approaches as nested special cases. He also has contributed extensively to the literature on aggregation over approximating specifications in econometrics, as well as to aggregation over economic agents and goods in economic theory. In addition, his work in those areas has motivated new approaches by others, such as the generalized symmetric Barnett approach originated by Diewert and Wales (1987). Part 1 of this book contains Barnett's contributions to functional structure modeling and estimation for consumers, while Part 2 contains his contributions on those subjects for firms. B: Statistical Theory. Barnett's contributions to statistical theory provide much of the asymptotic statistical theory needed to apply econometric inference procedures to the literature on economic functional structure and approximation. His contributions to the relevant statistical theory include discovery of the measure theoretic foundations for confidence regions in sampling theoretic statistics and the derivation of the asymptotic theory for joint maximum likelihood inference with closed-form systemwide models. He originated a multivariate extension of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test to permit testing the disturbances of an equation system for multivariate normality. Part 3 contains relevant results in statistical theory. C: Nonlinear Time Series. Analogous approximation and function space problems arise in time series approaches. A Volterra expansion in the time domain with a finite number of terms cannot span the space of possible time-series solution processes from the state space structures of economic theory. Hence when sample size is finite, all structural and time-series approximating specifications, whether dynamic or static, drive an unavoidable wedge between econometrics and economic theory. No easy solution exists to this inherently deep problem in econometric modeling and testing. In the time series literature, Barnett has designed and run a competition among tests for nonlinear and chaotic structure. The purpose was to investigate paradoxes that arose in that literature following his publication of findings of nonlinearity and chaos in some economic time series. The literature on modeling and filtering out linear structure from time series is now highly advanced. But many unsolved problems remain in the literature on modeling or filtering out various forms of nonlinear structure from time series. The results of Barnett's competition have cast much needed light on those problems and the relative properties of the various available competing approaches. Contributions to time series modeling and inference in the time domain and the frequency domain are provided in Part 4.

The last fifteen or twenty years have been marked by fundamental advances in the sources of complex behavior in micro- and macro-economics, in the practical and methodological implications of such behavior, and in the methods and tools appropriate to cope with them. Much of these developments have been driven by the recognition and acceptance by economists of approaches initiated in other fields - such as non-linear dynamics, statistical physics, network theory, biology, computer science, and the use of computational methods as problem-solving tools - giving rise to important and innovative impulses to economic thinking. The sixteen papers in this book -- the fourteenth volume in the series International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics - reflect from various perspectives this recent evolution. They are the outgrow from a selection of communications presented at the COMPLEXITY2000 workshop held in Aix en Provence, France, 4-6 May 2000 - a workshop that brought together, from twenty-two nations, almost seventy economists, mathematicians, biologists and physicists interested in complex phenomena. All papers were strictly refereed in the intended tradition of the series: to provide journal quality collections of research papers of unusual importance in areas of currently highly visible activity within the economics profession. With its selection of articles, the book presents an overview of advanced contributions to complexity in economics and social system, such as chaotic dynamics and multiple equilibria, agent-based models, applications of genetic algorithms, non-equilibrium macro-dynamics, information transmission, learning mechanisms. Although the papers address economic problems, the authorship and the perspectives presented are interdisciplinary and provide therefore a number of innovative insights and solutions to classical or new questions.

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.

The nine papers in this volume are a diverse set of quality contributions to the field in economics that is called political economy. It is important to understand that social scientists hold different interpretations of the term political economy. Most mainstream economists expect a paper in the field to use the same models as are used in neoclassical economics, be it micro or macro. The field of political economy is seen by most economists to be exclusively the purview of their field. However, the political system of a country determines the nature of its economics system. The economy feeds back to the political system but the rules of the game are determined by the political system. The study of politics is the hardest task in the social sciences. The political system defines the scope of the economics system while taking resources from the economy in order to run campaigns and produce the types of compromises that are required of a stable political system that allows economic agents to make sensible investments. The interaction between the highly inter-dependant yet very different fields of politics and economics forms the basis of this volume. It contains a collection of key papers on the topic of analytical political economy. The papers authored by some of the foremost experts in the field. It is part of the "ISETE" series.

The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics conference held in 1987 at the IC^T2 (Innovation, Creativity, and Capital) Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. The essays present fundamental new research on the analysis of complicated outcomes in relatively simple macroeconomic models. The book covers econometric modelling and time series analysis techniques in five parts. Part I focuses on sunspot equilibria, the study of uncertainty generated by nonstochastic economic models. Part II examines the more traditional examples of deterministic chaos: bubbles, instability, and hyperinflation. Part III contains the most current literature dealing with empirical tests for chaos and strange attractors. Part IV deals with chaos and informational complexity. Part V, Nonlinear Econometric Modelling, includes tests for and applications of nonlinearity.

