The study of bank interest rate spreads is central to our understanding of the process of financial intermediation. Data limitations generally restrict empirical analyses to interest rate spreads that are constructed from bank income statements and balance sheets. In this paper we make use of a...

The class of growth models that incorporate nonrivalry and/or externalities implies that the size (scale) of an economy influences its growth rate. Ample empirical evidence exists to suggest that such implied scale effects are counter-factual. The objective of this paper is to develop a general...

Many researchers believe that the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition leads to permanent and transitory components whose shocks are perfectly negatively correlated. Indeed, some even consider it to be a property of the decomposition. We demonstrate that the Beveridge-Nelson decomposition does not...

We investigate confidence intervals and inference for the instrumental variables model with weak instruments. Wald-based confidence intervals for a structural parameter perform poorly in that the probability they reject the null is far greater than their nominal size. We show that the preactice...

We analyze the effects of consumption and production externalities on the long-run rate of capital accumulation. We show that the importance of consumption externalities depends upon whether or not labor supply is fixed. In the case that it is fixed, they have no long-run effects. Whether they...

More than thirty years ago Milton Friedman proposed a 'plucking' model of business fluctuations in which output cannot exceed a ceiling level, but will, from time to time, be plucked downward by recession. The model implied that business fluctuations are asymmetric, that recessions have only a...