Aging populations in advanced economies are placing ever-increasing demands on government spending in the form of old-age benefits. Economies that have promised substantially more benefits than they have made provision to finance are heading into a prolonged era of fiscal stress. Unresolved...

Aging populations in advanced economies are placing ever-increasing demands on government spending in the form of old-age benefits. Economies that have promised substantially more benefits than they have made provision to finance are heading into a prolonged era of fiscal stress. Unresolved...

This paper is concerned with ex ante and ex post counterfactual analyses in the case of macroeconometric applications where a single unit is observed before and after a given policy intervention. It distinguishes between cases where the policy change affects the model's parameters and where it...

This paper is concerned with ex ante and ex post counterfactual analyses in the case of macroeconometric applications where a single unit is observed before and after a given policy intervention. It distinguishes between cases where the policy change affects the model's parameters and where it...

This paper proposes tests of policy ineffectiveness in the context of macroeconometric rational expectations models. It is assumed that there is a policy intervention that takes the form of changes in the parameters of a policy rule, and that there are sufficient observations before and after...

A growing literature stresses the importance of the “global financial cycle”, a common global movement in asset prices and credit conditions, for emerging market economies (EMEs). It is argued that one of the key drivers of this global cycle is monetary policy in the U.S., which is...

We employ a model-based approach in an ex-post evaluation of monetary policy decisions taken by the Bank of Israel during the years 2001-2010. Using ex-post information, we test, for each individual year, whether there could have been a Pareto improvement in inflation and output volatilities....

There exist difficulties to escape from stagnation and/or deflation if the economy hits zero lower bounds on short-term nominal interest rates because the central bank cannot stimulate the economy using rate cuts. How to escape from them? Answering the question, we extend a closed-looped...