The paper is concerned with the traditional "assignment" to be found in many textbooks that holds central bankers responsible for inflation – and inflation only – while government politicians are recommended to care for the short-term stabilisation of the economy (or not to interfere at all,...

Macroeconometric policy simulation models allow for an analysis, and, above all, for a quantification of the effects different economic policies have on the various variables that represent the economy. Despite the seminal Lucas critique levelled against them, these models are still widely used,...

A small labour market model for the six largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium) is estimated in a state -space framework. The model entails, in the long run, four driving forces: a trend labour force component, a trend labour productivity component,...

Macroeconometric policy simulation models allow for an analysis, and, above all, for a quantification of the effects different economic policies have on the various variables that represent the economy. Despite the seminal "Lucas critique" levelled against them, these models are still widely...

A small labour market model for the six largest euro area countries (Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium) is estimated in a state-space framework. The model entails, in the long run, four driving forces: a trend labour force component, a trend labour productivity component, a...

We argue that Islamic principles, in particular the avoidance of ribā and gharar should be applied with respect to real economic value rather than to monetary value in terms of conventional currency. In order to reconcile monetary value with economic value, we propose a reference currency...

I present evidence of systematically heterogeneous expectations, a violation of the Rational Expectations Hypothesis. I demonstrate that the expectations of different gender and wealth cohorts have different relative abilities to predict inflation, interest rates, unemployment, income, stock...

This collection of papers analyzes the versatility and predictive power of survey expectations data in asset pricing and macroeconomic forecasting. The first paper, Using Sentiment Surveys to Predict GDP Growth and Stock Returns sheds new light on the question of whether or not sentiment...

We propose serial correlation-robust asymptotic confidence bands for the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and its functional, viz. the area under ROC curve (AUC), estimated by quasi-maximum likelihood in the binormal model. Our simulation experiments confirm that this new method...

We develop monthly indicators for tracking short-run trends in real GDP growth in 32 advanced and emerging-market economies. We test the historical performance of our indicators and find that they do a good job at describing the business cycle. In a recursive out-of-sample forecasting exercise,...