Despite concerns are often voiced on the so called “excess volatility” of the stock market, little is known about the implications of market volatility for the real economy. This paper examines whether the stock market volatility affects real fixed investment. The empirical evidence obtained...

The financial press frequently suggest that the shape of yield curve reflects information about the prospects of the economy. This paper attempts to formalize the link between the yield curve and the real economic activity. A closed-form formula for the term structure of interest rates is...

Some of the highly controversial questions in macroeconomics critically hinge on the value of a single parameter of consumer preference--the elasticity of intertemporal substitution. This paper provides new estimates of this parameter for individual G-7 and a panel of twenty OECD countries. We...

Is the stock market responsive to macroeconomic news? This paper employs the daily returns of the Dow Jones Industrial Index, the S&P 500 index, the Russell 1000 index, and the Russell 2000 index to examine stock market reactions to a broad list of macroeconomic announcements, including money...

A common specification about the behavior of foreign exchange spot and futures prices is that they follow continuous diffusion processes. The empirical regularities uncovered from daily and weekly currency futures data, however, cast doubts on the validity of this model. First, contrary to the...

China has been growing at a spectacular rate in recent years, enabling per capita incomes to almost quadruple in only the last decade and a half This paper identifies the sources of economic growth in China from 1953 to 1994. While capital accumulation played an important role in China’s...