Angus Maddison and Harry Wu (2008) claim that, in 2003, China’s GDP was 73% of that of the United States on a purchasing power parity (PPP) basis. Rejecting the results of the 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP), they construct their own PPP using a 1986 GDP estimate for China...

The Millennium Development Goals set quantitative targets for poverty reduction and improvements in health, education, gender equality, the environment, and other aspects of human welfare. At existing rates of progress many countries will fall short of these goals. However, if developing...

The risk premium on equities and nominal and real long-term debt in the standard dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model used in macroeconomics is far too small and stable relative to empirical measures obtained from the data--an example of the equity and bond "premium puzzles."...

A number of recent papers have used different financial market instruments to measure near-term expectations of the federal funds rate and the high-frequency changes in these instruments around FOMC announcements to measure monetary policy shocks. This paper evaluates the empirical success of a...

Many researchers have used federal funds futures rates as measures of financial markets’ expectations of future monetary policy. However, to the extent that federal funds futures reflect risk premia, these measures require some adjustment for risk premia. In this paper, we document that excess...

This paper demonstrates that long-term forward interest rates in the U.S. often react considerably to surprises in macroeconomic data releases and monetary policy announcements. This behavior is in contrast to the prediction of many macroeconomic models, in which the long-run properties of the...

A standard result in the literature on monetary policy rules is that of certainty equivalence: given the expected values of all the state variables of the economy, policy should be set in a way that is independent of all higher moments of those variables. Some exceptions to this rule have been...

We present an algorithm and software routines for computing nth-order approximate solutions to dynamic, discrete-time rational expectations models around a nonstochastic steady state. We apply these routines to investigate the optimal monetary policy with commitment in an optimizing-agent model...

We compute the optimal Ramsey policy in a New Keynesian model where the steady state suffers from monopolistic and tax distortions. We show that the optimal monetary policy in this environment displays asymmetric responses to shocks to optimally inflate the economy (slightly) at times when it...