This paper presents aggregate demand gaps for seven OECD countries using structural VAR estimation. These estimates are far more robust than HP-filtered series–typical estimates for GDP-gaps–and demonstrate that both aggregate demand and supply shocks were important in the recent global...

I measure the importance of sectoral shocks in US aggregate output by using the World Input–Output Table (WIOT). The WIOT allows me to correct potential sub-graph bias in previous literature, caused by using only the US industrial production input–output table. I report results from three...

Using a 219-year sample, we find that the US output growth and inflation volatilities fell by 60% and 76%, respectively, from 1945 until the mid-1960s. This Postwar Moderation is more substantial than the Great Moderation. The largest reduction in inflation volatility occurred during the...

This paper proposes a couple of new methods to compute the news impact curve for stochastic volatility (SV) models. The new methods incorporate the joint movement of return and volatility, which has been ignored by the extant literature. The first method employs the Bayesian Markov chain Monte...

New estimates of an aggregate long-term production function for the post-war U.S. economy are reported. The results indicate that this long-term aggregate production function exhibits a slight but statistically significant increasing returns to scale. Since virtually all econometric growth...

We study the welfare implications of public information precision in a beauty contest framework allowing for optimal stabilization policies and information obfuscation. When policy makers’ ability to obfuscate information is constrained, increasing public information precision can be welfare...

Euler equations are the key link between monetary policy and the real economy in NK models. Under separable preferences, they fail to match interest rates. Non-separability between leisure and consumption significantly improves their fit and reliability for studying monetary policy.

We challenge the view that the negative correlation between the Federal Funds and the Euler equation interest rate is linked to monetary policy. Using Monte Carlo experiments, we show that the negative correlation can be explained by risk premium disturbances.

This note estimates the causal effect of life expectancy on per capita income and tests the hypothesis of a non-monotonic effect using finite mixture models. The results confirm the hypothesis and qualify recent evidence for a negative effect by Acemoglu and Johnson (2007).

Bliss [Bliss, C., 2008. Multiple equilibrium in the Diamond capital model. Economics Letters 100, 143–145] finds numerically that the Diamond OLG model can have uncountably many steady states. We use log preferences and show analytically that a continuum of steady states can still exist.