Since Christopher Sims's quot;Macroeconomics and Realityquot; (1980), macroeconomists have used structural VARs, or vector autoregressions, for policy analysis. Constructing the impulse response functions and variance decompositions that are central to this literature requires factoring the...

This paper considers a plan proposed by Warren Buffett, in which importers would be required to obtain certificates proportional to the amount of non-oil goods (and possibly also services) they brought into the country. These certificates would be granted to firms that exported goods. Exporting...

This paper attempts to explain one version of an empirical puzzle noted by Mankiw (2003): a Baumol-Tobin inventory-theoretic money demand equation predicts that the average U.S. adult should have held approximately $551.05 in currency and coin in 1995, while data show an average of $100. The...

Longstanding speculation about the likelihood of a housing market collapse has given way in the past few months to consideration of just how far the housing market will fall and how much damage the debacle will inflict on the economy. In this paper, we discuss recent developments related to the...

The Gibson paradox, long observed by economists and named by John Maynard Keynes (1936), is a positive relationship between the interest rate and the price level. This paper explains the relationship by means of interest-rate, cost-push inflation. In the model: spending is driven in part by...

Over the past 20 years, finance has become commodified. Firms increasingly obtain finance from securities markets, instead of borrowing from commercial banks with which they have long-term relationships, while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac package a growing number of mortgages into bonds. When...

We hope to model financial fragility and money in a way that captures much of what is crucial in Hyman Minsky's financial fragility hypothesis. This approach to modeling Minsky may be unique in the formal Minskyan literature. Namely, we adopt a model in which a psychological variable we call...

Should shocks be part of our macro-modeling tool kit — for example, as a way of modeling discontinuities in fiscal policy or big moves in the financial markets? What are shocks, and how can we best put them to use? In heterodox macroeconomics, shocks tend to come in two broad types, with some...

This Strategic Analysis paper provides an analysis of the medium-term forces behind economic growth since 1980, showing that the authors' previous work, grounded in the linkages between growth and the financial balances of the private, public, and foreign sectors of the economy, has proven a...