This book brings together presentations of some of the fundamental new research that has begun to appear in the areas of dynamic structural modeling, nonlinear structural modeling, time series modeling, nonparametric inference, and chaotic attractor inference. The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the third of a conference series entitled International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics. This conference was held at the IC;s2 (Innovation, Creativity and Capital) Institute at the University of Texas at Austin on May 22-23, l986.

This book presents an overview of developments in social choice theory and welfare economics, drawn from the proceedings of the eighth conference in the International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics series under the general editorship of William Barnett. The volume is divided into four parts, each exploring broad themes in social choice theory and welfare economics. First, an overview of the short, yet intense, period of the subject's historical development. Second, a discussion of the ethical aspects of social choice, encompassing such issues as equal opportunity, individual rights, and population monotonicity. Third, a study of the algebraic and combinatorial aspects of social choice theory. The final section is devoted to a study of aggregation with risk aversion to current and future variables, and the creation of an intertemporal framework to go beyond the usual static description of income distributions measured over a short period.

Nonlinear Econometric Modeling in Time Series presents the more recent literature on nonlinear time series. Specific topics covered with respect to nonlinearity include cointegration tests, risk-related asymmetries, structural breaks and outliers, Bayesian analysis with a threshold, consistency and asymptotic normality, asymptotic inference and error-correction models. With a world-class panel of contributors, this volume addresses topics with major applications for fields such as foreign-exchange markets and interest rate analysis. Eleventh in this series of international symposia, this volume is also part of the European Conference Series in Quantitative Economics and Econometrics (EC)2.

Commerce, Complexity, and Evolution is a significant contribution to the paradigm - straddling economics, finance, marketing, and management - which acknowledges that commercial systems are evolutionary, and must therefore be analysed using evolutionary tools. Evolutionary systems display complicated behaviours which are to a significant degree generated endogenously, rather than being solely the product of exogenous shocks, hence the conjunction of complexity with evolution. This volume considers a wide range of systems, from the entire economy at one extreme to the behaviour of single markets at the other. The papers are united by methodologies which at their core are evolutionary, though the techniques cover a wide range, from philosophical discourse to differential equations, genetic algorithms, multi-agent simulations and cellular automata. Issues considered include the dynamics of debt-deflation, stock management in a complex environment, interactions between consumers and its effect upon market behaviour, and nonlinear methods to profit from financial market volatility.

The Sixth Annual International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics was dedicated to Jacques Drèze on the occasion of his retirement. During his career, he worked on the development extension and applications of general equilibrium theory, and he also was essential to the founding of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. The papers in this volume are those given at the conference, and present some of the recent developments in general equilibrium theory in perspective of actual and potential applications.

New Approaches to Monetary Economics brings together presentations of innovative research in the field of monetary economics. Much of this research develops and applies approaches to modelling financial intermediation, aggregate fluctuations, monetary aggregation and transactions-motivated monetary equilibrium. The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the second in a conference series entitled International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics. This conference was held in 1985 at the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. The symposia in this series are sponsored by the IC2 Institute and the RGK Foundation. New Approaches to Monetary Economics, edited by Professors William A. Barnett and Kenneth J. Singleton, consists of five parts. Part I examines transactions-motivated monetary holding in general equilibrium; Part II, financial intermediation; Part III, monetary aggregation theory, Part IV, issues in aggregate fluctuation; and Part V, theoretical issues in the foundations of monetary economics and macroeconomics.

First published in 1996, Dynamic Disequilibrium Modeling presents some surveys and developments in dynamic disequilibrium and continuous time econometric modeling along with related research from associated fields. Specific areas covered include applications in business cycles and growth, tests for nonlinearity, rationing and disequilibrium dynamics, and demographic and international applications. The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the ninth conference in The International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics series under the general editorship of William Barnett. The proceedings volume includes the most important papers presented at a conference held at the University of Munich on August 31-September 4, 1993.

This book brings together presentations of some of the fundamental new research that has begun to appear in the areas of dynamic structural modeling, nonlinear structural modeling, time series modeling, nonparametric inference, and chaotic attractor inference. The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the third of a conference series entitled International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics. This conference was held at the IC;s2 (Innovation, Creativity and Capital) Institute at the University of Texas at Austin on May 22-23, l986.

