Volume 10, Issue 1, November 2008

The Research Agenda: Ricardo Lagos on Liquidity and the Search Theory of Money

1. Introduction

In financial economics, the liquidity of assets and markets is associated with the cost of trading. An asset is considered to be liquid if trading it entails relatively low transaction costs, e.g., transaction taxes, brokerage fees, or bid-ask spreads. A market is regarded as liquid if individual traders can find a counterpart for trade relatively quickly, and if the out-of-pocket costs involved in consummating trades are relatively small. There is a vast literature in finance that uses liquidity differences measured by differences in transaction costs to rationalize various asset-pricing puzzles, i.e., asset-return differentials that seem too large to be accounted for by the differences in the stochastic properties of the flows of payments that the assets represent. (For an extensive list of references, see Amihud et al., 2005.)

In monetary economics, "liquidity" refers to the degree to which an asset is useful as a medium of exchange. An asset is illiquid if it cannot be used as means of payment in quid pro quo trades. In particular, the Search Theory of Money--by which I mean the class of models that use search theory to provide micro foundations for monetary exchange that was pioneered by Kiyotaki and Wright (1989)--is built around the premise that assets can be valued not only for the intrinsic value of the real payoffs they represent, but also for their usefulness in the mechanism of exchange. This approach has deepened our understanding of the nature of monetary exchange by making explicit the frictions--e.g., specialization patterns, the configuration of the decentralized exchange mechanism, information structure, and so on--that make monetary exchange an equilibrium. In other words, this approach has proven useful for explaining the grandfather of all asset pricing puzzles: the existence of fiat money; an asset that is a formal claim to nothing yet sells at a positive price. Despite the evident conceptual connection and the potential for cross-fertilization, the Search Theory of Money and the mainstream asset-pricing literature have managed to stay disconnected for many years.

In the sections that follow, I will review some of my recent research and an ongoing research agenda, parts of which I have pursued, or am currently pursuing, with Guillaume Rocheteau, Pierre-Olivier Weill, and Randy Wright. In Sections 2-5 I will survey several papers that represent an effort to develop models in which, much as in the Search Theory of Money, financial assets are valued not only as claims to streams of consumption goods but also for their usefulness in the mechanism of exchange--i.e., for their moneyness, or exchange liquidity. In Section 6 I focus on the notion of transaction liquidity associated with transaction costs that is used in the financial literature, and review two papers that represent an effort to trace this notion of liquidity back to the microstructure of the market in which the assets are traded.

2. From indivisibility and upper bounds to Euler equations

In "A Unified Framework for Monetary Theory and Policy Analysis" (hereafter LW), Randy Wright and I propose a search-based framework that combines some features of search models, such as an explicit mathematical formulation of the decentralized trading and the price-setting mechanisms, with some features of competitive models. Specifically, agents sometimes trade in a decentralized manner as in search theory--bilaterally, at prices determined by bargaining--and sometimes as in competitive theory--with the market, at market clearing prices. There are at least two important benefits from taking this step from pure search theory toward competitive theory. First, it becomes relatively easy to integrate search-based micro foundations for money demand with the rest of macroeconomic theory. For example, some real-world markets may be better approximated by competitive markets, so it may be convenient in applications to be able to incorporate a segment of competitive trades into our search-based theories. Second, it turns out that under certain conditions on preferences (quasi-linearity in one of the goods that is traded competitively), allowing agents periodic access to competitive markets implies that the model remains tractable--even if we work with divisible money and allow agents to carry any nonnegative amount. (Quasi-linearity eliminates wealth effects in the demand for money, which simplifies the dynamics of the endogenous distribution of money holdings. In the simplest version, all agents who trade in the competitive market choose to carry the same money balances into the next round of decentralized trade, therefore periodically, the endogenous distribution of money holdings becomes degenerate. This allows for sharp analytic results, and makes the framework easy to work with. An alternative approach was proposed by Shi, 1997, who develops a tractable search model with divisible money that relies on a large-household construct to avoid distributional issues.)

Just as incorporating a competitive segment brings the search theory of money closer to mainstream macroeconomic theory, relaxing the stark restrictions on money holdings implies that the search-theoretic models can now deliver standard Euler equations. This brings the field within a step of mainstream asset-pricing theory. The missing step is a meaningful portfolio choice problem; something that requires introducing financial assets that agents can hold alongside money balances.

