Standard estimates of the NAIRU or natural rate of unemployment are subject to considerable uncertainty. We show in this paper that using multiple indicators to extract an estimated NAIRU cuts in half uncertainty as measured by variance and gives a 33% reduction in the confidence band. The...

When the instrumental variable is a poor one, in the sense of being weakly correlated with the variable it proxies, the small sample distribution of the IV estimator is concentrated around a value that is inversely related to the feedback in the system and which is often further from the true...

New results on the exact small sample distribution of the instrumental variable estimator are presented by studying an important special case. The exact closed forms for the probability density and cumulative distribution functions are given. There are a number of surprising findings. The small...