Research Database

This article describes how and why official U.S. estimates of the growth in real economic output and inflation are revised over time, demonstrates how big those revisions tend to be, and evaluates whether the revisions matter for researchers trying to understand the economy’s performance and the contemporaneous reactions of policymakers. The conclusion may seem obvious, but it is a point ignored by most researchers: To have a good chance of understanding how policymakers make their decisions, researchers must use not the final data available, but the data available initially, when the policy decisions are actually made.

A Beckerian model of household production is developed to study the allocation of capital and time between market and home activities over the business cycle. The adopted framework treats the business and household sectors symmetrically. In the market, labor interacts with business capital to produce market goods and services, and likewise at home the remaining time, leisure, is combined with household capital to produce home goods and services. The theoretical model presented is parameterized, calibrated, and simulated to see whether it can rationalize the observed allocation of capital and time, as well as other stylized facts, for the postwar U.S. economy.

Models of low-frequency behavior of time series may have strongly conflicting substantive implications while fitting the data nearly equally well. We should develop methods which display the resulting uncertainty rather than adopt modeling conventions which hide it. One step toward this goal may be to consider “overparameterized” stationary ARMA models.

In the specification of linear regression models it is common to indicate a list of candidate variables from which a subset enters the model with nonzero coefficients. This paper interprets this specification as a mixed continuous-discrete prior distribution for coefficient values. It then utilizes a Gibbs sampler to construct posterior moments. It is shown how this method can incorporate sign constraints and provide posterior probabilities for all possible subsets of regressors. The methods are illustrated using some standard data sets.

The determination of the mechanism for ordering strategies in a game theoretic conflict is the keystone of economic science, at least insofar as economics is to remain an outgrowth of that (otherwise relatively minor) school of English philosophy, Utilitarianism. A method for the solution of the general game is presented in this paper, and the implications for economic theorizing discussed.

One purpose of this article is to exposit the relationship between life cycle models (with constructive immortality) and infinitely lived agents models. We use this to point out problems in interpreting data, especially with regard to the use of interest rates in the class of representative agent models when growth in population and per capita variables is taken into account. We also point out some common misconceptions regarding the "volume of trade" in representative agent models and show how to reconcile the savings profile of the representative agent with the life cycle savings profile in a life cycle model.

Game theory is both at the heart of economics and without a definitive solution. This paper proposes a solution. It is argued that a dominance criterion generates a, and perhaps the, generalized equilibrium solution for game theory. First we provide a set theoretic perspective from which to view game theory, and then present and discuss the proposed solution.

The consequences of a straightforward monetary targeting scheme are examined for a simple dynamic macro model. The notion of "targeting" used below is the strategic one introduced by Rogoff (1985). Numerical simulations are used to demonstrate that for the model under consideration, monetary targeting is likely to lead to a deterioration of policy performance. These examples cast doubt upon the general efficacy of simple targeting schemes in dynamic rational expectations models.