3. A first look at competing assets: money and capital

In "Money and Capital as Competing Media of Exchange," Guillaume Rocheteau and I build on LW and consider a model where real assets (reproducible capital goods) can compete with fiat money as a medium of exchange. Our theory allows agents to choose which assets to exchange in decentralized trades and imposes no restrictions on their portfolios. We establish that a monetary equilibrium exists if and only if money is essential, and offer a condition on fundamentals under which this is the case. The condition states that money is essential when the capital stock that a social planner would choose to accumulate is smaller than the stock of assets that agents need to conduct transactions. In the nonmonetary equilibrium, this liquidity shortage manifests itself as a premium on the rate of return on the assets that can be used as a medium of exchange, and this premium induces agents to over-accumulate capital. Capital plays two roles in this economy: it has a productive role and it serves as a medium of exchange in decentralized trades. The introduction of fiat money helps to disentangle the productive use of capital from its liquidity use, and induces agents to reduce the inefficiently high stock of capital goods. In the monetary equilibrium, money has the same rate of return as capital since both assets can be used in decentralized trade and agents can exploit arbitrage opportunities in the centralized market. We find that when a monetary equilibrium exists, the policy of contracting the money supply at the rate of time preference is optimal.

4. Exchange liquidity and the asset-pricing puzzles

In the basic formulation, assets differ only in the stochastic properties of their payoffs, and agents are free to choose which assets to use as means of payment in decentralized trades. The theory unambiguously predicts that someone testing an agent's Euler equation for the risk-free bill using its measured rate of return would find that, at the margin, this agent can gain from transferring consumption from the future to the present. That is, there would appear to be a risk-free rate puzzle. I also find that, at least qualitatively, the theory may also be consistent with an equity premium in excess of the risk premium that compensates equity holders for bearing undiversifiable aggregate risk. I calibrate the model economies and study the extent to which they are able to generate average equity returns and risk-free rates that are in line with U.S. data. Mehra and Prescott's test of their theory essentially consisted of experimenting with different values of the curvature of the agent's utility function (call it sigma) to find the values for which the average risk-free rate and equity premium in the model matched those in the U.S. economy. I carry out a similar exercise.

First, I consider a baseline economy in which agents are free to use bonds and equity shares in all decentralized trades. I find that for relatively low values of sigma, the liquidity mechanism is inactive and the equilibrium is the one in Mehra-Prescott. For larger values of sigma (equal to or greater than 8) equity shares and bills are valuable in decentralized exchange. This additional motive for holding the assets lowers the return on equity and the risk-free rate from what they would be in the Mehra-Prescott economy, and brings them closer to the data. There is a precise sense in which even if shares are just as useful as bonds for exchange purposes, quantitatively, the model performs better than the Mehra-Prescott frictionless benchmark. For example, with standard constant relative risk aversion preferences, it takes a value of sigma of about 10 for the model to be consistent with asset return data in the Hansen-Jagannathan sense (as opposed to a value of sigma above 20 in Mehra-Prescott). Despite equity shares and bonds being equally acceptable in decentralized exchange, the model is capable of increasing the size of the equity premium somewhat relative to the Mehra-Prescott benchmark. The reason is that equity is a worse hedge against the risk of facing binding trading constraints in the decentralized market than bonds (trading constraints tend to bind more in states where the equity return is low).

Equity and bonds are equally liquid (equally useful to finance decentralize trades) in the baseline model. In order to assess the extent to which liquidity differences (differences in acceptability) can magnify the return differential between equity and bonds, I also analyze specifications in which exogenous restrictions, which can be interpreted as arising from institutional or legal arrangements, give bonds an advantage over equity as a medium of exchange. Specifically, I consider the case in which equity shares cannot be used in a fraction theta of decentralized exchanges (theta =0 is the case with no exogenous liquidity differences analyzed previously). For a calibrated version of this model, I formulate the following question: For a given value of sigma, how large does theta (the relative illiquidity of equity) have to be for the model to generate an average yearly risk-free rate of 1% and an equity premium that matches the long-term average for the U.S. economy? The answer is, quite small: If one allows for the fact that bonds may be slightly better suited than equity shares to play the medium-of-exchange role, then the model is able to match the historical average return to equity and the risk-free rate for the United States with values of sigma between 3 and 5.

