We study the effect of releasing public information about productivity or monetary shocks when agents learn from nominal prices. While public releases have the benefit of providing new information, they can have the cost of reducing the informational efficiency of the price system. We show that,...

In this paper we provide evidence on the presence of seasonal unit roots in aggregate U.S. data. The analysis is conducted using the approach developed by Hyllebcrg, Engle, Granger and Yoo (1990). We first derive the mechanics and asyrnptotics of the HEGY procedure for monthly data and use Monte...

This paper catalogs the business cycle properties of 163 monthly U.S. economic time series over the three decades from 1959 through 1988. Two general sets of summary statistics are reported. The first set measures the comovement of each individual time series with a reference series representing...

Empirical results based on two different statistical approaches lead to several conclusions about the role of time-varying asset risk assessments in accounting for what, on the basis of many earlier studies, appear to be time-varying differentials in ex ante asset returns. First, both methods...

This paper exploits a data rich environment to provide direct econometric estimates of time-varying macroeconomic uncertainty, defined as the common volatility in the unforecastable component of a large number of economic indicators. Our estimates display significant independent variations from...

In this paper we study the transition from a pay-as-you-go system of Social Security pensions to an investment-based system in an economy in which portfolio returns and capital profitability are both uncertain. The paper extends earlier studies by Feldstein and Samwick that modeled the...

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We study the dynamics of the distribution of overlapping generation economy with finitely lived agents and inter-generational transmission of wealth. Financial markets are incomplete, exposing agents to both labor income and capital income risk. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is...