The slowdown in the US economy in 2008, and in the housing mark et in particular, has been accompanied by a sharp fall in house prices and a glut of homes for sale on the market. While the idea that this overhang of dwellings for sale should place downward pressure on house prices is intuitive,...

The introduction of the euro meant that countries with sovereign debt problems could not use monetisation and devaluation as a way to prevent default. The institutional structures of the euro were also widely thought to prevent a country in difficulties being bailed out by other euro members or...

Unknown-breakpoint tests for possible structural change have become standard in recent years, with the most popular being the so-called Sup-F tests, whose asymptotic distribution was derived by Andrews (1993). We highlight two problems that lead to poor performance when testing for structural...

The canonical inflation specification in sticky-price rational expectations models (the new-Keynesian Phillips curve) is often criticized for failing to account for the dependence of inflation on its own lags. In response, many studies employ a “hybrid” specification in which inflation...

Is the observed correlation between current and lagged inflation a function of backward-looking inflation expectations, or do the lags in inflation regressions merely proxy for rational forward-looking expectations, as in the new-Keynesian Phillips curve? Recent research has attempted to answer...

Real equipment investment in the United States boomed in the 1990s, led by soaring investment in computers. We find that traditional aggregate econometric models completely fail to capture the magnitude of this growth—mainly because these models neglect to address two features that were...

Output per worker can be expressed as a function of technological efficiency and of the capital-output ratio. Because technology is exogenous in the Solow model, all of the endogenous convergence dynamics take place through the adjustment of the capital-output ratio. This paper uses the...