The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics conference held in 1987 at the IC^T2 (Innovation, Creativity, and Capital) Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. The essays present fundamental new research on the analysis of complicated outcomes in relatively simple macroeconomic models. The book covers econometric modelling and time series analysis techniques in five parts. Part I focuses on sunspot equilibria, the study of uncertainty generated by nonstochastic economic models. Part II examines the more traditional examples of deterministic chaos: bubbles, instability, and hyperinflation. Part III contains the most current literature dealing with empirical tests for chaos and strange attractors. Part IV deals with chaos and informational complexity. Part V, Nonlinear Econometric Modelling, includes tests for and applications of nonlinearity.

This collection of papers delivered at the Fifth International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics in 1988 is devoted to the estimation and testing of models that impose relatively weak restrictions on the stochastic behaviour of data. Particularly in highly non-linear models, empirical results are very sensitive to the choice of the parametric form of the distribution of the observable variables, and often nonparametric and semiparametric models are a preferable alternative. Methods and applications that do not require string parametric assumptions for their validity, that are based on kernels and on series expansions, and methods for independent and dependent observations are investigated and developed in these essays by renowned econometricians.

The Sixth Annual International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics was dedicated to Jacques Drèze on the occasion of his retirement. During his career, he worked on the development extension and applications of general equilibrium theory, and he also was essential to the founding of the Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE) in Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. The papers in this volume are those given at the conference, and present some of the recent developments in general equilibrium theory in perspective of actual and potential applications.

The contents of this volume are drawn from the seventh International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics, and represent recent advances in the development of concepts and methods in political economy. Contributors include leading practitioners working on formal, applied, and historical approaches to the subject. The collection will interest scholars in the fields of political science and political sociology no less than economics. Part I outlines relevant concepts in political economy, including implementation, community, ideology, and institutions. Part II covers theory and applications of the spatial model of voting. Part III considers the different characteristics that govern the behaviour of institutions, while Part IV analyses competition between political representatives. Part V is concerned with the way in which government acquires information held by voters or advisors, and Part VI addresses government choice on monetary policy and taxation.

This collection of papers delivered at the Fifth International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics in 1988 is devoted to the estimation and testing of models that impose relatively weak restrictions on the stochastic behaviour of data. Particularly in highly non-linear models, empirical results are very sensitive to the choice of the parametric form of the distribution of the observable variables, and often nonparametric and semiparametric models are a preferable alternative. Methods and applications that do not require string parametric assumptions for their validity, that are based on kernels and on series expansions, and methods for independent and dependent observations are investigated and developed in these essays by renowned econometricians.

The contents of this volume are drawn from the seventh International Symposium in Economic Theory and Econometrics, and represent recent advances in the development of concepts and methods in political economy. Contributors include leading practitioners working on formal, applied, and historical approaches to the subject. The collection will interest scholars in the fields of political science and political sociology no less than economics. Part I outlines relevant concepts in political economy, including implementation, community, ideology, and institutions. Part II covers theory and applications of the spatial model of voting. Part III considers the different characteristics that govern the behaviour of institutions, while Part IV analyses competition between political representatives. Part V is concerned with the way in which government acquires information held by voters or advisors, and Part VI addresses government choice on monetary policy and taxation.

This book presents an overview of developments in social choice theory and welfare economics, drawn from the proceedings of the eighth conference in the International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics series under the general editorship of William Barnett. The volume is divided into four parts, each exploring broad themes in social choice theory and welfare economics. First, an overview of the short, yet intense, period of the subject's historical development. Second, a discussion of the ethical aspects of social choice, encompassing such issues as equal opportunity, individual rights, and population monotonicity. Third, a study of the algebraic and combinatorial aspects of social choice theory. The final section is devoted to a study of aggregation with risk aversion to current and future variables, and the creation of an intertemporal framework to go beyond the usual static description of income distributions measured over a short period.

First published in 1996, Dynamic Disequilibrium Modeling presents some surveys and developments in dynamic disequilibrium and continuous time econometric modeling along with related research from associated fields. Specific areas covered include applications in business cycles and growth, tests for nonlinearity, rationing and disequilibrium dynamics, and demographic and international applications. The contents of this volume comprise the proceedings of the ninth conference in The International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics series under the general editorship of William Barnett. The proceedings volume includes the most important papers presented at a conference held at the University of Munich on August 31-September 4, 1993.