I take these results as an indication that prying deeper into the microeconomics of the decentralized exchange process can add to our understanding of how asset prices and returns are determined in actual economies. The quantitative results also highlight the importance of a fundamental question: why is asset X more generally accepted or better suited to function as a medium of exchange than asset Y? The finding that small differences in the acceptability of an asset can generate relatively large return differentials underscores the importance of tackling this question. Some research along these lines is already underway. For example, Kim and Lee (2008), Lester et al. (2008), and Rocheteau (2008) are exploring the possibility that differences in acceptability may arise due to a moral hazard problem in an environment where some assets are more susceptible to counterfeiting than others. Lagos and Rocheteau (2008) are focusing on the differences in acceptability that arise from an adverse selection problem due to the fact that some agents may be better informed about the return characteristics of certain assets than other agents. Nosal and Rocheteau (2008) are exploring trading mechanisms that may give some assets an advantage in exchange as in Zhu and Wallace (2007).

5. Asset prices, exchange liquidity, and monetary policy

In "Some Results on the Optimality and Implementation of the Friedman Rule in the Search Theory of Money," I consider a physical environment similar to the one described in the previous section, but replace the one-period government-issued risk-free real bill with government-issued fiat money. In this context, I show that the quantities in a monetary equilibrium are Pareto optimal if and only if the nominal interest rate, i.e., the marginal (indirect) utility of holding an additional dollar, is constant and equal to zero. Thus, a monetary authority that wishes to maximize welfare ought to follow Milton Friedman's prescription that monetary policy should be conducted with the objective of inducing a zero nominal interest rate. I characterize a large family of deterministic monetary policies that implement Milton Friedman's prescription, in the sense that these policies are consistent with the existence of a monetary equilibrium with zero nominal interest rates. This family of optimal policies is defined by two properties: (i) the money supply must be arbitrarily close to zero for an infinite number of dates, and (ii) asymptotically, on average, the growth rate of the money supply must be at least as large as the rate of time preference. Interestingly, even though the agents' liquidity needs are stochastic in this environment (because equity, whose price is stochastic, can be used alongside money in decentralized trades) this is the same class of monetary policies that implements the Friedman rule in the context of deterministic cash-in-advance economies, as shown by Cole and Kocherlakota (1998) and Wilson (1979).

Under an optimal policy, the quantity of real money balances is large enough so that agents' liquidity needs are satiated, so the real equity price and return are independent of monetary and liquidity considerations. The monetary equilibrium under an optimal monetary policy also exhibits some peculiarities: the price level is indeterminate, and the inflation rate can be independent of the path of the money supply, as was emphasized by Cole and Kocherlakota (1998) in the context of their deterministic cash-in-advance economy. Some may find the failure of the quantity theory and the ensuing price-level indeterminacy unappealing if the model is to be used for applied research. One way to eschew these issues, is to consider a perturbation of a certain class of optimal policies that implements a constant but positive nominal interest rate. A policy that targets a constant nonzero nominal rate in this stochastic environment, however, will typically involve a stochastic monetary policy rule. This is the direction I pursue in "Asset Prices, Liquidity, and Monetary Policy in an Exchange Economy" to study the positive implications of monetary policy for asset prices and returns. The analysis provides insights on how monetary policy must be conducted in order to support a recursive monetary equilibrium with a constant nominal interest rate (with the Pareto optimal equilibrium in which the nominal rate is zero as a limiting case): The growth rate of the money supply must be relatively low in states in which the real value of the equilibrium equity holdings is below average. Something similar happens with the implied inflation rate: it is relatively low between state x and a next-period state x', if the realized real value of the equilibrium equity holdings in state x' is below its state-x conditional expectation.

