Interest has been growing in testing for nonlinearity or chaos in economic data, but much controversy has arisen about the available results. This paper explores the reasons for these empirical difficulties. We designed and ran a single-blind controlled competition among five highly regarded...

The macroeconomic concept of "stabilization policy" implicitly assumes that the macroeconomy is unstable without imposition of a policy. Hence selection of a "stabilization policy" can be viewed as selection of a policy to bifurcate the system from an unstable to a stable operating regime. The...

We analyze the effect of the average level of intelligence on different measures of the quality of institutions, using a 2006 cross-sectional sample of 113 countries. The results show that average IQ positively affects all the measures of institutional quality considered in our study, namely...

We employ panel data from 40 countries in sub-Saharan Africa over the period 1990-2008 to examine whether HIV/AIDS has a causal effect on FDI. We find that HIV/AIDS has a negative but diminishing effect on FDI, and this adverse effect occurs even when the HIV prevalent rate is as low as 0.1...

In specifications of tastes and technology, econometricians often impose curvature globally, but monotonicity only locally or not at all. In fact monotonicity rarely is even mentioned in that literature. But without satisfaction of both curvature and monotonicity, the second order conditions for...

This paper is an up-to-date survey of the state-of-the-art in dynamical systems theory relevant to high levels of dynamical complexity, characterizing chaos and near chaos, as commonly found in the physical sciences. The paper also surveys applications in economics and finance. This survey does...

Personal bankruptcies have continued to rise even after passage of a comprehensive reform designed to curb strategic use of bankruptcy. We formalize a distinction between strategic filing and adverse events filing by testing whether consumers manipulate their debt and filing decision or not....

This paper assesses the ability of the Rotterdam model and of three versions of the almost ideal demand system (AIDS) to recover the time-varying elasticities of a true demand system and to satisfy theoretical regularity. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we find that the Rotterdam model performs...

We decompose a 219 year sample of U.S. real output data into permanent and transitory shocks. We find reductions in volatility of output growth and inflation, starting in the mid 1980s, consistent with the “Great Moderation” noted by many others. More importantly, we find periods of even...