This paper argues that the high historical excess returns to equity are1 a result of a severe ex post bias over the period from 1915 to circa 1960 because inflation surprises during this period drove a wedge between ex ante and ex post returns to bonds. Furthermore, it is shown that ex ante and...

We consider economies with incomplete markets, one good per state, two periods, t = 0; 1, private ownership of initial endowments, a single firm, and no assets other than shares in this firm. In Dierker, Dierker, Grodal (2002), we give an example of such an economy in which all market equilibria...

Evidence for the OECD countries show that the “great ratios”, such as the unemployment rate, factor shares, Tobin’s q and the investment-capital ratio, fluctuate significantly on medium-term frequencies of 10-40 years duration. To explain these medium-term fluctuations, we establish a...

The records of a New York savings bank founded by Irish immigrants in 1850 are used to shed light on immigrant savings patterns and the early history of savings banks. The analysis of the occupations and addresses of individual account holders reveals a very broad cross-section of the New York...

We consider economies with incomplete markets, one good per state, private ownership of initial endowments, a single firm, and no assets other than shares in this firm. In this simple framework, arbitrarily small income effects can render every market equilibrium resulting from some production...

The paper discusses the dynamics of inflation and money growth in a stochastic framework, allowing for double unit roots in the nominal variables. It gives some examples of typical I(2) ’symptoms’ in empirical I(1) models and provides both a nontechnical and a technical discussion of the...

Recent research on contingent claims valuation has assumed increasingly general models of the behavior of cash securities. Relatively few attempts have been made to implement and evaluate such models empirically, however. In this paper we apply a multi-factor, continuous time pricing model to...

The long-run foreign transmission effects are analyzed in a multivariate time-series model of Danish and German prices, exchange rates and interest rates. The analysis of the likelihood function reveals that the vector process is I(2), but that a linear transformation of the prices and the...

The persistent movements away from long-run benchmark values in real exchange rates, dubbed the PPP puzzle, observed in many real exchange rates during periods of currency float have been subject to much empirical research without resolving the puzzle. The paper demonstrates how the cointegrated...

Some recent developments in the macroeconometric analysis of time series are discussed in the light of Haavelmo (1944). Experimental design in econometrics is discussed and related to the case of passive observation. The general ideas are illustrated with an analysis of the long-run and...