We infer determinants of Latin American hyperinflations and stabilizations by using the method of maximum likelihood to estimate a hidden Markov model that assigns roles both to fundamentals in the form of government deficits that are financed by money creation and to destabilizing expectations...

We characterize and measure a long-term risk-return trade-off for the valuation of cash flows exposed to fluctuations in macroeconomic growth. This trade-off features risk prices of cash flows that are realized far into the future but continue to be reflected in asset values. We apply this...

The authors show how to use security market data to restrict the admissible region for means and standard deviations of intertemporal marginal rates of substitution of consumers. Their approach (1) is nonparametric and applies to a rich class of models of dynamic economics; (2) characterizes the...

In an economy studied by Lucas and Stokey, tax rates inherit the serial correlation structure of government expenditures, belying Barro's earlier result that taxes should be a random walk for any stochastic process of government expenditures. To recover a version of Barro's random walk...

Under the Articles of Confederation, the central government of the United States had limited power to tax. Therefore, large debts accumulated during the US War for Independence traded at deep discounts. That situation framed a US fiscal crisis in the 1780s. A political revolution—for that was...