I also find that on average, liquidity considerations can introduce a negative relationship between the nominal interest rate (and the inflation rate) and real equity returns. Intuitively, since agents are free to use any combination of assets for exchange purposes, even if the equity yields a real and exogenous dividend stream, part of the equity return will be linked to its liquidity return, and this liquidity return in turn depends on the quantity of real money balances--which is a function of the inflation rate. On average, if the rate of inflation is higher, real money balances are lower, and the liquidity return on equity rises, which causes its price to rise and its real measured rate of return (dividend yield plus capital gains) to fall. This type of logic could perhaps help to rationalize the fact that historically, real stock returns and inflation have been negatively correlated--an observation long considered anomalous in the finance literature (e.g., Fama and Schwert, 1977).

The model has a number of implications for the time-paths of output, inflation, interest rates, equity prices, and equity returns, and it would be interesting to explore these implications further. For example, even though variations in aggregate output are effectively exogenous under the types of monetary policies considered, for some parametrizations the theory produces a negative correlation between the inflation rate and the growth rate of output--a short-run "Phillips curve" --but one that is entirely generated by a monetary policy designed to provide liquidity in an economy with stochastic liquidity needs.

6. Transaction liquidity and the structure of financial markets

A recent related strand of work in theoretical finance started by Duffie et al. (2005) subscribes to the notion of market liquidity as trading costs, but goes deeper into the nature of these trading costs by building explicit models of the mechanism of exchange in financial markets. The starting point is the observation that many financial securities (e.g., unlisted stocks, currencies, derivatives, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, federal funds) are traded in over-the-counter (OTC) markets. The defining feature of OTC markets is that they have no formal organization: unlike organized securities exchanges, OTC markets are completely decentralized and do not operate in a particular location at set times. An agent wishing to trade a security in an OTC market is confronted with two fundamental trading frictions: he must first search for a counterpart, and once a potential counterpart has been found, the two parties will typically negotiate the terms of the trade to share the gains.

Duffie et al. (2005) show that a search-based model of an OTC market can parsimoniously rationalize standard measures of transaction liquidity discussed in the finance literature, such as trade volume, bid-ask spreads, and trading delays. A virtue of their formulation is that it is analytically tractable, so all these mechanisms can be well understood. The literature spurred by Duffie et al. (2005), however, keeps the framework tractable by imposing a stark restriction on asset holdings: agents can only hold either 0 units or 1 unit of the asset.

In "Liquidity in Asset Markets with Search Frictions," Guillaume Rocheteau and I develop a search-based model of trade in an OTC market with no restrictions on investors' asset holdings. The model is close in structure and spirit to Duffie et al. (2005): there are two types of agents, investors and dealers. The asset is only held by investors (they can hold any nonnegative position), and their idiosyncratic willingness to hold the asset changes over time, which creates a motive for trade among investors. Trades are intermediated by dealers, and investors contact dealers at random times, with the period of time preceding a trade interpreted as an execution delay. We find that as a result of the restrictions they impose on asset holdings, existing search-based theories of trade in OTC markets neglect a critical feature of illiquid markets, namely, that market participants can mitigate trading frictions by adjusting their asset positions to reduce their trading needs.

The key theoretical observation is that an investor's asset demand in an OTC market depends not only on his valuation for the asset at the time of the trade, but also on his expected valuation over the holding period until his next opportunity to trade. A reduction in trading frictions (e.g., a reduction in the average time it takes for an investor to contact a dealer) makes investors less likely to remain locked into an undesirable asset position and therefore induces them to put more weight on their current valuation. As a result, a reduction in trading frictions induces an investor to demand a larger asset position if his current valuation is relatively high, and a smaller position if it is relatively low, which tends to increase the spread of the distribution of asset holdings. We find that this effect is a key channel through which trading frictions determine trade volume, bid-ask spreads, and trading delays--the dimensions of transaction liquidity that search-based theories of financial intermediation are designed to explain.

In "Search in Asset Markets: Market Structure, Liquidity, and Welfare," Guillaume Rocheteau and I consider a version of this model with free entry of dealers as a way to endogenize trading delays. We show that when interacted with investors' unrestricted asset holding decisions, the dealers' incentives to make markets generate a liquidity externality that can give rise to multiple steady states. This finding suggests that all the symptoms of an illiquid market--large spreads, small trade volume, and long trading delays--can simultaneously arise as a self-fulfilling phenomenon in asset markets with an OTC structure.

