Since Christopher Sims’s Macroeconomics and Realityʺ (1980), macroeconomists have used structural VARs, or vector autoregressions, for policy analysis. Constructing the impulseresponse functions and variance decompositions that are central to this literature requires factoring the...

This paper adumbrates a theory of what might be going wrong in the monetary SVAR literature and provides supporting empirical evidence. The theory is that macroeconomists may be attempting to identify structural forms that do not exist, given the true distribution of the innovations in the...

Many empirical studies have found that interest rate have a positive effect on the price level. This paper pursues an obvious, but neglected explanation: interest payments are a cost of production that is at least in part passed on to costumers. A model shows that the cost-push effect of...

This paper adumbrates a theory of what might be going wrong in the monetary SVAR literature and provides supporting empirical evidence. The theory is that macroeconomists may be attempting to identify structural forms that do not exist, given the true distribution of the innovations in the...

Since Christopher Sims's quot;Macroeconomics and Realityquot; (1980), macroeconomists have used structural VARs, or vector autoregressions, for policy analysis. Constructing the impulse response functions and variance decompositions that are central to this literature requires factoring the...

The United States must make a fundamental choice in its economic policy in the next few months, a choice that will shape the US economy for years to come. Pundits and policymakers are divided over how to address what is widely referred to as the "fiscal cliff", a combination of tax increases and...

Recently, many economists have credited the late-1990s economic boom in the United States for the easy money policies of the Federal Reserve. On the other hand, observers have noted that very low interest rates have had very little positive effect on the chronically weak Japanese economy....