This paper provides a self-contained review of the introduction of the animal spirits hypothesis into the infinite horizon optimal growth model. The analysis begins with an economic discussion of Pontryagin’s maximum principles. Thereafter, I develop a version of the increasing-returns...

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major...

In this paper, instead of likelihood based methods that are fragile under model uncertainty, we use entropy based methods on time-ordered household income data to recover income distribution information on European countries and obtain income inequality estimates. For information recovery, we...

We use entropy based methods on a sample of household income data from the 2005 Chinese Inter-Census as a basis for summarizing the income data in the form of a probability density function(PDF), and to obtain measures of income inequality. We estimate the income probability density functions...

A growing literature relies on natural experiments to establish causal effects in macroeconomics. In diverse applications, natural experiments have been used to verify underlying assumptions of conventional models, quantify specific model parameters, and identify mechanisms that have major...

We study structural models of stochastic discount factors and explore alternative methods of estimating such models using data on macroeconomic risk and asset returns. Particular attention is devoted to recursive utility models in which risk aversion can be modified without altering...

In this paper, the authors propose a measure of underlying inflation for Canada obtained from estimating a monthly factor model on individual components of the CPI. This measure, labelled the common component of CPI, has intuitive appeal and a number of interesting features. In particular, it is...

This note points out a hitherto unrecognised identification issue in a class of rational expectations (RE) models with news shocks. We show that different degrees of anticipation (information flows) have strikingly different implications for the identifiability of the underlying structural...

We develop a new dynamic factor model that allows us to jointly characterize global macroeconomic and financial cycles and the spillovers between them. The model decomposes macroeconomic cycles into the part driven by global and country-specific macro factors and the part driven by spillovers...