Compared to its central role in policy discussions in the United States and most other developed countries, the reliability of the measurement of the output gap has attracted relatively little academic study. Furthermore, both the academic literature and the debate among practitioners have...

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...

The method proposed in this chapter is making use of the bispectrum transformation to estimate the level of integration of a fractionally integrated time series. Bispectrum ransformation transforms the series into a two dimensional frequency space, and thus has higher information content...

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 paper presents univariate and panel unit root tests for gasoline and oil price convergence over the last decade. We test for the absolute versus relative version of the LOOP and estimate the speed of convergence as well as its development over time. Our results show that the absolute version...