Recent work on expectations suggests that professional forecasters may have incentives that lead them to make more extreme forecasts than they would make were accuracy the only criterion. We use the interest rate and exchange rate forecasts from the Wall Street Journal?s panel of economists to...

We introduce a new method for drawing state variables in Gaussian state space models from their conditional distribution given parameters and observations. Unlike standard methods, our method does not involve Kalman filtering. We show that for some important cases, our method is computationally...

A highly acclaimed result in contract theory is that tournaments are superior to piece rate contracts when the agents are risk averse and their production activities are subject to a relatively large common shock. The reason is that tournaments allow the principal to trade insurance for lower...

This paper explores the effects of using alternative data sets for the estimation of DSGE models. I find that the estimated structural parameters and the model's outcomes are sensitive to the variables used for estimation. Depending on the set of variables the point estimate for habit formation...