The paper analyzes two questions: (i) the effect of a monetary policy shock on the business cycle and (ii) the extent to which a shift in a monetary policy affects the dynamics of business cycle. Unlike previous literature, to answer these questions, we measure cycle movements by calculating an...

The institution of slavery displays a puzzling historical pattern: it is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development, in horticultural societies, and less frequently among hunter-gatherers and societies at more advanced agrarian stages. We explain this rise-and- fall pattern...

The paper offers a new explanation for the cause of the Great Inflation by constructing a model that explicitly separates the roles of government and monetary policymakers. A mechanism that inflation can accelerate even if an inflation target is low is uncovered. The model solves the puzzle of...

The recent debates over discriminatory versus uniform-price auctions in the UK and elsewhere have revealed an incomplete understanding of the limitations of some popular auction models when applied to real-world electricity markets. This has led certain regulatory authorities to prefer...

This is the FINAL draft of this paper reporting the results of a long ongoing competition. The paper now is forthcoming in the Journal of Econometrics. This final version replaces the earlier draft that was also in this archive. Interest has been growing in testing for nonlinearity or chaos in...

This paper evaluates the effects of quality change on the price index for new passenger cars in Portugal for the years 1997-2001. Hedonic regression models are studied, giving particular emphasis to the relation between the form of the price index and the specification of the hedonic equation...

This paper discusses the performance of popular mismatch indexes proposed by Lilien (1982), Jackman and Roper (1987), Jackman, Layard and Savouri (1991), and Lambert (1988). Results in the literature show that, with the exception of Lambert’s index, measures of mismatch reveal decreasing or at...

Aggregate productivity growth can be decomposed into growth within establishments, between establishments, and the impact of entering and exiting establishments. We demonstrate that such a productivity decomposition formula can also be used for studying intraestablishment restructuring through...