In many financial markets, the search-for-a-counterpart problem is alleviated by dealers who trade assets from their own inventories. During market crashes, for instance, it can take a long time for an investor to find a counterpart for trade, either because of the technological limitations of order-handling systems or, as in OTC markets, due to the decentralized nature of the trading process. In these circumstances, liquidity provision by dealers (in the sense of their alleviating the investors' search problem by becoming themselves a counterpart for trade) can become critical, as shown by Weill (2007). In "Crashes and Recoveries in Illiquid Markets," Guillaume Rocheteau, Pierre-Olivier Weill and I extend the model in "Liquidity in Asset Markets with Search Frictions" to allow dealers to accumulate asset inventories. We use the theory to study the equilibrium and the socially optimal inventory policies of dealers during a market crash, which we model as a temporary negative shock to investors' willingness to hold the asset, followed by a (possibly stochastic) recovery path.

Our model can rationalize why dealers intervene in some crises and withdraw in others. We derive conditions under which dealers will find it in their interest to provide liquidity in the aftermath of a crash, as well as conditions under which their incentives to provide liquidity are consistent with market efficiency. We relate the liquidity provision by dealers to the details of the market structure, e.g., dealers' degree of market power or the extent of the search frictions (the average length of time it takes for an investor to contact a dealer), and the characteristics of the crash, such as the severity and persistence of the shock to investors' demands.

We find that the amount of liquidity provided by dealers following a crash varies nonmonotonically with the magnitude of search frictions. When search frictions are small, investors with higher-than-average utility for assets become more willing to hold larger-than-average positions and absorb more of the selling pressure coming from investors whose demands for the asset are lower than normal. In some cases, the former are so willing to buy large quantities of the asset from the other investors, i.e., so willing to serve as a counterpart for trade, that dealers don't find it profitable to step in. If, on the contrary, search frictions are large enough, dealers do not accumulate inventories either, but for a different reason: Trading frictions reduce the investors' need for liquidity provision by dealers. Indeed, in order to reduce their exposure to the search frictions, investors choose to take less extreme asset positions, so the problem of finding a counterpart for trade becomes less relevant. In fact, it is possible that the investors reduce their trading needs so much that dealers don't find it profitable to accumulate inventories following a crash. Thus, if one considers a spectrum of asset markets ranging from those with very small search frictions, such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), to those with severe search frictions, such as the corporate bond market, one would expect to see dealers accumulate more asset inventories during a crash in markets which are in the intermediate range of the spectrum.

7. Concluding remarks

On the one hand, by conceptualizing financial assets in the way monetary theorists think of fiat money, we can develop theories of liquidity that afford new insights into the fundamental features of assets and markets that can make some assets useful in the mechanism of exchange, and hence more prone to exhibit returns that exceed their fundamental valuations. A better understanding of the deeper determinants of the liquidity component of asset valuations can shed new light on a number of asset-pricing anomalies, as well as on the role that monetary policy plays, and the role it ought to play, in the determination of asset prices. On the other hand, the finance microstructure perspective reviewed in Section 6, formalizes some of the key micro elements of the exchange process in actual financial markets, which include trading delays, bilateral decentralized exchange, and other distinctively non-Walrasian elements, much like those which characterize the stylized "decentralized market" of the macro models in Sections 2-5. It seems to me that incorporating these microstructure considerations into those macro models would be a fertile avenue for future research. The hope I hold for this research agenda, is that by continuing to develop the association between the monetary and the financial perspectives on liquidity, we may be able to make progress on some deeper questions, such as which assets are better suited to satisfy the quid pro quo constraints in the Search Theory of Money, and why certain assets seem more prone to be traded in frictional market structures than others.

References

EconomicDynamics Interviews Christopher Pissarides on the Matching Function

EconomicDynamics: The Mortensen-Pissarides matching function has been a standard feature of the analysis of labor markets with unemployment, in particular over the business cycle. With Shimer (2005), its business cycle features have come under fire. Do you see the matching function survive the Shimer (2005) criticism?

