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...

We develop a model relating self-control, risk preferences and conflict identification to cooperation patterns in social dilemmas. We subject our model to data from an experimental public goods game and a risk experiment, and we measure conflict identification and self-control. As predicted, we...

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...

Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. A practical problem arises, however, when some data points are missing. This note proposes a method for coping with this problem.

This note gives a fairly complete statistical description of the Hodrick-Prescott Filter (1997), originally proposed by Leser (1961). It builds on an approach to seasonal adjustment suggested by Leser (1963) and Schlicht (1981, 1984). A moments estimator for the smoothing parameter is proposed...

Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. A practical problem arises, however, when the time series contains structural breaks (such as produced by German unification for German time series, for...

The estimation of models with time-varying coefficients is usually performed by Kalman-Bucy filtering. The two-sided filter proposed by Schlicht (1988) is statistically and computationally superior to the one-sided Kalman-Bucy filter. This paper describes the estimation procedure and the program...

Trend extraction from time series is often performed by using the filter proposed by Leser (1961), also known as the Hodrick-Prescott filter. Practical problems arise, however, if the time series contains structural breaks (as produced by German unification for German time series, for instance),...