Taylor rules posit a linear relationship between the output gap, inflation, and short-term nominal interest rates. Previous work has shown that the relationship between these key economic variables as captured by the Taylor rule is quite robust both across countries and monetary policy regimes....

We study the implications of alternative monetary targeting procedures for real interest rates and economic activity. We find that countercyclical monetary policy rules lead to higher real interest rates, higher average tax rates, lower output but lower variability of tax rates and consumption...

An in-kind subsidy is equivalent, both theoretically and empirically, to an increase of income for an individual consumer. But the equivalence does not empirically carry over to in-kind grants by a central government to a local one: this has been seen as an anomaly and dubbed the â??flypaper...

The goal of this paper is to theoretically and empirically demonstrate the consequences of different imputation methods, using recent data from the International Price Program. We suppose that prices are missing due to random or erratic reporting. We consider three different imputation methods:...

This paper develops and compares specification tests for parametric duration models estimated with censored data. The tests are based on generalized residuals (the integrated hazard), which is exponentially distributed if the model is correctly specified. I present several conditional moment...

A key parameter in real business cycle models is the weight on the utility of leisure. Typically this parameter is chosen so that the steady-state level of work activity matches the corresponding measure in the data, i.e. the amount of time workers spend in market activity. While the calibration...

Economists sometimes interpret the failure of a significance test to disconfirm a hypothesis as evidence that this hypothesis is valid. Six examples of this are cited from recent journals. But this is a as interpretation of what significance tests show. While in general it is correct that every...

This paper is a general investigation of temporal aggregation in time series analysis. It encompasses traditional research on time aggregation as a particular case and extends the analysis to irregular intervals of aggregation. The Data Generating Process is allowed to evolve at regular,...