A number of authors have attemted to test whether the U.S. economy is in a determinate or an indeterminate equilibrium. We argue that to answer this question, one must be impose a priori restrictions on lag length that cannot be tested. We provide examples of two economic models. Model 1...

Price level targeting has been proposed as an alternative to inflation targeting that may confer benefits if a central bank sets policy under discretion, even if societyu0092s loss function is specified in terms of inflation (instead of price level) volatility. This paper demonstrates the...

Standard economic models hold that exchange rates are influenced by fundamental variables such as relative money supplies, outputs, inflation rates and interest rates. Nonetheless, it has been well documented that such variables little help predict changes in floating exchange rates u0097 that...

We study identiÞcation in a class of three-equation monetary models. We argue that these models are typically not identiÞed. For any given exactly identiffed model, we provide an algorithm that generates a class of equivalent models that have the same reduced form. We use our algorithm to...

This brief reviews the evolution of the US and the European labour markets since the beginning of the financial crisis. In the US, the unemployment rate and the share of long-term unemployment grew very fast, during the crisis, thereby reaching levels close to those in the EU. Does that mean...

The global crisis has taken its toll on the EU’s prime position in international trade. While the EU still has the largest relative market shares, its position has deteriorated since the crisis, much more so than the US, and its comparative advantage in knowledge-intensive goods has been...

There has been much discussion of the differences in macroeconomic performance and prospects between the US, Japan and the euro area. Using Markov-switching techniques, in this paper we identify and compare specifically their major business-cycle features and examine the case for a common...