Recent empirical work has pointed to a positive correlation between product market competition and productivity growth. In this lecture we try to reconcile this evidence with the Schumpterian growth paradigm. Three alternative explanations are successively considered, respectively based upon...

Without policy reforms, the aging of the U.S. population is likely to increase the burden of the currently unfunded social security and medicare systems. In this paper we build an applied general equilibrium model and incorporate the population projections made by the Social Security...

We apply recursive methods to obtain a finite dimensional and recursive representation of an equilibrium of one of Townsend's models of 'forecasting the forecasts of others'. The equilibrium has the property that decision makers make common forecasts of the hidden state variable whose presence...

Recent papers have analyzed how economies with adaptive agents may converge to and escape from self-confirming equilibria. These papers have imputed to agents a particular prior about drifting coefficients. In the context of a model of monetary policy, this paper analyzes dynamics that govern...

For a VAR with drifting coefficients and stochastic volatilities, we present posterior densities for several objects that are pertinent for designing and evaluating monetary policy. These include easures of inflation persistence, the natural rate of unemployment, a core rate of inflation, and...

Previous studies have interpreted the rise and fall of US inflation after World War II in terms of the Fed's changing views about the natural rate hypothesis but have left an important question unanswered. Why was the Fed so slow to implement the low-inflation policy recommended by a natural...

We explore methods for confronting model misspecification in macroeconomics. We construct dynamic equilibria in which private agents and policy makers recognize that models are approximations. We explore two generalizations of reational expectations equilibria. In one of these equilibria,...