In a classic article, Granger (1966) asserted that most economic time series measured in level have spectra that exhibit a smooth declining shape with considerable power at very low frequencies. There has been no systematic attempt to examine Granger,s assertion with international data. We...

We estimate output growth rate spectra for 58 countries. The spectra exhibit diverse shapes. To study the sources of this diversity, we estimate the short-run, business cycle, and long-run frequency components of the sampled series. For most OECD countries the bulk of the spectral mass is in the...

The U.S. prewar output series exhibit smaller shock-persistence than postwar-series. Some studies suggest this may be due to linear interpolation used to generate missing prewar data. Monte Carlo simulations that support this view generate large standard-errors, making such inference imprecise....

In this paper we investigate the size of markups for nationally branded products sold in the U.S. retail grocery industry. Using scanner data from a large Midwestern supermarket chain, we compute several measures of upper and lower bounds on markup ratios for over 230 nationally branded products...

Using unique retail and wholesale price data for 4,532 products carried by a major Mid-western grocery retailer, we find evidence of significant retail price rigidity during the Thanksgiving through Christmas holiday period relative to the rest of the year. We suggest that this pattern of...

We combine two data sets to study price rigidity. The first consists of weekly time series of retail, wholesale, and spot prices for twelve products. These time series contain two exogenous cost shocks. We find that prices exhibit more rigidity in response to the second shock than the first. The...

In this study, we empirically examine the extent of price rigidity using a unique store-level time series data set—consisting of (i) actual retail transaction prices, (ii) actual wholesale transaction prices which represent both the retailers’ costs and the prices received by manufacturers,...

Existence of a cointegration relationship between two time series in the time domain imposes restrictions on the series zero-frequency behaviour in terms of their squared coherence, phase, and gain, in the frequency domain. I derive these restrictions by studying cross-spectral properties of a...

Using the framework of a dynamic intertemporal optimization model of an open economy, it is shown that the long-run investment-saving correlation follows directly from the economy’s dynamic budget constraint and this does not depend on the degree of international capital mobility. Therefore,...

We use U.S. county-level data consisting of 3,058 observations, to study growth determination and measure the speed of income convergence. County-level data are particularly valuable for studying convergence because they allow us to study a sample with substantial homogeneity and exceptional...