The bank as "general store" is slowly being replaced by the bank as conglomerate. This is because improvements in information technology and market efficiency are changing the way the activities of financial intermediaries are performed. The imperatives of cost minimization and competition have...

Investment decision-making is modeled by means of a Kohonen neural net, where neurons represent firms. This is done in order to model investments in novel fields of economic activity, that according to this model are carried out when firms recognize the emergence of a new technological pattern....

Territorial appointees to an independent central bank (e.g. District Federal Reserve Banks’ presidents, Governors of national central banks at the ECB’s Governing Council) are liable to confront a “role conflict” stemming from a duality of loyalties and allegiances - to the home regional...

A number of commentators have argued that technological innovation is about to change the institutional structure of the retail payments system. Through the potential private issue of currency via new electronic payments systems – electronic money – individuals will create currencies based...

We develop a business cycle model in which consumption goods, physical capital, and human capital are produced in separate sectors. An important feature of the model is that human and machine inputs in the production process are treated symmetrically: each has both a stock and flow component....

Historically, when an economy emerges from recession, employment grows with, or soon after, the resumption of GDP growth. However, following the two most recent recessions in the United States, employment growth has lagged the recovery in GDP by several quarters, a phenomenon thathas been termed...

A marked acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in U.S. manufacturing followed World War I. This development contributed substantially to the absolute and relative rise of the domestic economy's aggregate TFP residual, which is observed when the 'growth accounts' for the first...

The most-often stated reason the decline in average real weekly wages among production workers has been that technological advancements have resulted in increased demand for skilled workers, leaving less-skilled workers with fewer job opportunities. In this paper, David R. Howell examines this...

We study the aggregate effects of a social security reform in a large overlapping generations model where markets are incomplete and households face uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks. We depart from the previous literature by assuming that, because of lack of commitment in the credit...

This paper examines the problem of appropriately specifying and estimating the money demand function in the presence of adaptive expectations and partial adjustment mechanisms. The paper demonstrates the difficulty of interpreting distributed lag reduced form representations of the monetary...