A well-known feature of one-good, multi-agent, Arrow-Debreu economies with identical additively-separable, homothetic preferences is that the consumptions of all agents are perfectly correlated. Such economies are widely used in interpreting business cycles but seem to be inconsistent with...

This chapter reviews calibration techniques in macroeconomics. The discussion designs with an outline of the use of calibration in applied work. Next, a simple asset-pricing model is the setting for a demonstration of calibration and for comparison with conventional estimation and testing....

Business cycles may be defined or measured by parametrizing detrending filters to maximize the ability of a business-cycle model to match the moments of the remaining cycles. Thus a theory can be used to guide cycle measurement. We present two applications to U.S. postwar data. In the first...

An SVAR in US federal spending, federal revenue, and GDP is a standard setting for the study of the impact of fiscal shocks. An appealing feature of identifying a fiscal shock with an external instrument is that one can find the effects of that shock without fully identifying the SVAR. But we...

We outline in turn criticisms made by econometricians of the methods used in empirical business-cycle research and then criticisms made by business-cycle researchers of some methods used by econometricians. The aim is to clarify and in some cases correct these criticisms. Overall there is no...

This paper investigates the behaviour of estimators based on the Kullback-Leibler information criterion (KLIC), as an alternative to the generalized method of moments (GMM). We first study the estimators in a Monte Carlo simulation model of consumption growth with power utility. Then we compare...

There is much research on consumption-savings problems with risky labor income and a constant interest rate and also on portfolio allocation with risky returns but nonstochastic labor income. Less is known quantitatively about the interaction between the two forms of risk. Under CRRA utility,...

We examine the behavior of forward and spot exchange rates from the perspective of the representative agent theory of asset pricing. We verify that with moderate risk aversion and time-additive preferences the theory accounts for very little (by our calculations, less than 5 percent) of the...

This paper assesses the ability of general equilibrium models of asset pricing using two recently developed sets of preferences to quantitatively account for the observed variability in the Canadian term structure of interest rates. the preference structures are non-expected utility and habit...