It is common for comparisons to be made of output growth and inflation across groups of countries, yet such comparisons can result in inconsistencies. We address two problems: (i) how to measure aggregate real output and inflation for groups of countries and (ii) how to construct measures of...

Analyzing the rhetorical structure of The Wealth of Nations (Smith WN) and its context, we make the case for the central importance of its Book V, "Of the Revenue of the Sovereign or Commonwealth”, which tends to be neglected in most accounts of Smith’s oeuvre (even, most recently, in the...

This paper introduces the concept of a Forecast Combination Equilibrium to model boundedly rational agents who combine a menu of different forecasts using insights from the forecasting literature to mimic the behavior of actual forecasters. The equilibrium concept is consistent with rational...

Under treatment effect heterogeneity, an instrument identifies the instrument-specific local average treatment effect (LATE). If a regression model is estimated by the two-stage least squares (2SLS) using multiple instruments, then 2SLS is consistent for a weighted average of different LATEs. In...

We investigate the role of public, private, and external debt in explaining the propagation of …nancial shocks during three major …nancial crises from 2007-2013. For our analysis, we construct indices of crisis severity in equity markets based on di¤erent tests of contagion and investigate...

Why did the volatility of U.S. real GDP decline by more than the volatility of final sales with the Great Moderation in the mid-1980s? One explanation is that firms shifted their inventory behavior towards a greater emphasis on production smoothing. We investigate the role of inventories in the...

We examine the relative importance of the interest rate, exchange rate, and banklending channels for the transmission mechanism of monetary policy in the United States over the past 50 years. Our analysis is based on a structural vector autoregressive model that includes bank loans and uses sign...

The paper studies the problems associated with the construction of price indexes for commercial properties that could be used in the System of National Accounts. Property price indexes are required for the stocks of commercial properties in the Balance Sheets of the country. Related service...

This paper utilizes a many-country, many-product Ricardian trade model to evaluate the usefulness of measures of revealed comparative advantage (RCA) in academic and policy analyses. I find that, while commonly used indexes are generally not consistent with theoretical notions of comparative...

The idea of identifying structural parameters via heteroskedasticity is explored in the context of binary choice models with an endogenous regressor. Sufficient conditions for parameter identification are derived for probit models without relying on instruments or additional restrictions. The...