The use of principal component techniques to estimate approximate factor models with large cross-sectional dimension is now well established. However, recent work by Inklaar, Jacobs and Romp (2003) and Boivin and Ng (2005) has cast some doubt on the importance of a large cross-sectional...

It is believed that changes in the varieties of an imported product might have effects on the import price index for the product that are similar to the effects of new goods on the cost of living. Recently, a new index number formula that incorporates the effects of new goods has been suggested...

The Lorenz curve relates the cumulative proportion of income to the cumulative proportion of population. When a particular functional form of the Lorenz curve is specified it is typically estimated by linear or nonlinear least squares, estimation techniques that have good properties when the...

The conventional formula for estimating the extended Gini coefficient is a covariance formula provided by Lerman and Yitzhaki (1989). We suggest an alternative estimator obtained by approximating the Lorenz curve by a series of linear segments. In a Monte Carlo experiment designed to assess the...

The present paper estimates upper-level substitution and new-goods bias in the Korean Consumer Price Index (CPI). It has been estimated that the upper-level substitution bias in the CPI alone increased the inflation rate by 0.51 percentage points per year over the thirteen-year period between...

This paper examines and dissects ten popular "suspect" conjectures about exchange rates. The conjectures are the following: (1) Economists know what determines the exchange rate (2) Flexible exchange rates are unstable due to destabilising speculation (3) Flexible exchange rates are excessively...

Inflation targeting needs to be supplemented by an economic growth target so that central banks will not adopt monetary policy which results in stagnation. There is no guarantee that the economy will move towards full employment by itself when the inflation rate is kept between two to three per...

When the demand for money is infinitely the interest elastic, injecting base money into the system is akin to money being sucked into a Black Hole. Economics activity will not be revived by driving the rate of interest to zero. Full employment can only be restored by a judicious combination of...

Monetary policy may be effective in stabilising income via the real balance effect and the exchange rate channel. Even though interest rates of government bonds are subject to a zero lower bound, fiscal and monetary policy may be employed to change Tobin's q in a multi-asset model and thereby...

This paper considers a central bank with a zero inflation target and a fiscal authority with a differing objective. Examples using calibrated models explore the consequences of the fiscal authority being aware of the central bank's objective. Situations in which the fiscal authority is able to...