Differences across countries or decades in the countercyclical stance of fiscal policy can help identify whether the growth in government spending affects output growth and so speeds recovery from a recession. We use the heterogeneity in the government-spending reaction functions across twenty...

Interwar macroeconomic history is a natural place to look for evidence on the correlations between (a) deflation and depression and (b) unexpected deflation and depression. We apply time-series methods to measure unexpected deflation or inflation for 26 countries from 1922 to 1939. The results...

We provide a new way to filter US inflation into trend and cycle components, based on extracting long-run forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters. We operate the Kalman filter in reverse, beginning with observed forecasts, then estimating parameters, and then extracting the...

Many international macroeconomic models link the real exchange rate to a ratio of marginal utilities. We examine this link empirically, allowing the marginal utility of consumption to depend on government expenditure, real money balances, or external habit. We also consider two environments with...

Euro-interest rates are well-known to be persistent, as are their differentials across countries for a given maturity. The international CCAPM implies that the rates are persistent because forecasts of national consumption growth or inflation are persistent too. We examine this prediction for a...

This paper investigates the behaviour of estimators based on the Kullback-Leibler information criterion (KLIC), as an alternative to the generalized method of moments (GMM). We first study the estimators in a Monte Carlo simulation model of consumption growth with power utility. Then we compare...

There is much research on consumption-savings problems with risky labor income and a constant interest rate and also on portfolio allocation with risky returns but nonstochastic labor income. Less is known quantitatively about the interaction between the two forms of risk. Under CRRA utility,...

Daily data on spot and forward dollar/sterling exchange rates and on Britain's foreign exchange reserves are used to reassess the financial history of the 1956 Suez crisis. We find that support of sterling at its Bretton Woods lower bound lost credibility as early as July. Reserve losses also...

Much recent business cycle research focuses on moments of macroeconomic aggregates. We construct examples of real business cycle sample paths for output, consumption, and employment for the U.S. economy. Annual sample paths are generated from an initial condition in 1925, measured technology and...