This paper challenges recent conventional wisdom of a divide between Main Street (the average American consumer) and Wall Street (financial market participants). The views of survey respondents regarding the likelihood of stock index returns exceeding specific thresholds are compared to market...

In this paper, we develop an aggregation procedure using time-varying weights for constructing the common component of international economic fluctuations. The methodology for deriving time-varying weights is based on some stylized features of the data documented in the paper. The model allows...

In November, 2011, the Financial Stability Board, in collaboration with the International Monetary Fund, published a list of 29 "systemically important financial institutions" (SIFIs). This designation reflects a concern that the failure of any one of them could have dramatic negative...

Ever since the development of the Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity (ARCH) model (Engle [1982]), testing for the presence of ARCH has become a routine diagnostic. One popular method of testing for ARCH is T times the R^2 from a regression of squared residuals on p of its lags. This...

When does the Federal Reserve deviate from its dual mandate of pursuing the economic goals of maximum employment and price stability and what are the consequences? We assemble the most comprehensive collection of Federal Reserve speeches to-date and apply state-ofthe-art natural language...

The ongoing analysis of the effects of pension plan provisions on retirement is pursued in this paper. A primary objective of this paper is to test the validity of models previously developed and estimated with data from a Fortune 500 company, here using data from a second large company. The...

The Health and Retirement Study asks respondents their subjective probabilities about 12 future events. An individual's responses contain a common component that is unrelated to the true probability of the event in question. Use of the entire set of an individual's responses to control for this...