For years the economics profession has been puzzled by one of the most perplexing economic problems - the overall slowdown in the growth rate of labour productivity since 1973. Not only was the deceleration a worldwide trend, the growth of productivity also turned out to be markedly slower in...

We find and compare two simple fiscal rules. The first is a theoretical rule that approximates well Ramsey-optimal fiscal policy in a DSGE model calibrated to the U.S. economy over the period 1955:1 to 2007:3. The second is an empirical rule that approximates well actual U.S. fiscal policy over...

For years the economics profession has been puzzled by one of the most perplexing economic problems - the overall slowdown in the growth rate of labour productivity since 1973. Not only was the deceleration a worldwide trend, the growth of productivity also turned out to be markedly slower in...

The paper employs a rank-dependent formulation of the social welfare function with time-separable utilities to evaluate the economic consequences of income mobility from an ex-ante perspective. The resultant class of measures can be decomposed not only in terms of structural and exchange...

This paper considers the problem of forecasting in large macroeconomic panels using Bayesian model averaging. Practical methods for implementing Bayesian model averaging with factor models are described. These methods involve algorithms that simulate from the space defined by all possible...