Christopher Pissarides: The matching function has been influential in the modeling of labor markets because it is a simple device for capturing the impact of frictions on individuals and market equilibrium. It is the kind of function that economists like to work with, a stable function of a small number of variables, increasing and concave in its arguments and homogenous of degree one. It gives the rate at which jobs form (or "created") over time as a function of the search effort of workers and firms, which in the simplest and most common form are represented by unemployment and job vacancies. In a market without frictions this rate is infinite. So for any given search effort from each side of the market, the speed at which jobs are created is a measure of the frictions in the market. If two countries have identical search inputs, the one with a lower speed of job creation - or alternatively, with a matching function further away from the origin in vacancy-unemployment space - has more frictions.

Once the matching function is introduced to capture frictions in an otherwise conventional model of the labor market, the modeling needs to change fundamentally. The frictions give monopoly power to both firms and workers, and job creation becomes like an investment decision by the firm. Models with a matching function have found many applications, such as the study of unemployment durations, disincentives from social security, employment protection legislation and many others. Empirically it has performed well in its simplest forms for many countries.

The claim made in Pissarides (1985) was that the rents created by the matching function imply that outside non-cyclical variables, such as the imputed value of leisure, influence directly the wage rate. When there are shocks to the productivity variables that also influence the wage rate, the outside influences stop the wage rate short from fully reacting to the shock. This "wage stickiness" implies more volatility in job creation and employment than in a frictionless equilibrium model and less volatility in wages.

Shimer's critique was about the quantitative implications of this model. He argued that although in principle the claim was correct, at conventional parameter values the volatility of employment increased by very little, far less than in the data that it was supposed to match, and the volatility of wages decreased by even less. However, as shown by Hagedorn and Manovskii (2008) in particular, other parameter values that restrict the firm's profit flow to a small fraction of the revenue from the job, deliver more employment volatility. And as shown by Hall (2005) and Hall and Milgrom (2008), other wage mechanisms from the conventional Nash wage equation, can also deliver more employment volatility.

In these (and in many others) extensions the matching function has been preserved intact. Frictions are still represented by the simple matching functions with constant returns and a very small number of arguments. So one cannot really argue that Shimer's critique has diminished the usefulness of the matching function. His critique was about other aspects of the model and was targeted at some popular versions of the model that have been used in the recent literature. It also shifted the focus to wage behavior, which intensified research in this area within the framework of the matching model.

ED: Search models have made considerable advances in recent years, in particular by trying to make explicit relationships that were typically represented in reduced form. Will the matching function survive this as well as the production function?

CP: Search models are aggregative models with all matching frictions represented by an aggregate matching function. I take it that this is what you mean by "reduced form", that instead of representing frictions more specifically according to their origin and their type, we lump them all together into an aggregate function. My reaction to this is that our understanding of labor markets would improve if we could represent frictions in more specific forms, but I don't see it happening yet. We can represent some very special types of frictions by more explicit processes. For example, the most famous one, the urn-ball game, assumes that the frictions are due to conflicts when two workers apply for the same job and only one gets it. The transition of workers from unemployment to employment derived from this friction is well behaved and satisfies specific restrictions. Significantly, it can be represented as a special case of the more general "black-box" matching function used in the standard model. But unfortunately the special case that the urn-ball game supports has found no support at all in the empirical literature.

Other types of frictions have also been explored in the recent literature. For example, in stock-flow matching, originally due to Melvyn Coles and Eric Smith (1998), the friction is that in the local market there is no match that can be made, as opposed to the implicit assumption of the aggregate function that there are matches that can be made if only the partners knew where to find each other. In stock-flow matching an unmatched agent has to wait for new entry to try and match. The transitions derived from this specification are again well-behaved and not different from the transitions that can be derived from special forms of the aggregate matching function (as shown by Shimer, 2008). This specification has found more support in the data than the urn-ball one has, but again I wouldn't say that finding support for stock-flow matching makes the reduced-form matching function obsolete.

My point more generally is that although some special cases can be worked out from more primitive assumptions about frictions, none of them has contradicted the aggregate matching function. Frictions in labor markets are due to so many different reasons that I do not yet see either a complete or near complete characterization of frictions in a micro model. The convenience of the aggregate matching function, its support in the data and our experience with more micro models so far are such that they convince me that there is a bright future for the aggregate matching function for a long time to come. We shouldn't miss the fact that the success of the aggregate matching function stimulated a lot more research in the role of frictions in labor markets and in its foundations. If one were to succeed to come up with a good micro founded alternative it would be real progress.

