How justified is the charge that ideology strongly influences the allegedly objective opinions of economists? An analysis of a new survey of AEA members and of surveys of labour economists and public economists shows that value judgments and judgments about the government's efficacy have some...

The standard loss function counts both positive and negative deviations from the output and inflation targets as losses. But if the sample period is long enough, then output growth in excess of the target, and often also inflation rates that are below target, should be counted as gains instead...

How can one tell whether academic research influences macroeconomic policy? One possibility is to look at government documents that set forth macro policy. This paper looks for such traces in U.S., European and Japanese documents. Because of ease of access it focuses on U.S. documents. Numerous...