The effect of the tax treatment of IRA/401(k)s on U.S. personal saving is examined using household survey data from the Survey of Consumer Finances. The results suggest that the tax treatment of IRA/401(k)s encouraged households to increase the share of assets held in the form of pension...

Recent incidents of exchange rate collapse have provoked interest in the extent to which such events are determined by economic fundamentals. This paper considers whether interest rate differentials are appropriate measures of the risk of devaluation and whether this measure of devaluation risk...

The relationship between regional saving and investment is examined to measure the extent of capital mobility. The relationship between total regional saving and investment is significantly negative in Canada and the United Kingdom, in contrast to the significant positive relationship found...

This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the relative importance of different labour market adjustment mechanisms in Canada and the United States. The effects of the unemployment insurance (UI) system on labour market adjustment are also examined. We find that, at the aggregate level,...

Structural vector autoregressions are used to analyse the relationship between real output and relative prices within the European Union (EU) and the United States. Relative price variability appears to be more important for adjustment within the EU than the United States, reflecting the lower...

Estimation of graphical models whose conditional independence graph comes from the general class of decomposable graphs is compared with estimation under the more restrictive assumption that the graphs are interval graphs. This restriction is shown to improve the mixing of the Markov chain Monte...

Given a decomposable graph, we characterize and enumerate the set of pairs of vertices whose connection or disconnection results in a new graph that is also decomposable. We discuss the relevance of these results to Markov chain Monte Carlo methods that sample or optimize over the space of...