With positive trend inflation, the Taylor principle is not enough to guarantee a determinate equilibrium. We provide new theoretical results on restoring determinacy in New Keynesian models with positive trend inflation and combine these with new empirical findings on the Federal Reserve's...

We construct a framework for measuring economic activity at high frequency, potentially in real time. We use a variety of stock and flow data observed at mixed frequencies (including very high frequencies), and we use a dynamic factor model that permits exact filtering. We illustrate the...

Asset returns have traditionally been modeled in the literature as following continuous-time Markov processes, and in many cases diffusions. Can discretely sampled financial rate data help us decide which continuous-time models are sensible? Diffusion processes are characterized by the...

This paper presents a simple new method for estimating the size of 'wealth effects' on aggregate consumption. The method exploits the well-documented sluggishness of consumption growth (often interpreted as 'habits' in the asset pricing literature) to distinguish between short-run and long-run...

Forecast evaluation often compares a parsimonious null model to a larger model that nests the null model. Under the null that the parsimonious model generates the data, the larger model introduces noise into its forecasts by estimating parameters whose population values are zero. We observe that...

When a k period future return is regressed on a current variable such as the log dividend yield, the marginal significance level of the t-test that the return is unpredictable typically increases over some range of future return horizons, k. Local asymptotic power analysis shows that the power...

This paper analyzes the performance of heteroskedasticity-and-autocorrelation-consistent (HAC) covariance matrix estimators in which the residuals are prewhitened using a vector autoregressive (VAR) filter. We highlight the pitfalls of using an arbitrarily fixed lag order for the VAR filter, and...

This paper considers issues related to testing for multiple structural changes in cointegrated systems. We derive the limiting distribution of the Sup-Wald test under mild conditions on the errors and regressors for a variety of testing problems. We show that even if the coefficients of the...

Recent empirical studies find little evidence of a change in euro area inflation persistence over the post-1970 period. Their methodology is primarily based on standard unit root and structural break tests on the persistence parameter in an autoregressive specification for the inflation process....

Perron and Yabu (2008) consider the problem of testing for a break occuring at an unknown date in the trend function of a univariate time series when the noise component can be either stationary or integrated. This paper extends their work by proposing a sequential test that allows one to test...