Recent empirical and theoretical research on business inventories is surveyed and critically evaluated. While most inventory research has had macroeconomic motivations, the authors focus on its microtheoretic basis and on potential conflicts between theory and evidence. The paper asks two...

The authors show that the interest rate on Federal funds is extremely informative about future movements of real macroeconomic variables. Then they argue that the reason for this forecasting success is that the funds rate sensitively records shocks to the supply of bank reserves; that is, the...