The informational content of different forecasts can be compared by regressing the actual change in a variable to be forecasted on forecasts of the change. We use the procedure in Fair and Shiller (1987) to examine the informational content of three sets of ex ant. forecasts: the American...

Over the past two decades, respondents to the Shiller Investor Confidence Surveys assess the probability of a catastrophic stock market crash to be much higher that the historical frequency of such events. We decompose these crash probabilities into fundamental and subjective components and use...

The world's first known inflation-indexed bonds were issued by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1780 during the Revolutionary War. These bonds were invented to deal with severe wartime inflation and with angry discontent among soldiers in the U.S. Army with the decline in purchasing power of...

Recent empirical research on the term structure of interest rates has shown that the long-term interest rate is well described by adistributed lag on short-term interest rates, but does not conform to the expectations theory of the term structure. It has been suggested that the long rate...

Within the last five years, Canada, Sweden and New Zealand have joined the ranks of the United Kingdom and other countries in issuing government bonds that are indexed to inflation. Some observers of the experience in these countries have argued that the United States should follow suit. This...

Social security system old age insurance systems are devices for the sharing of income risks of elderly people with others. Risks can be shared intergenerationally (with the young of the same country), intragenerationally (with other elderly of the same country), or internationally (with...

A questionnaire survey was conducted to explore how people think about inflation, and what real problems they see it as causing. With results from 677 people, comparisons were made among people in the US, Germany, and Brazil, between young and old, and between economists and non-economists....

A forecast produced by an econometric model is a weighted aggregate of predetermined variables in the model. In many models the number of predetermined variables used is very large, often exceeding the number of observations. A method is proposed in this paper for testing an econometric model as...