"Most intervention studies have been silent on the assumed structure of the economic system--implicitly imposing implausible assumptions--despite the fact that inference depends crucially on such issues. This paper proposes to identify the cross-effects of intervention with the level and...

"This paper examines the technical efficiency of U.S. Federal reserve check processing offices over 1980-2003. We use new unconditional quantile estimator of efficiency that avoids some drawbacks of other recently proposed estimators. The new estimator is fully non-parametric, robust with...

We document that monetary policy inertia can help alleviate problems of indeterminacy and non-existence of stationary equilibrium observed for some commonly-studied monetary policy rules. We also find that inertia promotes learnability of equilibrium. The context is a simple, forward-looking...

Actual policy decisions are made in real time and are not irrevocable. These observations are mundane, but most policy modeling has neglected them. We show that when policy is made in an environment of uncertainty, costs of switching policies give the option to wait positive value. This insight...