This paper studies whether fiscal policy satisfies a borrowing constraint. Direct tests of the present-value constraint are rare, despite widespread discussion of the feasibility of current policy. We examine monthly data on Canadian federal government finances using tests for cointegration. We...

Business cycles may be defined or measured by parametrizing detrending filters to maximize the ability of a business-cycle model to match the moments of the remaining cycles. Thus a theory can be used to guide cycle measurement. We present two applications to U.S. postwar data. In the first...

Deviations from ergodicity in fundamentals may give rise to apparent bubbles (non-stationary residuals) in time series models of asset prices if an econometrician is unaware of them. This paper examines a number of such deviations in the form of expected, future, regime changes and explicitly...

Macroeconomic theories in which there is a fixed cost to changing prices have proliferated recently. This paper solves a menu-cost pricing problem faced by a monopolistic firm in continuous time and subject to both the stochastic aggregate price level emphasized by Sheshinski and Weiss (1983)...

One aspect of calibration in macroeconomics is the notion that free parameters of models should be chosen by matching certain moments of the simulated models with those of actual data. We formally examine this notion by treating the process of calibration as an econometric estimator. A numerical...

What explains the widespread fear of deflation? This paper reviews the history of thought, economic history, and empirical evidence on deflation, with a view to answering this question. It also outlines informally the main effects of deflation in applied monetary models. The main finding is that...

Differences across decades in the counter-cyclical stance of fiscal policy can identify whether the growth in government spending affects output growth and so speeds recovery from a recession. We study government-spending reaction functions from the 1920s and 1930s for twenty countries. There...

Many international macroeconomic models link the real exchange rate to a ratio of marginal utilities. We examine this link empirically, allowing the marginal utility of consumption to depend on government expenditure, real money balances, or external habit. We also consider two environments with...

Economists often describe nominal exchange rates as forward-looking, so that they reflect discounted, expected, future fundamentals. This study applies a method for identifying the discount rate involved, without knowing or measuring fundamentals. Identification arises from assumptions on the...

Euro-interest rates are well-known to be persistent, as are their differentials across countries for a given maturity. The international CCAPM implies that the rates are persistent because forecasts of national consumption growth or inflation are persistent too. We examine this prediction for a...