Claims that the nation has reached full employment take for granted the need for a reserve pool of labor to maintain price stability and labor market flexibility. But are millions of jobless and underemployed workers the best we can do in these times of economic expansion? And what will happen...

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...

The process of constructing impulse-response functions (IRFs) and forecast-error variance decompositions (FEVDs) for a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) usually involves a factorization of an estimate of the error-term variance-covariance matrix V. Examining residuals from a monetary VAR,...