The historical behavior of interest rates and growth rates in U.S. data suggests that the government can, with a high probability, run temporary budget deficits and then roll over the resulting government debt forever. The purpose of this paper is to document this finding and to examine its...

Hysteresis is central to long-run unemployment movements in many countries. This essay addresses two broad issues. The first is whether there is clear evidence of hysteresis effects. To put it differently, can we reject the hypothesis that the NAIRU, and hence the long run behavior of...

This paper examines the optimal allocation of risk in an overlapping-generations economy It compares the allocation of risk the economy reaches naturally to the allocation that would be reached if generations behind a Rawlsian 'veil of ignorance' could share risk with one another through...

Sticky-price models with rational expectations fail to capture the inertia in US inflation Models with backward-looking expectations capture current inflation behavior but are unlikely to fit other monetary regimes This paper seeks to overcome these problems with a near-rational model of...

This paper estimates a long-run demand function for M1, using U.S. data for 1959-1993. The paper interprets deviations from this long-run relation with Goldfeld=s partial adjustment model. A key innovation is the choice of the interest rate in the money demand function. Most previous work uses a...