The rapid increase in U.S. economic growth during the late 1990s inspired speculation that an acceleration in the rate of technological progress had given rise to an increase in potential output growth. This paper considers the transition dynamics associated with such a change using a general...

Dynamic general equilibrium models predict high cross-country consumption correlations, whereas the data show that output correlations tend to be higher. Spectral decomposition reveals that this ranking varies across frequency bands, with consumption correlations often exceeding output...

Over the past two decades, the FOMC has included in its policy decisions a statement of bias toward subsequent tightening or easing of policy. This paper examines the predictive content of these statements in a Taylor-rule setting, finding that they convey information that is useful for...

General equilibrium models of international fluctuations which assume complete asset markets predict that consumption will be highly correlated across countries, while the data display correlations which are rather low. It is common to characterize this empirical regularity by noting that...

A review of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker's testimony before Congress about the System's monetary targets for 1985, with an analysis of some current monetary policy issues.

An examination of the compositional changes in the monetary aggregates M1 and M1A, with a discussion of their behavior in the 1980s and some issues relevant to the possibility of replacing M1 with M1A in the monetary targeting framework.

A review of the history of the lagged reserve requirements- contemporaneous reserve requirements controversy and a discussion of the relative importance of reserve timing under various operating procedures.

Smoking was banned in all Illinois casinos in January 2008. We explore the effects that the smoking ban has had on Illinois casino revenue and attendance. Our empirical methodology extends and enhances that of previous literature in that we observe a natural experiment in comparing the...