Following the recent financial crisis of August 2007 in US, economists and policy makers hold the view that monetary policy may have an effect on real economic activity through ‘risk taking channel’ which indicates the risk behavior of economic agents and the linkages between monetary policy...

It is important to identify the effects of stock prices on financial and macroeconomic variables when the development of capital markets is concerned. In this study, AB type-SVAR models are employed, whereupon impulse response functions (IRFs) and forecast error variance decompositions (FEVDs)...

This paper surveys the empirical literature on total factor productivity (TFP) and the sources of growth in the East Asian Countries. It raises the queston whether the literature has helped us understand better the factors that have propelled growth in the region. The paper discusses the main...

The foundations of the aggregate production function were long ago thrown into doubt by problems of aggregation and the Cambridge capital theory controversies. Yet the aggregate production function, whether in the familiar form of the Cobb-Douglas, the CES, or the translog, continues to be...

This paper shows that unit labor costs (ulcs), the most widely used measure of competitiveness, can be interpreted as the labor share in output multiplied by a price-adjustment factor. This has three main implications. First, ulcs are not just a technical concept since they embody the social...

This paper evaluates the methodological foundations of some recent attempts to estimate econometrically the degree of market power and the degree of returns to scale in manufacturing. The method discussed is based on estimating the aggregate production function in growth rate form. It is argued,...

This comment raises three main issues about He and Qin's (2004)attempt at modeling investment in the PRC. The first is this author's skepticism about the general applicability of the neoclassical model of investment to the PRC. Second, that their model for business investment, based on the...

This paper shows that previous arguments about the problems in interpreting the coefficients in multiplicative-logarithmic functions, derived from an arbitrary rebasing of the series, are incorrect. In the specific case of the translog production function, the tests for the CES, Cobb-Douglas and...