This paper compares the different dynamics of the simple sum monetary aggregates and the Divisia monetary aggregate indexes over time, over the business cycle, and across high and low inflation and interest rate phases. Although traditional comparisons of the series sometimes suggest that simple...

The current financial crisis followed the “great moderation,” according to which some commentators and economists believed that the world’s central banks had gotten so good at countercyclical policy that the business cycle volatility had declined to low levels. As more and more economists...

This paper comprises a survey of a half century of research on international monetary aggregate data. We argue that since monetary assets began yielding interest, the simple sum monetary aggregates have had no foundations in economic theory and have sequentially produced one source of...

This paper explores the disconnect of Federal Reserve data from index number theory. A consequence could have been the decreased systemic-risk misperceptions that contributed to excess risk taking prior to the housing bust. We find that most recessions in the past 50 years were preceded by more...

I have been invited to write an essay on my experiences as founder and editor of the Cambridge University Press journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics. I have decided to focus the essay on my experiences in starting up the journal. Few economists, who have not themselves started up a new journal, are...

While credit cards provide transaction services, as do currency and demand deposits, credit cards have never been included in measures of the money supply. The reason is accounting conventions, which do not permit adding liabilities, such as credit card balances, to assets, such as money. But...

This survey provides an overview of the classes of macroeconometric models for which these experiments have so far been run and emphasizes the implications for lack of robustness of conventional dynamical inferences from macroeconometric policy simulations. By making this detailed survey of past...

This paper constructs and analyzes core inflation indicators for Saudi Arabia for the period of March 2012 to May 2014 using two alternative approaches: the Exclusion Method (ex food and housing/rent) and the Statistical Method. The findings of the analysis suggest that the ex food and...

This paper builds monthly time-series of Divisia monetary aggregates for the Gulf area for the period of June 2004 to December 2011, using area-wide data. We also offer an "economic stability" indicator for the GCC area by analyzing the dynamics pertaining to certain variables such as the dual...