In specifications of tastes and technology, econometricians often impose curvature globally, but monotonicity only locally or not at all. In fact monotonicity rarely is even mentioned in that literature. But without satisfaction of both curvature and monotonicity, the second order conditions for...

Diewert's "superlative" index numbers, defined to be exact for second order aggregator functions, unify index number theory with aggregation theory, but have been difficult to identify. We present a new approach to finding elements of this class. This new approach, related to that advocated by...

It has long been rumored among European economists that Theil had a difficult time in The Netherlands during the Second World War, but few, if any, economists knew what actually happened to him. Following Theil's retirement from the U. of Florida, I visited with him in St. Augustine, where Hans...

Although nonlinearity is the rule in economic theory, nonlinearity tends to make life difficult for econometricians. While there have been many advances in nonlinear econometrics in recent years, some problems produced by nonlinearity remain 'skeletons in the closet' in empirical economic...

This paper consists of the page proofs of W. A. Barnett's interview of Paul A. Samuelson, to appear in print in the journal, Macroeconomic Dynamics, in September 2004. To our knowledge, this is the first and only interview of Paul A. Samuelson published in a professional economics journal. In...

In aggregation theory, index numbers are judged relative to their ability to track the exact aggregator functions nested within the economy's structure. Within the monetary sector, Barnett, Liu, and Jensen (1997) compared two statistical index numbers: the Divisia monetary aggregate and the...

Euler equation models represent an important class of macroeconomic systems. Our ongoing research (He and Barnett (2003)) on the Leeper and Sims (1994) Euler equations macroeconometric model is revealing the existence of singularity-induced bifurcations, when the model’s parameters are within...

The determinants of money velocity are explored under various assumptions on interest rate uncertainty in a monetary general equilibrium model. It is found that the appearance of velocity function instability can be produced by overlooking interest rate stochastic volatility. In addition, when...

This paper is a follow on to our earlier papers exploring the dynamic properties of the UK continuous time macroeconometric model. This paper is focussed on policy implications. We take the position that the term "stabilization policy" implies that the economy would be unstable without policy,...

This paper extends the field of index number theory to the case of risk, by deriving the Divisia index from the Euler equations under risk, rather than from the first order conditions under perfect certainty, as was done by Francois Divisia. The result is an extended Divisia index which corrects...