Most of those who take macro and monetary policy decisions are agents. The worst penalty which can be applied to these agents is to sack them if they are perceived to have failed. To be publicly sacked as a failure is painful, often severely so, but the pain is finite. Agents thus have loss...

Most of those who take macro and monetary policy decisions are agents.  The worst penalty which can be applied to these agents is to sack them.  Agents thus have loss functions which are bounded above.  We work with a bell loss function which has this property.  With additive uncertainty the...

Most of those who take macro and monetary policy decisions are agents. The worst penalty which can be applied to these agents is to sack them if they are perceived to have failed. To be publicly sacked as a failure is painful, often severely so, but the pain is finite. Agents thus have loss...

This paper shows that standard corporate finance theory implies that there is potentially a trade off between the variances of dividends and equity prices. We show how the trade off works in a stochastic difference equation model of dividend policy demonstrating that the solution may be unstable...

The overriding practical problem now is the tension between the global financial and market system and the national political and power structures. The main analytical short-coming lies in the failure to incorporate financial frictions, especially default, into our macro-economic models. Neither...

We use Bayesian time-varying parameters VARs with stochastic volatility to investigate changes in the marginal predictive content of the yield spread for output growth in the United States and the United Kingdom, since the Gold Standard era, and in the Eurozone, Canada, and Australia over the...

This paper assesses the linkages between money, credit, house prices and economic activity in industrialised countries over the last three decades. The analysis is based on a fixed-effects panel VAR estimated using quarterly data for 17 industrialized countries spanning the period 1970-2006. The...