The authors test the statistical significance of Pindyck’s (1999) suggested class of econometric equations that model the behaviour of long-run real energy prices. The models postulate meanreverting prices with continuous and random changes in their level and trend, and are estimated using...

In the United States, the Federal Reserve has a dual mandate of promoting stable inflation and maximum employment. Since the Fed directly controls only one instrument-the federal funds rate-the authors argue that the Fed's priorities continuously alternate between inflation and economic...

The author proposes a class of exact tests of the null hypothesis of exchangeable forecast errors and, hence, of the hypothesis of no difference in the unconditional accuracy of two competing forecasts. The class includes analogues of the well-known Diebold and Mariano (1995) parametric and...

Real wage rigidities have recently been proposed as a way of building intrinsic persistence in inflation within the context of New Keynesian Phillips Curves. Using two recent illustrative structural models, we evaluate empirically the importance of real wage rigidities in the data and the extent...

The early work of Tobin (1958) showed that portfolio allocation decisions can be reduced to a two stage process: first decide the relative allocation of assets across the risky assets, and second decide how to divide total wealth between the risky assets and the safe asset. This so called...

Weak identification is likely to be prevalent in multi-equation macroeconomic models such as in dynamic stochastic general equilibrium setups. Identification difficulties cause the breakdown of standard asymptotic procedures, making inference unreliable. While the extensive econometric...

Real wage rigidities have recently been proposed as a way of building intrinsic persistence in inflation within the context of New Keynesian Phillips Curves. Using two recent illustrative structural models, we evaluate empirically the importance of real wage rigidities in the data and the extent...

The authors address empirically the implications of structural breaks in the variance-covariance matrix of inflation and import prices for changes in pass-through. They define pass-through within a correlated vector autoregression (VAR) framework as the response of domestic inflation to an...

In a recent paper, Chang, Gomes, and Schorfheide (2002) extend the standard real business cycle (RBC) model to allow for a learning-by-doing (LBD) mechanism whereby current labour supply affects future productivity. They show that this feature magnifies the propagation of shocks and improves the...

This paper compares the performance of simple inflation targeting (IT) and price-level path targeting (PLPT) rules to stabilize the macroeconomy, in response to a series of shocks, similar to those seen in Canada and the United States over the 1983 to 2004 period. The analysis is conducted in a...