In this paper we examine two different measures of monthly production that have been used by economists. The first measure, which we refer to as IP, is the index of industrial production constructed by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. This measure is used extensively in empirical...

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the empirical behavior of inventories. A great deal of this research examines some variant of the production smoothing model of finished goods inventories. The overall assessment of this model that exists in the literature is quite...

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the empirical behavior of inventories. A great deal of this research examines some variant of the production smoothing model of finished goods inventories. The overall assessment of this model that exists in the literature is quite...

Those who study consumption behavior routinely assume that labor income is stochastic and that the utility function exhibits constant relative risk aversion. No one has derived closed form solutions to this problem, however, and therefore we do not know what the resulting consumption function...

Many U.S. corporations have frozen defined benefit (DB) pension plans, replacing new DB promises with contributions to defined contribution (DC) plans. We estimate expected DB accruals from the age-service and salary distributions of a large sample of U.S. corporate pension plans with more than...

The effect of drug prohibition on drug consumption is a critical issue in debates over drug policy. One episode that provides information on the consumption-reducing efffect of drug prohibition is the Chinese legalization of opium in 1858. In this paper we examine the impact of China's opium...