The influence of peer behavior on an individual's choices has received renewed interest in recent years. However, accurate measures of this influence are difficult to obtain. Standard reduced-form methods lead to upwardly biased estimates due to simultaneity, common shocks, and nonrandom peer...

This paper examines the problem of appropriately specifying and estimating the money demand function in the presence of adaptive expectations and partial adjustment mechanisms. The paper demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting distributed lag reduced form representations of the monetary...

In recent years, wavelets have become widely used in physics, engineering, and mathematics. They have been used for signal processing, image processing, numerical computation, and data compression. Wavelets have not, however, been used very much in the fields of Economics, Econometrics, and...

We present several Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation methods that have been widely used in recent years in econometrics and statistics. Among these is the Gibbs sampler, which has been of particular interest to econometricians. Although the paper summarizes some of the relevant theoretical...

The essential idea of equilibrium search models of labour market behaviour is that wage policy matters. In contrast, the stylized neoclassical competitive model predicts that firms paying a wage above the competitive equilibrium will disappear; those offering less will attract no workers. The...

We have collected data on the one-year-ahead income expectations of members of American households in our Survey of Economic Expectations (SEE), a module of a national continuous telephone survey conducted at the University of Wisconsin. The income- expectations questions take this form: "What...

The authors examine the issue of lag-length selection in the context of a structural vector autoregression (VAR) and a vector error-correction model with long-run restrictions. First, they show that imposing long- run restrictions implies, in general, a moving-average (MA) component in the...

This paper looks at the history of money and its modern form from a scientific and mathematical point of view. The approach here is to emphasize simplicity. A straightforward model and algebraic formula for a large economy analogous to the ideal gas law of thermodynamics is proposed. It may be...