The United Kingdom employed the McKenna rule to conduct fiscal policy during World War I (WWI) and the interwar period. Named for Reginald McKenna, Chancellor of the Exchequer (1915-16), the McKenna rule committed the United Kingdom to a path of debt retirement, which we show was forward-looking...

Benjamin and Kochin (1979, Journal of Political Economy) present regression estimates to support their hypothesis that larger unemployment benefits increased U.K. unemployment post-World War I (WWI). The Benjamin-Kochin (BK) regression is easy to replicate. When the replication is widened to...

We propose a new information criterion for impulse response function matching estimators (IRFMEs) of the structural parameters of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) macroeconomic models. An advantage of our procedure is that it allows researchers to select the impulse responses that...