Over the past two decades, the FOMC has included in its policy decisions a statement of bias toward subsequent tightening or easing of policy. This paper examines the predictive content of these statements in a Taylor-rule setting, finding that they convey information that is useful for...

General equilibrium models of international fluctuations which assume complete asset markets predict that consumption will be highly correlated across countries, while the data display correlations which are rather low. It is common to characterize this empirical regularity by noting that...

Smoking was banned in all Illinois casinos in January 2008. We explore the effects that the smoking ban has had on Illinois casino revenue and attendance. Our empirical methodology extends and enhances that of previous literature in that we observe a natural experiment in comparing the...

A paper recently published in the journal Tobacco Control purports to show that the implementation of a smoking prohibition in Delaware had no statistically significant effect on the revenues of three gaming facilities in that state. After correcting for evident errors in that analysis, I find...

This paper shows that the optimal monetary policies recommended by New Keynesian models still imply a large amount of inflation risk. We calculate the term structure of inflation uncertainty in New Keynesian models when the monetary authority adopts the optimal policy. When the monetary policy...

Conventional wisdom posits that high interest rates stem capital flight and currency depreciation. Some have argued, however that the standard prescription exacerbates the problems. This paper set out a framework for evaluating the conditions under which an increase in domestic interest rates...

A general-equilibrium shopping-time model of money demand is used to obtain estimates of some dynamic costs of inflation under alternative monetary policy rules. After examining the welfare implications of steady-state inflation, dynamic welfare costs are evaluated for inflation-targeting and...

As communities around the nation consider laws restricting smoking in public places, a key political and economic issue that often arises is the effect that such laws have on the sales and profits of particular sectors. The gaming industry has been active in opposition to such ordinances, citing...

In dynamic equilibrium trade models, the common assumption that asset markets are complete implies that correlations of consumption across countries should be quite high. In contrast, measured consumption correlations tend to be rather low. While some suggest this implies that asset market...

When residents of two countries have access to complete contingent claims markets, the welfare effects of changes in tariffs are opposite to those found in static trade theory. This paper demonstrates that a much simpler asset market structure can be sufficient to generate such a result. In the...