This paper revisits the issue of conditional volatility in real GDP growth rates for Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Previous studies find high persistence in the volatility. This paper shows that this finding largely reflects a nonstationary variance. Output growth in...

The Great Moderation, the significant decline in the variability of economic activity, provides a most remarkable feature of the macroeconomic landscape in the last twenty years. A number of papers document the beginning of the Great Moderation in the US and the UK. In this paper, we use the...

The lag in effect of monetary policy contains vital information for the policy evaluation. Allowing for a time-varying treatment effect, we show that inflation targeting effectively lowers inflation for both developed and developing countries. Developed countries reach their targets rapidly with...

Energy saving can importantly help prevent greenhouse gas emissions and, thus, climate change. Energy service companies (ESCOs) provide a crucial instrument for delivering improved energy efficiency and potentially contributing to substantial energy savings in the public and private sectors....

This study examines the relationship between U.S. output growth and its volatility over the period 1875:Q1 to 2008:Q2. We examine the data for outliers and apply corrections when found. Next, we search for possible effects of structural breaks in the growth rate and its volatility. In so doing,...