This paper is the text of a lecture given on November 20, 1997 to inaugurate the John W. Sweetland Chair in International Economics, in the Department of Economics of the University of Michigan. Its message is that international trade theory, and in particular the theory of comparative...

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in nonparametric bootstrap inference for economic time series. Nonparametric resampling techniques help protect against overly optimistic inference in time series models of unknown structure. They are particularly useful for evaluating the fit...

We study the reliability of the estimated responses of major economic aggregates to monetary policy shocks. We investigate the bias of the estimated impulse response functions and the reliability of their qualitative features such as their sign and shape and the timing of peaks and troughs. We...

There is a widespread tendency in the applied time series literature to interpret rejections of the unit root null hypothesis in favor of a trend stationary process with possible trend breaks as evidence that the data are better characterized as stationary about a broken trend. This...