This paper is a critique of the latest new classical theory of economic fluctuations. According to this theory, the business cycle is the natural and efficient response of the economy to exogenous changes in the available production technology. This paper discusses several versions of this...

This paper examines the hypothesis that financial markets are myopic by studying the term structure of interest rates. White rejecting decisively the traditional expectations hypothesis regarding the term structure, our statistical results also lead us to conclude that long term interest rates...

This paper examines popular advice on portfolio allocation among cash, bonds, and stocks. It documents that this advice is inconsistent with the mutual-fund separation theorem, which states that all investors should hold the same composition of risky assets. In contrast to the theorem, popular...

This paper discusses the recent research on the consumption function that has attempted to relax the assumption of certainty equivalence. While there remain many open questions, both theoretical and empirical, it is clear that the assumption of certainty equivalence can be misleading. Under more...

This paper discusses the short-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment. Although this tradeoff remains a necessary building block of business cycle theory, economists have yet to provide a completely satisfactory explanation for it. According to the consensus view among central bankers...

This paper discusses the conduct and performance of U.S. monetary policy during the 1990s, comparing it to policy during the previous several decades. It reaches four broad conclusions. First, the macroeconomic performance of the 1990s was exceptional, especially if judged by the volatility of...

This paper examines an economy in which aggregate shocks are not dispersed equally throughout the population. Instead, while these shocks affect all individuals ex ante, they are concentrated among a few ex post.The equity premium in general depends on the concentration of these aggregate...

We reexamine the expectations theory of the term structure using data at the short end of the maturity spectrum. We find that prior to the founding ofthe Federal Reserve System in 1915, the spread between long rates and short rates has substantial predictive power for the path of interest rates;...