References

Society for Economic Dynamics: Letter from the President

We are now a formal organization, and thanks to our Treasurer Ellen McGrattan's efforts, a non-profit corporation. You can see our Charter here (pdf). The Society is governed as it has always been by a committee consisting of the former Presidents of the Society, now formally constituted as the Board of Directors, with terms limits, rules for voting, and everything you would expect of a formal organization.

Some important leadership changes take place this year. My own dictatorship ends with the upcoming meetings in Istanbul. The Board of Directors unanimously agreed that Richard Rogerson would be an outstanding successor, and luckily he agreed to do it. I expect the Society to continue to flourish under his leadership. I also have bad news and good news to report. After his strong and devoted leadership Narayana Kocherlakota has asked to step down as managing editor of RED. During his tenure as editor-in-chief RED has continued its rise to become the premier specialty "macroeconomic" journal. Fortunately for us Gianluca Violante has agreed to take over beginning in January, and Narayana has agreed to stay on for a while longer as co-editor, so the journal remains in the best of hands. We have further strengthened the board by adding Matthias Doepke as a co-editor. Concerning RED, one issue that remains important is the credentialing of the journal. If you know about institutions that maintain lists or ranking of journals to whom we might usefully provide information about why the Review is a first rate journal, drop me an email. Narayana's report contains a lot more of the detail about what is happening with RED.

Our summer meeting in Cambridge was terrific. The program chairs George-Marios Angeletos, Ariel Burstein, Mikhail Golosov, and Christian Hellwig put together an outstanding intellectual program, including great plenary talks by James Poterba, José Scheinkman, and Per Krusell. They also handled the local organization, creating a great environment for the conference, and making sure that everything went smoothly.

Our upcoming meetings will take place in Istanbul, Turkey July 2-4, 2009, hosted by Bahçeşhir University. Our co-chairs Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde and Martin Schneider are hard at work putting things together, and we already have lined up a great set of plenary speakers: Matt Jackson, Tim Kehoe and Chris Sims. Our local organizers Nezih Guner, Refet Gürkaynak, Selo Imrohoroglu, Gokce Kolasin and Kamil Yilmaz have lined up some great venues and activities. Details as they are available, including the submission deadline, will be found at http://www.economicdynamics.org/sed2009.htm. I look forward to seeing all of you in Istanbul.

For 2010, we plan to hold the meetings in Montreal. Montreal is a great city, and I expect we will put together our usual strong scientific program. Tentatively for 2011 we plan to go to Gent Belgium, and we will probably switch from alternating one year in North America, one year overseas to one year in North America with two years overseas.

As always we are fortunate to have strong officers running things. Our Treasurer Ellen McGrattan avoided investing in mortgage backed securities, and as a result our endowment remains in fine shape. Our Secretary Christian Zimmermann continues to run our website and edit this newsletter, and is moving to write down some of our institutional knowledge about running the Society and our conferences.

Best Regards.

David Levine, President
Society for Economic Dynamics

Review of Economic Dynamics: Letter from the Co-ordinating Editor

Let me first tell you about three upcoming issues of the journal. All of the papers in the January 2009 issue of the journal will be dedicated to labor economics. The lead article will be jointly authored by Michael Keane and Kenneth Wolpin, and is based on Wolpin's plenary lecture at the 2006 Society for Economic Dynamics conference. The issue will also include:

• "Lifetime Aggregate Labor Supply with Endogenous Workweek Length," E. Prescott, R. Rogerson and J. Wallenius.
• "Home Production, Market Production, and the Gender Wage Gap: Incentives and Expectations," S. Albanesi and C. Olivetti.
• "Optimal Unemployment Insurance in an Estimated Job Search Model with Savings," R. Lentz.
• "An Empirical Investigation of Labor Income Processes," F. Guvenen.

