There is considerable disagreement in the empirical macro literature as to the degree of returns to scale in U.S. output. While many studies find evidence of a small degree of increasing returns, standard errors are typically large. This issue is of importance for assessing the possibility of...

This paper analyzes the specific role of fiscal policy on the welfare effects of macroeconomic stabilization policies. We extend current DSGE models à la Schmitt-Grohè and Uribe (2003) to a non-tandard fiscal policy framework. We focus on distortionary and progressive taxation which alters the...

This paper extends the well known Capital Asset Pricing Model by Sharpe and Lintner to a multi-period context with possibly price dependent preferences. The model is built from individual forward looking agents adopting a portfolio selection scheme similar to the portfolio selection theory...

A well known problem in economics is to describe properly a situation where N agents are repeatedly competing to use the same limited resource. A version of this problem is known in the literature as the El Farol game: week after week N agents face the decision whether to go or not to go to a...

The bond-equity yield ratio is defined as the ratio of the coupon yield on long government bonds to the dividend yield on equity. Commonly named in the UK as the gilt-equity yield ratio (GEYR), it has been argued to capture the relative value of bonds and equities through the differential in...

We investigate an inflationary overlapping generations model where households predict future inflation rates by running a least squares regression of inflation rates or prices on their past levels. We critically examine the results on learning equilibria obtained by Bullard (1994) and...

There is now considerable evidence that business cycle variation in output and employment in the U.S. differs in expansions and contractions. We present nonparametric evidence that asymmetries are strongest in durable goods manufacturing. In a Markov switching framework, we find two leading...

In this paper we concentrate on the hypothesis that the empirical rejections of the Expectations Theory(ET) of the term structure of interest rates can be caused by improper modelling of expectations. Our starting point is an interesting anomaly found by Campbell-Shiller(1987), when by taking a...

I ask whether differences in labor market performance between the US and Europe can be attributed to an interaction between employment protection legislation (EPL) and an acceleration in the rate of capital-embodied technical change associated with the advent of information technologies. I find...

The Use of a Simple Decision Rule in Repeated Oligopoly Games Much interest has been directed towards decision rules and conditions when firms make decisions converging to a non-cooperative Nash equilibrium in repeated oligopoly games. We explore the use of a simple decision rule where firms...