Intro -- Abstracts -- Introduction -- 1 The Source of Historical Economic Fluctuations: An Analysis using Long-Run Restrictions -- Comment Harald Uhlig, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Tilburg University, Bundesbank, and CEPR -- 2 Optimal Monetary and Fiscal Policy in a Liquidity Trap --...

We compare the out-of-sample forecasting performance of univariate homoskedastic, GARCH, autoregressive and nonparametric models for conditional variances, using five bilateral weekly exchange rates for the dollar, 1973-1989. For a one week horizon, GARCH models tend to make slightly more...

This paper develops a decision-theoretic approach to policy analysis. We argue that policy evaluation should be conducted on the basis of two factors: the policymaker's preferences, and the conditional distribution of the outcomes of interest given a policy and available information. From this...