Expected inflation is a central variable in economic theory. Economic historians have estimated historical inflation expectations for a variety of purposes, including studies of the Fisher effect, the debt deflation hypothesis, central bank credibility, and expectations formation. I survey the...

We provide new evidence on the relationship between inflation and its uncertainty in the U.S. on an historical basis, covering the period 1775-2014. First, we use a bounded approach for measuring inflation uncertainty, as proposed by Chan et al. (2013), and we compare the results with the Stock...

In this paper we study Malthusian pressures in a frontier economy. Using the empirical data on the real prices and demographic variables from 1688 to 1860 for Quebec and Montreal, we test for the existence of Malthusian pressures. Bearing in mind the particularities of frontier economies and the...

Government intervention during the banking holiday of March 1933 resolved the uncertainty usually created by bank suspensions. Including banking holiday suspensions in growth regressions therefore biases downwards the estimates of the real effects of bank suspensions. In this paper, I propose a...

This paper examines the ability of a simple stylized general equilibrium model that incorporates nominal wage rigidity to explain the magnitude and persistence of the Great Depression in the United States. The impulses to our analysis are money supply shocks. The Taylor contracts model is...

The recent fears of a sovereign debt crisis have spurred interest in the sustainability of public debt. There are two different approaches to the assessment of sustainability: the use of sustainability gap indicators (Blanchard et al., 1990) and the time series approach (Trehan and Walsh, 1988)....

This paper studies the effect of innovation uncertainty on the concomitant time path of firm valuations, technology adoption and growth in a setting which incorporates positive network externalities. The resulting stock market bubble, induced by uncertainty and accelerated by the externality...

In questo lavoro utilizziamo i nuovi dati storici di contabilità nazionale per l'Italia nel periodo 1861-2010, ricostruiti dalla Banca d'Italia e dall'Istat, con la collaborazione dell'Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata.” La prima parte consiste in uno studio dettagliato delle...

The current economic crisis requires fast information to predict economic behavior early, which is difficult at times of structural changes. This paper suggests an innovative new method of using data on internet activity for that purpose. It demonstrates strong correlations between keyword...

The current economic crisis requires fast information to predict economic behavior early, which is difficult at times of structural changes. This paper suggests an innovative new method of using data on internet activity for that purpose. It demonstrates strong correlations between keyword...