Journal Article
How natural is the natural rate of unemployment in Europe?
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. (1990-01)
European economic performance has been disappointing in the 1980s. High unemployment has been a dominant policy issue, but in order to react properly, government authorities had to determine the causes of this unemployment. If inadequate aggregate demand were the source, expansionary fiscal or monetary policy could help to solve the problem; on the other hand, if movements in labor supply were to blame, traditional macro policy would be ineffective. European officials clearly leaned toward the labor supply explanation, as aggregate deman policy remained conservative throughout the decade. ; ...
New England Economic Review , Issue Jan , Pages 23-36

Journal Article
Central bank flexibility and the drawbacks to currency unification
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. (1990-05)
Recently, the benefits to monetary unification have been widely heralded. Advocates of European, as well as East and West German, monetary integration point repeatedly to the advantages the United States derives from possessing a single currency. Yet, the losses resulting from this policy have too often been ignored. ; This article briefly reviews the costs and benefits of currency integration as articulated in the traditional optimal currency area literature. For the first time a full-employment model is used to examine the cost to currency unification derived from diversity among countries ...
New England Economic Review , Issue May , Pages 3-18

Journal Article
Regional economic conditions and the FOMC votes of district presidents
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. (1991-03)
It is often argued that the institutional structure of the Federal Reserve System influences the formulation and attainment of national monetary policy goals. District Bank presidents do play a major role in the formulation of monetary policy. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York always has one of twelve votes at the policy-making Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meetings, and four of the remaining eleven votes rotate among the other Reserve Bank presidents. ; This article tests whether regional economic performance excessively influences the votes of District Bank presidents. The article ...
New England Economic Review , Issue Mar , Pages 3-16

Journal Article
\"Whither New England\"?
McNees, Stephen K.; Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. (1991-07)
This article attempts to identify precursors, or indicators, of New England employment. The predictive power of a diverse array of variables is calculated and compared. However, because no single variable is likely to contain all information of predictive value, the article then explores alternative methods of combining several variables into an index or statistical "model" of New England employment growth. The variables are separated into regional, national, and expectational in order to measure the predictive value of each type of information. ; In both in-sample and out-of-sample tests, ...
New England Economic Review , Issue Jul , Pages 11-26

Journal Article
Are district presidents more conservative than board governors?
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. (1991-09)
It is widely believed that the Federal Open Market Committee policy votes of Federal Reserve Bank presidents are more "conservative" than those of their Board governor counterparts. In both academia and Congress, the suspicion runs deep that the political appointment procedure exercised over Federal Reserve Board governors-nomination by the President and confirmation by the Senate-results in monetary policy that is more concerned with output and less concerned with inflation than the policy produced by the more politically independent District Bank presidents. ; This article examines the ...
New England Economic Review , Issue Sep , Pages 3-12

Journal Article
Defaults, denials, and discrimination in mortgage lending
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. (1993-09)
The results of the study of discrimination in mortgage lending by Munnell, Browne, McEneaney, and Tootell (1992) have been questioned by some who claim that the authors failed to control adequately for the expected profitability of each loan. Critics assert that an examination of default rates for minorities and whites would explain the disparate treatment minorities received in obtaining mortgage loans. ; This article will demonstrate that studies of denials are a valid approach to testing for discrimination and that, in fact, examination of defaults cannot, in general, reveal much about the ...
New England Economic Review , Issue Sep , Pages 45-51

Journal Article
Purchasing power parity within the United States
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. (1992-07)
Economics has many articles of faith. One of the most dearly held is Purchasing Power Parity, which posits that the price of the same good in different regions should be equivalent when no barriers to arbitrage exist. Because Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is an important assumption in much of international economic theory, this article examines empirical evidence testing this proposition. ; Instead of analyzing international data, this study analyzes PPP between regions of the United States. By comparing regions within a country, it eliminates many of the hypotheses offered to explain the ...
New England Economic Review , Issue Jul , Pages 15-24

Journal Article
How farsighted is the FOMC?
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. (1997-01)
The most difficult problem facing monetary policymakers results from the long and variable lags in monetary policy's impact on the economy. The full effect of an interest rate change today is not realized for several quarters, so monetary policymakers must be forward-looking. Yet, it is difficult enough to interpret how the economy is doing now, let alone forecast how it will be performing one year hence. This uncertainty hinders the ability of policymakers to offset future fluctuations with current actions. Even so, the lags leave central bankers no choice but to react to their expectations ...
New England Economic Review , Issue Jan , Pages 49-65

Journal Article
Mortgage lending in Boston: a response to the critics
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B.; Browne, Lynn E. (1995-09)
Three years ago, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released an examination of racial patterns in mortgage denial rates in the Boston area. The study was motivated by newly available data on mortgage applications, showing that black and Hispanic applicants were two to three times as likely to be turned down for mortgages as white applicants. The study gathered all the variables thought to be missing from the HMDA analysis, such as the applicants' debt burdens and credit histories, to see whether these economic factors explained the racial difference in denial rates. Although the additional ...
New England Economic Review , Issue Sep , Pages 53-78

Journal Article
Restructuring, the NAIRU, and the Phillips curve
Tootell, Geoffrey M. B. (1994-09)
Recent news stories about corporate downsizing have increased concerns that the labor market is being permanently restructured. The press implicitly, and some economists explicitly, have concluded that this "restructuring" in the labor market has increased the rate of unemployment that is consistent with stable inflation. This rate is known as the NAIRU, the non-accelerating-inflation rate of unemployment, the unemployment rate below which inflation tends to rise, and above which inflation tends to fall. ; This article examines both macroeconomic data and more disaggregated data in search ...
New England Economic Review , Issue Sep , Pages 31-44