Revolutions often spawn counterrevolutions and the efficient market hypothesis in finance is no exception. The intellectual dominance of the efficient-market revolution has more been challenged by economists who stress psychological and behavioral elements of stock-price determination and by...

Using data from the Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals, this paper describes the shape of consumption profiles over the month for Social Security benefit recipients. Individuals with income mostly made up of Social Security benefits and who have some savings smooth consumption over...

As the opening speaker, I may perhaps be permitted a short trip down memory lane. The trip is purposeful, and it will be mercifully short. While preparing my Marshall Lectures for delivery at Cambridge in 1995, I asked the Federal Reserve staff, for I was then Vice Chairman, to research what had...

It is well known that the voluntary reporting of hedge funds may cause biases in estimates of their investment returns. But wide disagreements exist in explaining why hedge funds stop reporting to the datagathering services. Academic studies have suggested that poor or failing funds stop...

In the context of several examples of problems associated with present budgetary conventions, I revisit Musgrave's conceptual division of the government's program into Allocation, Distribution and Stabilization Branch subbudgets. I suggest progress towards Musgrave's ideal of a more informative...

Most recent research on monetary-policy rules is restricted to considering a commitment to simple instrument rules, where the central-bank instrument is a simple function of available information about the economy, like the Taylor rule. However, a commitment to a simple instrument rule appears...

Non-linearities in the Social Security benefits formula are used to estimate the effect of benefit size on the probability married beneficiaries work after initiating benefits. Consistent with economic theory, benefit size has a significant, negative effect on the probability of post-retirement...

Times change. When I was introduced to macroeconomics as a Princeton University freshman in 1963, fiscal policy and by that I mean discretionary fiscal stabilization policy was all the rage. The policy idea that would eventually become the Kennedy- Johnson tax cuts was the new, new thing. In...

This paper surveys the literature on the price effects of horizontal mergers. The majority of mergers that have been examined in the nine studies conducted over the past 22 years resulted in increased prices for both the merging parties and rival firms, at least in the short run. There is some...

This paper analyzes the role that health status plays in household portfolio decisions using data from the first wave of the Health and Retirement Study. The results indicate that health is a significant predictor of both the probability of owning different types of financial assets and the...