What does the level of the real interest rates tell us about where the economy, or one's portfolio, is headed? The answer to this question depends on one's estimate of the ``equilibrium'' value of real interest rates, a measure that is unfortunately not directly observed in the market place. In...

Nominal short term interest rates have been low in the United States, so low that some have wondered whether the federal funds rate is likely to hit its lower bound at 0 percent. Such a scenario, which some economists have called the liquidity trap, would imply that the Federal Reserve could no...

The performance of the U.S. commercial banking industry remained strong in 1998, but slipped a bit from the remarkable results of recent years. Both the return on assets and the return on equity edged down last year, although they remained high by historical standards. While supported by growth...

Motivated by recent developments in the bounded rationality and strategic complementarity literatures, we examine an intentionally simple and stylized aggregative economic model when the assumptions of fully rational expectations and no strategic interactions are relaxed. We show that small...

I analyze the business cycle implications of noisy economic indicators in the context of a dynamic general equilibrium model. Two main results emerge. First, measurement error in preliminary data releases can have a quantitatively important effect on economic fluctuations. For instance, under...

I construct a dynamic general equilibrium model where agents differ in the way they form expectations. Sophisticated agents form model-consistent expectations. Rule-of-thumb agents' expectations are based on an intuitive forecasting rule. All agents solve standard dynamic optimization problems...

If current projections of future budget surpluses materialize, investing in Treasury securities--an asset class with which investors have long been familiar--could eventually become a thing of the past. In this paper, I examine the extent to which investors' portfolio allocation decisions are...