This paper revisits the issue of conditional volatility in real GDP growth rates for Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Previous studies find high persistence in the volatility. This paper shows that this finding largely reflects a nonstationary variance. Output growth in...

Recent studies evaluate the effectiveness of inflation targeting through the average treatment effect and generally conclude the window-dressing view of the monetary policy for industrial countries. This paper argues that the evidence of irrelevance emerges because of a time-varying relationship...

Recently, Fagiolo et al. (2008) find fat tails of economic growth rates after adjusting outliers, autocorrelation and heteroskedasticity. This paper employs US quarterly real output growth, showing that this finding of fat tails may reflect the Great Moderation. That is, leptokurtosis disappears...

This paper revisits the issue of conditional volatility in real GDP growth rates for Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Previous studies find high persistence in the volatility. This paper shows that this finding largely reflects a nonstationary variance....

Recently, Fagiolo et al. (2008) find fat tails in the distribution of economic growth rates after adjusting for outliers, autocorrelation, and heteroskedasticity. This paper employs US quarterly real output growth, showing that this finding of fat tails may reflect the Great Moderation. That is,...