The durability of health care treatment, the substantial technical change in health care treatment, and the prevalence of third-party payment interact to create substantial difficulty in measuring the price and output of health care. This paper provides a framework for analyzing the demand for...

In this paper we use the relative movements in bank loans and commercial paper to provide evidence on the existence of a loan supply channel of monetary policy transmission. A first necessary condition for monetary policy to work through a lending channel is that banks must view loans and...

This paper explores the theoretical foundations of a new approach to monetary policy. Proponents of this approach hold that when inflation is moderate but still above the long-run objective, the Fed should not take deliberate anti-inflation action, but rather should wait for external...

Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due....

This paper shows how to generate the joint distribution of correlated random variables with specified marginal distributions. For cases where the marginal distributions are either normal or lognormal, it shows how to calculate analytically the correlation of the underlying normal distributions...