Forecasting is a daunting challenge for business economists and policymakers, often made more difficult by pervasive uncertainty. No such uncertainty is more difficult than projecting the reaction of policymakers to major shifts in the economy. We explore the process by which the FOMC came to...

Presentation at the University of Tennessee, Martin, Tenn. - Oct. 26, 1999

Presentation to the Annual Technology Transfer Showcase for the University of Missouri System, St. Louis - April 25, 2002

Presentation at the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, Edwardsville, Ill. - April 7, 2000

We propose a sectoral–shift theory of aggregate factor productivity for a class of economies with AK technologies, limited loan enforcement, and a constant production possibilities frontier. Both the growth rate and TFP respond to random and persistent endogenous fluctuations in the sectoral...

The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity. There is strong evidence, instead, that patents have many negative consequences.

Since Galí [1999], long-run restricted VARs have become the standard for identifying the effects of technology shocks. In a recent paper, Francis et al. [2008] proposed an alternative to identify technology as the shock that maximizes the forecast-error variance share of labor productivity at...

This paper examines the impact of a permanent shock to the productivity growth rate in a New Keynesian model when the central bank does not immediately adjust its policy rule to that shock. Our results show that inflation and productivity growth are negatively correlated at business cycle...

The technology growth trends that underlie recent productivity patterns are investigated in a framework that incorporates investment-specific technological progress. Structural-break tests and regime-shifting models reveal the presence of a downward shift in TFP growth in the late 1960s and an...

Numerous studies have found that US commercial banks are quite inefficient, and we find that, on average, banks became more technically inefficient between 1984 and 1993. Our analysis of productivity change, however, shows that technological improvements adopted by a few banks pushed out the...