Economists are widely familiar with the Ricardian equivalence thesis. It maintains that, given the time-path of government spending, a change in taxation does not alter the set of feasible life-time consumption plans of the households and affects neither the demand for commodities and services...

This note identifies a severe mistake in my article “Unexpected Consequences of Ricardian Expectations” that appeard in this journal in the July 2013 issue.

Economists are widely familiar with the Ricardian equivalence thesis. It maintains that, given the time-path of government spending, a change in taxation does not alter the set of feasible life-time consumption plans of the households and affects neither the demand for commodities and services...

This paper investigates the issue of rational expectations using inflation forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and the Green Book. We provide an alternative test of rational expectations hypothesis by measuring the degree of persistence of potential systematic mistakes....

Canonical analysis of the classical general equilibrium model demonstrates the existence of an open and dense subset of standard economies that possess fully-revealing rational expectations equilibria. This paper shows that the analogous result is not true in urban economies under appropriate...

Canonical analysis of the classical general equilibrium model demonstrates the existence of an open and dense subset of standard economies that possess fully-revealing rational expectations equilibria. This paper shows that the analogous result is not true in urban economies under reasonable...

Using a multi-country general equilibrium model, we demonstrate that when agents face credit constraints in an international financial market, rational expectations, which are ex-post heterogeneous between countries, cause business fluctuations. If the international financial market becomes...

This note generalizes Feldstein’s (1976) criticism of Barro’s(1974) analysis for the case that the interest rate exceeds the growth rate. This is done by considering an economy in steady state where all agents hold “Barro expectations”: they believe that government debt must necessarily...

The Rational Expectations Hypothesis (REH) states that the actual outcome will be identical to the optimal forecast when all obtainable information had been utilized in forming the expectations. This study intends to empirically examine the existence of rational behavior in the banks and other...