This paper examines how much structural change there was in the U.S. economy in the last half of the 1990s. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that there was only one major structural change, namely the huge increase in stock prices relative to earnings. All other large changes can...

Some challenges for econometric research on trending time are discussed in relation to some perceived needs of macroeconomics and macroeconomic policy making.

This paper develops a complete limit theory for Wald tests of Granger causality in levels vector autoregression (VAR's) and Johansen-type error correction models (ECM's) allowing for the presence of stochastic trends and cointegration. Earlier work by Sims, Stock and Watson (1990) on trivariate...

This paper analyzes whether inclusion of a statistically independent random walk in a vector autoregression can result in spurious inference. The problem was raised originally by Ohanian (1988). In a Monte Carlo simulation based on the VAR's estimated by Sims (1980b, 1982), Ohanian found that...

I have been doing research in macroeconomics since the late 1960s, almost 50 years. In this paper I pause and take stock. The paper is part personal reflections on macroeconometric modeling, part a road map of the techniques of macroeconometric modeling, and part comments on what I think I have...

The sensitivity of U.S. aggregate investment to shocks is procyclical: the response upon impact increases by approximately 50% from the trough to the peak of the business cycle. This feature of the data follows naturally from a DSGE model with lumpy microeconomic capital adjustment. Beyond...

Microeconomic lumpiness matters for macroeconomics. According to our DSGE model, it explains roughly 60% of the smoothing in the investment response to aggregate shocks. The remaining 40% is explained by general equilibrium forces. The central role played by micro frictions for aggregate...

There have been a number of recent papers arguing that there has been considerable convergence in macro research and to the good. This paper considers the question whether what has been converged to is good. Has progress been made in understanding how the macro economy works?

We propose a nonparametric empirical distribution function based test of an hypothesis of conditional independence between variables of interest. This hypothesis is of interest both for model specification purposes, parametric and semiparametric, and for non-model based testing of economic...

The quantal response equilibrium (QRE) notion of McKelvey and Palfrey (1995) has recently attracted considerable attention, due largely to its widely documented ability to rationalize observed behavior in games played by experimental subjects. We show that this ability to fit the data, as...