Abstract A number of recent papers have hypothesized that the Federal Reserve possesses information about the course of inflation and output that is unknown to the private sector, and that policy actions by the Federal Reserve convey some of this superior information. We conduct two tests of...

We analyze retail prices and at-the-dock (import) prices of specific items in the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) CPI and IPP databases, using both databases simultaneously to identify items that are identical in description at the dock and when sold at retail. This identification allows us to...

Employing a large number of financial indicators, we use Bayesian model averaging (BMA) to forecast real-time measures of economic activity. The indicators include credit spreads based on portfolios, constructed directly from the secondary market prices of outstanding bonds, sorted by maturity...

This paper investigates breaks in the variability and comovement of output, consumption, and investment in the G-7 economies. In contrast with most other papers on comovement, we test for changes in comovement, allowing for breaks in mean and variance. Despite claims that rising integration...

Periodicity and Stochastic Dends in Economic Time Series by Philip Hans Franses. Pp. xii+230. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. ($US 65.00 cloth, $US 32.50 paper) WEB INFORMATION: www.oupusa.org/docs/0198774540.h.

This paper proposes a new approach to identifying the effects of monetary policy shocks in an international vector autoregression. Using high-frequency data on the prices of Fed Funds futures contracts, we measure the impact of the surprise component of the FOMC-day Federal Reserve policy...

The authors present two examples in which the addition of an option market leads to sunspot equilibria despite the fact that no sunspot equilibria exist without the market. These examples highlight limitations in two prevalent views of option markets. It is often assumed that option markets help...