The last twenty years of the twentieth century witnessed regulatory change not seen since the Great Depression. That regulatory change, culminating with the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994, produced a significant consolidation within the banking industry, resulting from...

A small, but growing, body of literature searches for evidence of non-Keynesian effects of fiscal contractions. That is, some evidence exists that large fiscal contractions stimulate short-run economic activity. Our paper continues this research effort by systematically examining the effects, if...

Regulatory change not seen since the Great Depression swept the U.S. banking industry beginning in the early 1980s and culminating with the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994. Banking analysts anticipated dramatic consolidation with large numbers of mergers and acquisitions....

We use a copula approach to investigate the effect of uncertainty on crude- oil returns. Using copulas to construct multivariate distributions of time- series data permit the calculation of the dependence structure between the series independently of the marginal distributions. Further, we...

This paper addresses two issues -- the time-inconsistency of optimal policy and the controllability of target variables within new-classical and new-Keynesian model structures. We can resolve both issues by delegation. That is, we design central bank loss functions by determining the two target...

This paper considers the effects of humanitarian aid on economic welfare through a demographic transition channel. We develop a two-period overlapping generations model where reproductive agents face a non-zero probability of death in childhood. As adults, agents allocate their time to work,...

This study employs the panel convergence methodology developed by Phillips and Sul (2007) to explore the convergence dynamics of international equity markets. The analysis considers both country and industry effects. While traditional portfolio management strategies usually follow a top-down...

This paper analyzes the degree of convergence of financial development for a panel of 50 countries. We apply the methodology of Phillips and Sul (2007) to various financial development indicators to assess the existence of convergence clubs. We consider nine such indicators that various...

We use several models using Bayesian and classical methods to forecast employment for eight sectors of the US economy. In addition to standard vector-autoregressive and Bayesian vector autoregressive models, we also include the information content of 143 additional monthly series in some models....

Do in-cash and in-kind transfers to families affect parental fertility choices and economic welfare differently? We examine this question via a demographic transition channel in the context of a two-period overlapping generations model. In childhood, reproductive agents face a non-zero...