Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to take a forecasting approach to examine the relationship between the US birth rate, marriage rate, and economic conditions (measured by both realized unemployment and expected unemployment). The expectation data come from the Michigan Surveys of...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe the transformation of macro‐modelling from reduced form behavioural equations estimated separately, through to contemporary microfounded dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models estimated by systems methods. It is argued that...