For years, the problems associated with the Lucas critique have loomed over empirical macroeconomics. Since the publication of the classic Lucas (1976) critique, researchers have endeavored to specify models that capture the underlying dynamic decision-making behavior of consumers and firms who...

Since the publication (1976) of the classic Lucas critique, researchers in empirical macroeconomics have endeavored to specify models that capture the underlying dynamic decision-making behavior of consumers and firms who require forecasts of future events. Recently, a number of researchers have...

This paper carefully outlines a method for the calculation of average marginal tax rates. The method is applied to Statistics of Income data for dividend and interest income earned by U.S. households from 1954 to 1980. To illustrate the effects these data can have inempirical work, the tax rates...

The econometrics literature contains many alternative measures of goodness of fit, roughly analogous to R2, for use with equations with dichotomous dependent variables. There is, however, no consensus as to the measures' relative merits or about which ones should be reported in empirical work....

This paper examines the relationship of the term structure of interest rates to monetary policy instruments and to subsequent real activity and inflation in both Europe and the United States. The results show that monetary policy is an important determinant of the term structure spread, but is...

Some recent time-series applications use probit models to measure the forecasting power of a set of variables. Correct inferences about the significance of the variables requires a consistent estimator of the covariance matrix of the estimated model coefficients. A potential source of...

The current review of the 1988 Basel Capital Accord has put the spotlight on the ratios used to assess banks’ capital adequacy. This article examines the effectiveness of three capital ratios—the first based on leverage, the second on gross revenues, and the third on risk-weighted...

Various methods are available to extract the "business cycle component" of a given time series variable. These methods may be derived as solutions to frequency extraction or signal extraction problems and differ in both their handling of trends and noise and their assumptions about the ideal...