In July 2009, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé and Martín Uribe of Columbia University will organize a mini-conference that will take place within the SED meetings. The mini-conference will focus on business cycle shocks. The organizers are especially interested in the recent exciting work on news shocks. The papers submitted to the 2009 mini-conference will all be considered for a special issue of the RED, to be published in 2010. If you want to submit a paper to the mini-conference, check out the conference website for details. Please note that to submit a paper to the mini-conference, you must simultaneously submit it to the Review of Economic Dynamics for consideration by the journal.

I now turn to some journal news. In 2006-2008, we have averaged 210 submissions per year--about 50% more than our highest year before 2006. We are processing these submissions rapidly: in 2007, 75% of papers received first decisions within 4 months, 93% within 6 months, and all but one within eight months.

The quality of the published papers is also higher than ever before. I have heard this subjective opinion from many readers. But there is also hard objective evidence to back it up. Journals are typically ranked in terms of impact factors: this is the per-article citation in a given year to articles published in the preceding two years. In the year 2005, our impact factor was 0.43. In the year 2007, our impact factor was close to 0.97. This doubling (really more) in such a short span is remarkable. We now rank higher than prestigious journals like the International Economic Review and the Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking.

I close by discussing the exciting change in journal leadership. Beginning in January 2009, I will return to my old job as an editor of the journal. Gianluca Violante of New York University will replace me as co-ordinating editor. Gianluca has an impressive record of scholarly publications which address fundamental issues in macroeconomics and labor economics. Beyond this record, he has done a remarkable job as associate editor and editor. He has a wealth of great ideas about how to make the journal even better. I am looking forward to seeing these ideas implemented!

I have enjoyed my three and half years as co-ordinating editor. It has been highly rewarding: we have ve made progress on a number of dimensions. And I have learned a tremendous amount by reading a lot of excellent economics.

In my last words to you as co-ordinating editor, I will echo my first words. Macroeconomics is intrinsically dynamic, and so the Review of Economic Dynamics publishes a lot of papers in macroeconomics. But we are certainly not a macroeconomics journal. There is a natural link between dynamic economics and the use of computational experiments, and so the RED publishes many papers that use calibration methods. But we are certainly not a calibration journal. We are willing and eager to publish excellent research in any area of dynamic economics that uses any mode of analysis.

This is not empty rhetoric. In chronological order, the three most-cited papers in journal history are:

• "Explaining Rising Wage Inequality: Explanations With A Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of Labor Earnings With Heterogeneous Agents," J. Heckman, L. Lochner and C. Taber
• "Modeling Altruism and Spitefulness in Experiments," D. Levine.
• "1990's in Japan, A Lost Decade," F. Hayashi and E. Prescott.

Yours,

Narayana Kocherlakota, Co-ordinating Editor
Review of Economic Dynamics

Society for Economic Dynamics: 2009 Meetings Call for Papers

The program will be made up from a selection of invited and submitted papers. The Society now welcomes submissions for the Instanbul program. Submissions may be from any area in economics. A program committee will select the papers for the conference. The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2009. Further details and instructions on how to submit a paper are available at

http://www.economicdynamics.org/sed2009.htm

Review: The Economics of Inaction

A reality mostly ignored in economic modeling is that we do nothing most of the time: portfolios lay unadjusted, prices are unchanged, investment is chunky, hiring and firing are lumpy. One way to explain this is that some fix cost is involved, generating a region of inaction. This book lays the foundations on how to think about fix costs in a dynamic setting. It turns out that continuous-time models are very appealing in the context of such costs and Nancy Stokey delivers a series of example models using this methodology.

The book is self-contained, thus it includes a substantial part with mathematical preliminaries on stochastic processes, Brownian motions and other diffusions. It covers the essential theorems for these concepts and then applies them to various situations. There are essentially two types of models. First, impulse control models, where a fix cost leads to a lumpy decision. Examples are exercising an option, pricing with menu costs, inventory management and portfolio adjustment. Second, instantaneous control models, where the fix cost leads to a change in a rate of adjustment. Examples are inventory management again and irreversible investment. Finally, the book covers the issue of aggregating individually lumpy decisions.

This is a very technical book, but it tackles a hard and important problem. As it covers the necessarily preliminaires, someone with only passing familiarity with Brownian motions should be able to work through it. This book will prove to be a timeless reference.

"The Economics of Inaction" is published by Princeton University Press.

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