Early research on the returns to higher education treated the postsecondary system as a monolith. In reality, postsecondary education in the United States and around the world is highly differentiated, with a variety of options that differ by credential (associates degree, bachelor's degree,...

Price surges often generate social disapproval and requests for regulation and price controls, but these interventions may cause inefficiencies and shortages. To study how individuals perceive and reason about sudden price increases for different products under different policy regimes, we...

We reexamine the expectations theory of the term structure focusing on the question how monetary policy actions indicated by changes in the very short rate affect long-term interest rates. Our main point is that the expectations hypothesis implies that very long rates should only react to...

In this paper, the structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model is used to analyze short-run and contemporaneous relationships between monetary aggregates and other macroeconomic variables. This requires imposing restrictions on the correlation structure of the VAR residuals. Different...

Alternative modeling strategies for specifying subset VAR models are considered. It is shown that under certain conditions a testing procedure based on t-ratios is equivalent to sequentially eliminating lags that lead to the largest improvement in a prespecified model selection criterion. A...

This paper conducts counterfactual historical analysis of several monetary policy rules by contrasting actual settings of instrument variables with values that would have been specified by the rules in response to prevailing conditions. Of particular interest is whether major policy mistakes,...

This paper examines monetary policy in Rudebusch and Svensson's (1999) two equation macroeconomic model when the policymaker recognizes that the model is an approximation and is uncertain about the quality of that approximation. It is argued that the minimax approach of robust control provides a...

This paper assesses the long-run effects of the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUSFTA) on the Canadian labor market using matched longitudinal administrative data for the years 1984-2004. We simultaneously examine the labor market effects of increased export expansion and import...

Using confidential regulatory firm-bank-loan level data from the U.S., we document four new facts about the credit market. First, private SMEs typically utilize all available bank credit which comprises their entire balance sheet debt, compared to large listed firms who can switch between...

We review the literature on the empirical characteristics of the global financial cycle and associated stylized facts on international capital flows, asset prices, risk aversion and liquidity in the financial system. We analyse the co-movements of global factors in asset prices and capital flows...