Since Kydland and Prescott published their famous article on rules versus discretion in 1977, the literature on the time-inconsistency problem of economic policy expanded rapidly. While much of the literature is highly technical and can seem esoteric, there is generally an underlying...

The authors document a robust and interesting relationship between the real domestic price of oil and real effective exchange rates for Germany, Japan and the United States. They explain why they think the real oil price captures exogenous terms-of-trade shocks and why such shocks could be the...

Work on testing for bubbles has caused much debate, much of which has focused on methodology. Monte Carlo simulations reported in Evans (1991) showed that standard tests for unit roots and cointegration frequently reject the presence of bubbles even when such bubbles are present by construction....