This paper proposes a tripartite framework of design, evaluation, and post-evaluation analysis for generating and interpreting economic forecasts. This framework's value is illustrated by re-examining mean square forecast errors from dynamic models and nonlinearity biases from empirical...

Virtually all we know about the behavior of U.S. imports rests on studies estimating income and price elasticities with postwar data. But anyone examining the evolution of U.S. trade cannot avoid asking whether the postwar period provides enough information to characterize that behavior. From...

This paper uses the transcripts from the FOMC meetings to characterize the interactions between policymakers and macro models in the formulation of U.S. monetary policy. We develop a taxonomy of these interactions and present two case studies. The first case focuses on the debate on the choice...

Fifty years of econometric modeling of U.S. import demand assumes that trade elasticities are autonomous parameters, that both cross-price effects and simultaneity biases are absent, and that expenditures on domestic and foreign goods can be studied independently of each other. To relax these...

This paper evaluates the hypothesis that globalization has increased the role of international factors and decreased the role of domestic factors in the inflation process in industrial economies. Toward that end, we estimate standard Phillips curve inflation equations for 11 industrial countries...

Virtually all that is known about the behavior of imports rests on studies estimating income and price elasticities with postwar data. But anyone examining the evolution of trade over the last century cannot avoid asking whether the postwar period provides enough information to characterize that...

This paper builds, estimates. and simulates a world trade model to provide a quantitative analysis of the behavior of the U.S. trade deficit. A key feature of this model is that international trade imbalances add up to zero. The analysis estimates income and price elasticities for bilateral...

One of the most remarkable macroeconomic developments of the past decade has been the widespread decline in inflation despite declines in unemployment rates. For the United States, these seemingly contradictory developments have been reconciled in terms of three factors: (1) an acceleration in...