Was the Depression forecastable? After the Crash, how long did it take contemporary economic forecasters to realize how severe the downturn was going to be? How long should it have taken them to come to this realization? These questions are addressed by studying the predictions of the Harvard...

The effects of the changing U.S. age distribution on various macroeconomic equations are examined in this paper. The equations include consumption, money demand, housing investment, and labor force participation equations. Seven groups are analyzed: 16-19, 20-24, 30-39, 40-54, 55-64, and 65+....

We examine the small sample properties of tests of rational expectations models. We show using Monte Carlo experiments that these tests can be extremely biased toward rejection for sample sizes typical in applied research. These biases are important when the time series examined are highly...

Recent studies find that consumption is excessively sensitive to income. These studies assume that income is stationary around a deterministic trend. The data, however, do not reject the hypothesis that disposable income is a random walk with drift. If income is indeed a random walk, then the...

Non-competitive conduct can be assessed by estimating the size of the markup or Lerner index achieves in a market. The markup implies a price elasticity of demand faced by the representative firm. For a given markup, non-competitive conduct that is insensitive to the value of the monopoly. To...

What shocks account for the business cycle frequency and long run movements of output and prices? This paper addresses this question using the identifying assumption that only supply shocks, such as shocks to technology, oil prices, and labor supply affect output in the long run. Real and...

A firm may acquire additional capital input by purchasing new capital or by increasing the utilization of its current capital. The margin between capita accumulation and capital utilization is studied in a model of dynamic factor demand where the firm chooses capital, labor, and their rates of...

Much recent work emphasizes the joint nature of the consumption decision and the portfolio allocation decision. In this paper, we compare two formulations of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. The traditional CAPM suggests that the appropriate measure of an asset's risk is the covariance of the...

Supply shocks played an important role in macroeconomic fluctuations during the 1970's. Supply shocks are also increasingly important in Keynesian and neo-classical models of the business cycle. This paper is a short survey of these theoretical models. It also discusses the history of supply...

A model of the dynamically interrelated demand for capital and labor is specified and estimated. The estimates are of the first-order conditions of the firm's problem rather than of the closed-form decision rules. This use of the first-order conditions allows a random rate of return and a...