Recent developments in biofuel technologies have resulted in heightened linkages between the petroleum and agricultural sectors. As such, a large price and/or volatility shift experienced in one sector is now more likely to spill-over into the other. In trying to capture the interrelations...

We investigate the information contained in the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR) and the U.S. Constant Maturity Treasury (CMT) term structure of interest rates and report two novel findings. First, we document that the information contained in terms structures are significantly different...

Recent work finds evidence that the volatility of the U.S. economy fell dramatically around the first quarter of 1984. We trace the timing of this so-called "Great Moderation" across many subsectors of the economy in order to better understand its root cause. We find that the interest rate...

We conduct a fairly thorough statistical analysis of the empirical foundations for the existence of a Taylor rule. Inflation, the output gap and the federal funds rate appear to be non-stationary variables that are not cointegrated. Although this lack of cointegration could be caused by missing...

Cointegration among interest rates for instruments with different maturities has been widely tested with mixed results. This paper provides an extension to the Engle-granger testing strategy by permitting asymmetry in the adjustment toward equilibrium in two different ways. We demonstrate that...

We estimate real US GDP growth as a threshold autoregressive process, and construct confidence intervals for the parameter estimates. However, there are various approaches that can be used in constructing the confidence intervals. We construct confidence intervals for the slope coefficients and...

The standard Blanchard-Quah (BQ) decomposition forces aggregate demand and supply shocks to be orthogonal. However, this assumption is problematic for a nation with an inflation target. The very notion of inflation targeting means that monetary policy reacts to changes in aggregate supply. This...

In contrast to recent forecasting developments, “Old School” forecasting techniques, such as exponential smoothing and the Box–Jenkins methodology, do not attempt to explicitly model or estimate breaks in a time series. Adherents of the “New School” methodology argue that once breaks...

The overall incarceration rate in the United States is extremely high by international standards. Moreover, there are large racial disparities, with the black male rate of imprisonment being 5.5 times the white male rate in 2014. This paper focus on how this black-white imprisonment ratio has...

There has been an increase in food price instability in recent years, with varied consequences for farmers, market participants, and consumers. Before policy makers can design schemes to reduce food price uncertainty or ameliorate its effects, they must first understand the factors that have...