A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels. Such a criterion is essential to resolve the optimal population problem, i.e., the tradeoff between population size and the welfare of each person...

We develop a framework for estimating expected returns---a <i>predictive system</i>---that allows predictors to be imperfectly correlated with the conditional expected return. When predictors are imperfect, the estimated expected return depends on past returns in a manner that hinges on the correlation...

The standard regression approach to modeling return predictability seems too restrictive in one way but too lax in another. A predictive regression models expected returns as an exact linear function of a given set of predictors but does not exploit the likely economic property that innovations...

Standard practice for the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models maintains the assumption that economic variables are properly measured by a single indicator, and that all relevant information for the estimation is summarized by a small number of data series. However,...

Standard practice for the estimation of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models maintains the assumption that economic variables are properly measured by a single indicator, and that all relevant information for the estimation is summarized by a small number of data series. However,...

While the focus of mainstream economic analysis of liability rules remains on negligence liability, recently some legal scholars have argued for the sharing of liability. In this paper, our first objective is contribute to the debate regarding the desirability of the sharing of liability for the...

This paper is about the properties of Markov switching rational expectations (MSRE) models. We present a simple monetary policy model that switches between two regimes with known transition probabilities. The first regime, treated in isolation, has a unique determinate rational expectations...

This paper provides a minimalist derivation of the gravity equation and uses it to identify three common errors in the literature, what we call the gold, silver and bronze medal errors. The paper provides estimates of the size of the biases taking the currency union trade effect as an example....

In this paper we propose a method to characterize the time series properties of individual consumption, income and interest rates using micro data, as studies in labour economics have characterized the time series properties of hours and earnings. Our approach, however, does not remove aggregate...

It is argued that learnability/E-stability is a necessary condition for a RE solution to be plausible. A class of linear models considered by Evans and Honkapohja (2001) is shown to include all models of the form used by King and Watson (1998) and Klein (2000), which permits any number of lags,...