Much attention has been given to the recent growth of the U.S. federal debt. This paper examines the growth of federal liabilities that are not included in the officially reported numbers. These take the form of implicit or explicit government guarantees and commitments. The five major...

This paper reviews some of the literature on the macroeconomic effects of oil price shocks with a particular focus on possible nonlinearities in the relation and recent new results obtained by Kilian and Vigfusson (2009)

Although ARCH-related models have proven quite popular in finance, they are less frequently used in macroeconomic applications. In part this may be because macroeconomists are usually more concerned about characterizing the conditional mean rather than the conditional variance of a time series....

Here's why. (1) The HP filter produces series with spurious dynamic relations that have no basis in the underlying data-generating process. (2) Filtered values at the end of the sample are very different from those in the middle, and are also characterized by spurious dynamics. (3) A statistical...

In many time series models, an infinite number of moments can be used for estimation in a large sample. I supply a technically undemanding proof of a condition for optimal instrumental variables use of such moments in a parametric model. I also illustrate application of the condition in...

Econometric aspects of recent research on inventory models are surveyed. The discussion emphasizes issues relevant to instrumental variables estimation of a first order condition of the Holt et al. (1960) linear quadratic inventory model, including choice of instruments, covariance matrix...

An aggregate demand - aggregate supply framework is used to analyze the effects of Japanese monetary policy, 1973:1-1990:8. It is found that money supply shocks contribute relatively little to output variability over the sample as a whole. Nor do these shocks seem to be particularly marked...

This is a summary and interpretation of some of the literature on stock price volatility that was stimulated by Leroy and Porter (1981) and Shiller (1981a). It appears that neither small sample bias, rational bubbles nor some standard models for expected returns adequately explain stock price...

This paper uses a novel teat to see whether the Herse (1985) and Woo (1985) models are consistent with the variability of the deutschemark - dollar exchange rate 1974-1984. The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is yes. Both models, however, explain the month to month variability as resulting in a...

The set of parameters needed to calculate the expected present discounted value of a stream of dividends can be estimated in two ways. One may test for speculative bubbles, or fads, by testing whether the two estimates are the same. When the test is applied to some annual U.S. stock market data,...