Milton Friedman's contributions to and influence on macroeconomics are discussed, beginning with his work on the consumption function and the demand for money, not to mention monetary history, which helped to undermine the post World War 2 Keynesian consensus in the area. His inter-related...

The aim of this paper is to assess whether explicitly modeling structural change increases the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts. We produce real time out-of-sample forecasts for inflation, the unemployment rate and the interest rate using a Time-Varying Coefficients VAR with Stochastic...

Martin Stuart ("Marty") Feldstein, currently George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. (NBER), is a renowned American economist who has made important contributions to public finance, macroeconomics,...

The present paper is the first in a series of three essays in which we examine the macroeconomic and structural approaches to inflation. In this paper we explore some of the key contributions to the macroeconomic literature which appeared since the late 1950s. Much of this literature evolved in...

The authors solve the IS puzzle for the G7 countries. They find that five of the G7 countries have the expected significant negative relationship between the output gap and the realrate gap; the time series of the remaining two show material deviation from expected IScurve behavior. The authors...

Specific ideas about the Fisher relation between real and nominal interest rates and more general ideas about the nature of the central bank's duty to support the financial system in times of crisis were important to the Monetarist re-assessment of the causes of the Great Depression and what...

We investigate the effects of economic crises on the subsequent economic performance, economic reform, democratization and institutional change. Our analysis is based on a sample of post-communist countries, most of which experienced severe economic crises during the 1990s. We find that the...

The authors review the challenges that the Romanian economy and society had to face in the European and global geoeconomic context. Starting from the perspectives advanced by the international economic fora, the risks the European economy will have to answer through counteracting and general...