Almost half of American families did not adjust their consumption following receipt of the 2001 or 2008 tax rebates. Another 20 percent, with low income and more likely to rent, spent a small but significant amount. Households with large spending propensity held high levels of mortgage debt. The...

We investigate inflation predictability in the United States across the monetary regimes of the twentieth century. The forecasts based on money growth and output growth were significantly more accurate than the forecasts based on past inflation only during the regimes associated with neither a...

This paper estimates the impact on the US economy of four types of uncertainty about <i>(i)</i> government spending, <i>(ii)</i> tax changes, <i>(iii)</i> public debt sustainability and <i>(iv)</i> monetary policy. Following a one standard deviation shock, uncertainty about debt sustainability has the largest and most...

Was UK inflation more stable and/or less uncertain before 1914 or after 1945? We address these questions by estimating a statistical model with changing volatilities in transient and persistent components of inflation. Three conclusions emerge. First, since periods of high and low volatility...

Monetary policy in the US is characterized by a substantial degree of inertia. While in principle this may well be the outcome of an optimizing central bank behaviour, the ability of any derived policy rule to match the data relies on so large weights for interest rate smoothing into policy...

Economic activities are highly clustered. Why is geographic concentration becoming a predominant feature of industrialized economies? On the basis of the empirical models developed by the new theories of international trade, our answer is that increasing returns are the driving force of economic...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which the decision makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. Reduced-form and structural estimates of the central...

The quadratic form of policy makers' loss function has gained a wide consensus in monetary policy analysis mainly because of its analytical tractability. A number of researchers, however, have recently proposed alternative functional forms which have also proved to yield tractable solutions of...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policy analysis in which the decision makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. Reduced-form and structural estimates of the central...

This paper documents a new stylized fact of the U.S. greater macroeconomic stability of the last two decades or so. Using 131 monthly time series, three popular statistical methods and the forecasts of the Federal Reserve's Green book and the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we show that the...