The political accord struck by world leaders at the United Nations negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009 allows participating countries to express their greenhouse gas commitments in a variety of ways. For example, developed countries promised different percent emissions reductions...

Words are critical in how the public perceives the work of central banks and the quality of monetary policy. Press releases that accompany policy rate decisions and, where available, the minutes of central bank committee meetings, are focal points for the media in public discussions about the...

This paper models the global financial crisis as a combination of shocks to global housing markets and sharp increases in risk premia of firms, households and international investors in an intertemporal (or DSGE) global model. The model has six sectors of production and trade in 15 major...

This paper examines the robustness characteristics of optimal control policies derived un- der the assumption of rational expectations to alternative models of expectations. We assume that agents have imperfect knowledge about the precise structure of the economy and form expectations using a...

Empirical literature provided convincing evidence that explicit (ie legislated) inflation targets anchor expectations. We propose a novel game theoretic framework with generalized timing that allows us to formally capture this beneficial anchoring effect. Using the framework we identify several...

The prediction of future temperature increases depends critically on the projections of future greenhouse gas emissions. Yet there is a vigorous debate about how these projections should be undertaken and how reasonable is the approach of the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES)...

We evaluate potential global impacts of increase in U.S. natural gas exports as a result of the shale gas boom. To our knowledge this is the first such analysis using a global economic model to understand this timely policy issue. Our primary conclusion is that world economic activity is higher...

Empirical studies using survey data on expectations have frequently observed that forecasts are biased and have concluded that agents are not rational. We establish that existing rationality tests are not robust to even small deviations from symmetric loss and hence have little ability to tell...

A puzzle from the Great Recession is an apparent mismatch between a fall in the persistence of European inflation rates, and the increased variability of expert forecasts of inflation. We explain this puzzle and show how country specific beliefs about inflation are still quite close to the...