The paper presents the welfare cost of inflation in a banking time economy that models exchange credit through a bank production approach. The estimate of welfare cost uses fundamental parameters of utility and production technologies. It is compared to a cash-only economy, and a Lucas (2000)...

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 real-rate gap; the time series of the remaining two show material deviation from expected IS-curve behavior. The...

We propose a first order bias correction term for the Gini index to reduce the bias due to grouping. The first order correction term is obtained from studying the estimator of the Gini index within a measurement error framework. In addition, it reveals an intuitive formula for the remaining...

How much have the dynamics of U.S. time series changed over the last century? Has the evolution of the Federal Reserve as an institution over the 100 years altered the transmission of monetary policy shocks? To tackle these questions, we build a multivariate time series model with time-varying...

It is commonly accepted that information is helpful if it can be exploited to improve a decision making process. In economics, decisions are often based on forecasts of up- or downward movements of the variable of interest. We point out that directional forecasts can provide a useful framework...