Ignoring items with large price changes may enhance the informational content of a price index. As an application of the metrically trimmed mean (Kim, 1992) we suggest to discard the individual price changes that deviate the most from the median. Focusing on outliers increases the efficiency...

Based on the equilibrium correction structure of a cointegrated vector autoregression it is rejected that US monetary policy 1988-2002 can be described by a traditional Taylor (1993) rule. Instead we find a stable long-term relationship between the Federal funds rate, the unemployment rate, and...