This paper proposes a simple explanation for the frequent appearance of a price puzzle in VARs designed for monetary policy analysis. It suggests that the best method of solving the puzzle implies a close connection between theory and empirics rather than the introduction of a commodity price....

Fair (2002) argues that New Keynesian models are wrong in predicting that an inflation shock has contractionary effects only if it raises the real interest rate, and that a coefficient on inflation higher than one in the Taylor rule is a necessary condition for stability. While Fair uses his...

We demonstrate improvements in predictive power when introducing spline functions to take account of highly non-linear relationships between firm failure and earnings, leverage, and liquidity in a logistic bankruptcy model. Our results show that modeling excessive non-linearities yields...

We model a regression density nonparametrically so that at each value of the covariates the density is a mixture of normals with the means, variances and mixture probabilities of the components changing smoothly as a function of the covariates. The model extends existing models in two important...