This paper explores details behind the phenomenal increase in global crude oil production over the last century and a half and the implications if that trend should be reversed. I document that a key feature of the growth in production has been exploitation of new geographic areas rather than...

A consensus has recently emerged that a number of variables in addition to the level, slope, and curvature of the term structure can help predict interest rates and excess bond returns. We demonstrate that the statistical tests that have been used to support this conclusion are subject to very...

Reporting point estimates and error bands for structural vector autoregressions that are only set identified is a very common practice. However, unless the researcher is persuaded on the basis of prior information that some parameter values are more plausible than others, this common practice...

The purpose of the paper is to provide a general framework for analyzing ""preference for opportunities."" Based on two simple axioms a fundamental result due to Kreps is used in order to represent rankings of opportunity sets in terms of multiple preferences. The paper provides several...

Why did socialists win elections in some countries in Europe, and fascists in others, during the interwar period? Many political historians have viewed ''distributive class politics'' as the appropriate characterization of this period and place, but heretofore, formal politico-economic analysis...

This paper is a statistical analysis of the manner in which the Federal Reserve determines the level of the Federal funds rate target, one of the most publicized and anticipated economic indicators in the financial world. The analysis presents two econometric challenges: (1) changes in the...

The paper by Bond, Harrison, and O'Brien illustrates the role that convergence criteria, search algorithms, and starting values can play in influencing the success of numerical optimization. One aspect contributing to the importance of these choices in their results appears to be a multivariate...

The issue of normalization arises whenever two different values for a vector of unknown parameters imply the identical economic model. A normalization does not just imply a rule for selecting which point, among equivalent ones, to call the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE). It also governs the...