IDENTIFYING THE EFFECTS OF MONETARY POLICY SHOCKS ON EXCHANGE RATES USING HIGH FREQUENCY DATA

This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks in an international vector autoregression. Using high‐frequency data on the prices of Fed Funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of the FOMC‐day Federal Reserve policy decision on financial variables, such as the exchange rate and the foreign interest rate. We show how this information can be used to achieve identification without having to make the usual strong assumption of a recursive ordering. (JEL: C32, E52, F30)     

Utility Subsidies as Social Transfers: An Empirical Evaluation of Targeting Performance

Subsidies to residential utility customers are important in‐kind transfer mechanisms in developing countries. Do these subsidies reach the poor? This article finds the average targeting performance of water and electricity subsidies to be similar to that of other social‐transfer mechanisms using the same targeting method. The most common form — a quantity‐based consumption subsidy aiming to subsidise low‐volume customers — is highly regressive. Many geographically‐targeted and most means‐tested utility subsidies are progressive, but still exclude many poor households. Connection subsidies are an attractive alternative in low coverage areas, but they will only reach the poor if utilities extend network access to poor households and if households choose to connect.     

‘Police On My Back’ and the postcolonial experience

‘Police On My Back’ was written in England by Eddy Grant and recorded by his group, The Equals, in 1967. Since then it has been covered by a number of artists. In this article I am concerned with the original and four covers. Over the 40 years between the Equals' version of the song and the final version with which I am concerned, the meaning of the lyrics has changed from being an expression of Jamaican rude boy culture to being a song that expresses the oppression of migrants from British and European colonies living in the metropoles of the colonisers. This article tracks the changes in musical and lyrical expression in the song against the increasingly oppressive circumstances of those migrants and their descendents. These are the circumstances that contributed to the British riots of 1981 and of 2011, and the French riots of 1981 and the many subsequent riots climaxing in those of 2005. ‘Police On My Back’ has always been hybrid. Grant's version placed rude boy lyrics with a British beat group sound. Later, as the lyrics came to reflect the circumstances of the migrants, so the musical backing came to include a variety of musical forms, many of which expressed the heritages of the performers and asserted the legitimacy of those heritages in a multicultural context.     

A cultural studies without guarantees: Response to Kuan-Hsing Chen

Abstract

This article is a short response to Chen's critique of our article ‘Asianing Australia: notes toward a critical transnationalism in cultural studies’. It is argued that Chen's attack on our article is misdirected. Furthermore, we are in substantial agreement with Chen on many issues, most importantly that the nation-state should not be the uninterrogated site for the development of a ‘local’ cultural studies. However, we find Chen's politics, and his use of a reductionist Marxist theory, overly simplistic. Moreover, the core/periphery binary which he uses is not adequate to express the complexities of a global capitalist world order in which the sites of power are becoming increasingly decentred. Similarly, the politics of resistance are also more complex than Chen suggests; resistance must be understood in relation to local situations and local tactics, as well as the imperatives of global capitalism. Finally, a properly localized and left-politicized cultural studies must reflexively interrogate the politics of theory, including Marxism, considering its specific ‘western’ history and recognizing the necessary partiality of theory in a post-colonial world of differentiated modernities.     

Memories of Jack Michael From a Freshman Whose Life He Changed

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior -     

Book reviews

Periodicity and Stochastic Dends in Economic Time Series by Philip Hans Franses. Pp. xii+230. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. ($US 65.00 cloth, $US 32.50 paper) WEB INFORMATION: www.oupusa.org/docs/0198774540.h.