There are five topics of debate that I will cover today: 1) Does inflation targeting improve economic performance? 2) Is inflation targeting consistent with the dual mandate? 3) Can central bank transparency go too far? 4) Would a price level target be better than an inflation target? 5) Would a point target be better than a target range?
Objective: The objective of this work was the investigation of the extent to which the introduction of new drugs has increased society's ability to produce goods and services by increasing the number of hours worked per member of the working-age population. Methods: Econometric models of ability-to-work measures from data on approximately 200,000 individuals with 47 major chronic conditions observed throughout a 15-year period (1982-1996) were estimated.
The recent media and political attention on service outsourcing from developed to developing countries gives the impression that outsourcing is exploding. As a result, workers in industrial countries are anxious about job losses. This paper aims to establish what are the hypes and what are the facts. The results show that although service outsourcing has been steadily increasing it is still very low, and that in the United States and many other industrial countries "insourcing" of services is greater than outsourcing.
In this address, I first describe the hallmarks of the Greenspan Fed and the advantages of this strategy that have produced such favorable economic outcomes. Then I look at how well the Fed might do after Greenspan and what challenges it might face. This discussion then leads naturally to suggestions for how the Fed should operate in the future to continue the excellent performance it has achived under Alan Greenspan.
Several econometric studies have concluded that technical progress embodied in equipment is a major source of manufacturing productivity growth. Other research has suggested that, over the long run, growth in the U.S. economy's 'health output' has been at least as large as the growth in non-health goods and services. One important input in the production of health pharmaceuticals is even more R&D- intensive than equipment.
Due to the importance of leisure time in general, and longevity in particular, to economic well-being, we propose replacing GDP in the production function by "full income," defined herein. We hypothesize that R&D-generated increases in the stock of knowledge capital may have a positive impact on both components of full income: leisure time (via longetivity) and consumption of goods and services.
While recent research has emphasized the desirability of studying effects of changes in marginal tax rates on taxable income, broadly defined, there has been comparatively little analysis of effects of marginal tax rate changes on entrepreneurial entry. This margin is likely to be important both because of the likely greater elasticity of entrepreneurial decisions with respect to tax changes (relative to decisions about hours worked) and because of recent research linking entrepreneurship, mobility, and household wealth accumulation.
We perform an econometric analysis of the effect of new drug launches on longevity, using data from the IMS Health Drug Launches database and the WHO Mortality Database. Our data cover virtually all of the diseases borne by people in 52 countries during the period 1982-2001 and enable us to control, to an unusually great extent, for the effects of other potential determinants of longevity, e.g., education, income, nutrition, the environment, and "lifestyle." We find that launches of new chemical entities (NCEs) have a strong positive impact on the probability of survival.
This paper outlines a financial statement analysis for use in equity valuation. Standard profitability analysis is incorporated, and extended, and is complemented with an analysis of growth. The perspective is one of forecasting payoffs to equities. So financial statement analysis is presented first as a matter of pro forma analysis of the future, with forecasted ratios viewed as building blocks of forecasts of payoffs. The analysis of current financial statements is then seen as a matter of identifying current ratios as predictors of the future ratios that drive equity payoffs.