This paper re-considers the empirical relevance of the Lucas critique using a sticky price model in which a weak central bank response to inflation generates equilibrium indeterminacy. The model is calibrated on the magnitude of the historical shift in the Fed's policy rule and is capable of...

The focus in this paper is on the time series dynamics of the basis for commodity futures. These have special interest since regulation of commodity markets is much laxer than is typical for stock markets. However, although such futures contracts have been traded for several decades, they have...

Some researchers and many practitioners have move from the classic mean-variance (Markowitz, 1959) portfolio theory to a new portfolio optimization framework based on downside-risk measures that are more appropriate to the investor’s preferences. Moreover, several studies (Friedman and...

Literature on environment and endogenous growth suggests that sustainable growth critically depends on technological innovations. In this paper, technological progress takes the form of an expansion in the variety of inputs. In a first scenario, a closed economy is endowed with a renewable...

In many traditional financial and economic models, economic agents are assumed to make decisions using expected lifetime utility under rational expectations, where rational expectations are assumed to be formed on the basis of sufficient knowledge of the data generating process. But the mere...

We apply agent based computer techniques to develop a modeling framework that can be used to study all aspects of commodity markets. The goal is to use advances in computation to study the micro level behavior of the market and its players. This work is motivated by the understanding that the...

We examine the evolution of the distributions of wealth and income in a Ramsey model in which agents differ in their initial capital endowment and where the labor supply is endogenous. The assumption that the utility function is homogeneous in consumption and leisure implies that the...

Our empirical investigation reveals that less democratic countries have higher volatility of GDP growth rates. Disparity in polity across countries robustly dominates differences in initial income, inequality or instability of regimes, the commonly cited reasons in the literature, as the main...

This paper examines the implications of adaptive learning in the New Keynesian benchmark model extended with inflation indexation to capture inflation persistence. First, we show that the price level will be stationary and follow an AR(2) process. Next, we study under which circumstances the...

We study identification in a class of linear rational expectations models. For any given exactly identified model, we provide an algorithm that generates a class of equivalent models that have the same reduced form. We use our algorithm to show that a model proposed by Jess Benhabib and Roger...