Nonlinear Dynamics and Economics, first published in 1997, presents developments in nonlinear economic dynamics along with related research from associated fields, including mathematics, statistics, biology, and physics. Specific areas covered include instability in economic theory, nonlinearity in financial markets, tests for nonlinearity and chaos, frequency domain methods, nonlinear business cycles, and nonlinear prediction and forecasting. This volume comprises the tenth in the International Symposia in Economic Theory and Econometrics series under the general editorship of William Barnett. This proceedings volume includes revisions of the most important papers presented at a conference held at the European University Institute in Florence on July 6-17, 1992, along with revisions of the related, invited papers presented at the annual meetings of the American Statistical Association held in San Francisco on August 8-12, 1993.

Nonlinear Econometric Modeling in Time Series presents the more recent literature on nonlinear time series. Specific topics covered with respect to nonlinearity include cointegration tests, risk-related asymmetries, structural breaks and outliers, Bayesian analysis with a threshold, consistency and asymptotic normality, asymptotic inference and error-correction models. With a world-class panel of contributors, this volume addresses topics with major applications for fields such as foreign-exchange markets and interest rate analysis. Eleventh in this series of international symposia, this volume is also part of the European Conference Series in Quantitative Economics and Econometrics (EC)2.

Commerce, Complexity, and Evolution is a significant contribution to the paradigm - straddling economics, finance, marketing, and management - which acknowledges that commercial systems are evolutionary, and must therefore be analysed using evolutionary tools. Evolutionary systems display complicated behaviours which are to a significant degree generated endogenously, rather than being solely the product of exogenous shocks, hence the conjunction of complexity with evolution. This volume considers a wide range of systems, from the entire economy at one extreme to the behaviour of single markets at the other. The papers are united by methodologies which at their core are evolutionary, though the techniques cover a wide range, from philosophical discourse to differential equations, genetic algorithms, multi-agent simulations and cellular automata. Issues considered include the dynamics of debt-deflation, stock management in a complex environment, interactions between consumers and its effect upon market behaviour, and nonlinear methods to profit from financial market volatility.

Within the subprime crisis (2007) and the recent global financial crisis of 2008-2009, we have observed significant decline, corrections and structural changes in most US and European financial markets. Furthermore, it seems that this crisis has been rapidly transmitted toward the most developed and emerging countries and has strongly affected the whole economy. This volume aims to present recent researches in linear and nonlinear modelling of economic and financial time-series. The several discussions of empirical results of its chapters clearly help to improve the understanding of the financial mechanisms inherent to this crisis. They also yield an important overview on the sources of the financial crisis and its main economic and financial consequences. The book provides the audience a comprehensive understanding of financial and economic dynamics in various aspects using modern financial econometric methods. It addresses the empirical techniques needed by economic agents to analyze the dynamics of these markets and illustrates how they can be applied to the actual data. It also presents and discusses new research findings and their implications.

A significant part of economics as we know it today is the outcome of battles that took place in the post-war years between Keynesians and monetarists. In the US, the focus of these battles was often between the neo-Keynesians at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Chicago monetarists. The undisputed leader of the MIT Keynesians was Paul A. Samuelson, one of the most influential economists of the 20th century and arguably of all time. Samuelson’s output covered a vast number of subjects within economics, the quality of theseoften pioneering contributions unmatched in the modern era.The volume focuses both on how Samuelson’s work has been developed by others and on how that work fits into subsequent developments in the various fields of speciality within which Samuelson operated.

By focusing on the human side as well as the intellectual dimensions of how economists work and think, this collection of interviews with top economists of the 20th century becomes a startling and lively introduction to the modern world of macroeconomics. A fun read! For more information, frequent updates, and to comment on the forthcoming book, visit William A. Barnett's weblog at http://economistmind.blogspot.com/. Acclaim for Inside the Economist's Mind "In candid interviews, these great economists prove to be fabulous story tellers of their lives and times. Unendingly gripping for insiders, this book should also help non-specialists understand how economists think."Professor Julio Rotemberg, Harvard University Business School, and Editor, Review of Economics and Statistics. "Economics used to be called the 'dismal science'. It will be impossible for anybody to hold that view anymore ... This is science with flesh and blood, and a lot of fascinating stories that you will find nowhere else."Dr. Jean-Pascal Bénassy, Paris-Jourdan Sciences Économiques, Paris, France "This book provides a rare and intriguing view of the personal and professional lives of leading economists ... It is like A Beautiful Mind, scaled by a factor of 16 [the number of interviews in the book]."Professor Lee Ohanian, University of California at Los Angeles " ... if you want an insider view of how economics has been developing in the last decades, this is the (only) book for you."Professor Giancarlo Gandolfo, University of Rome ‘La Sapienza,’ Rome "Here we see the HUMAN side of path-breaking research, the personalities and pitfalls, the DRAMA behind the science."Professor Francis X. Diebold, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia