"The acceleration of productivity growth during the latter half of the 1990s was both the defining economic event of the decade and a major topic of debate among Federal Reserve policymakers. A key aspect of the debate was the conflict between incoming aggregate data, which initially suggested...

"When monetary policies are endogenous, the conventional VAR approach for detecting the effect of monetary policies is powerless. This paper proposes to test the implication of monetary policies along a different dimension. That implication is to exploit the policy induced exogeneity of...

"This paper evaluates the ability of formal rules to establish U.S. business cycle turning point dates in real time. We consider two approaches, a nonparametric algorithm and a parametric Markov-switching dynamic-factor model. In order to accurately assess the real-time performance of these...