In recent years the relationship between ÎmoneyÌ and the macroeconomy has assumed prominence in the academic literature and in Central Banks circles. Although some Central Bankers have stated that they have formally abandoned the notion of using monetary aggregates as indicators of the impact...

In his monograph The Conquest of American Inflation, Sargent (1999) points out the perils of econometric policy evaluation of the Theil-Tinbergen tradition wherein one estimates a reduced form econometric model of the economy and subjects it to control. If the model is misspecified, as is...

A long-standing area of research and policy interest is the construction of a measure of monetary policy stance. One measure that has been proposed-as an alternative to indices that employ monetary aggregates or exchange rates-is the spread between the actual real interest rate and its...

When the Central Bank sets nominal rates as a a non-decreasing function of the inflation rate to stabilize the economy, that is it uses a Taylor Rule, the zero lower bound on interest rates may result in multiple equilibria and a liquidity trap. However, if fiscal policy is non-Ricardian, or...

I develop a dynamic stochastic model of individual choices about health insurance, exercise, smoking, alcohol consumption and medical treatment. The primary objective is to estimate the parameters of the model to conduct counter-factual health policy experiments. The model is estimated through...

The MacSim package is designed for teaching macroeconomics, focusing on international trade. It uses a set of simplified models, describing the economy of countries belonging to the European Union. It brings together single-country mechanisms, including some financial elements, and international...

In recent years simulation-based estimation of multinomial probit (MNP) models has attracted an increasing interest among econometricians. With the help of more powerful and cheaper computers, MNP models have become a well-accepted alternative to multinomial logit (MNL) models that impose the...

In this paper we develop a likelihood based approach for estimating the joint equilibrium parameter distribution in random coefficient-random utility models. Under this demand specification and a profit maximizing supply specification, the equilibrium distribution of prices and quantities has an...

The negative effect of smoking during a pregnancy on a child's birth weight outcome has been a consistent finding in the economics literature on estimating birth weight production functions. An important result in the literature is that the negative effect of smoking on birth weight is generally...

Since the beginning of this century, the normal distribution has played a central role in the mathematical finance literature. However, major drawbacks insight this assumption rely in the absence of closed form expressions for both its cumulative and probability density functions. Additionally,...