Search Results
Journal Article
Is noninflationary growth an oxymoron?
A review of the theoretical and empirical case for disinflationary economic growth, showing that, contrary to popular wisdom, it is quite possible to have a booming economy without an acceleration in the price level.
Journal Article
Price stability: is a tough central bank enough?
What is the best way to achieve price stability? Conventional wisdom says that a tough, independent central bank is all that is necessary. However, a new view?the fiscal theory of the price level?argues that an appropriate fiscal policy is also required, no matter how tough the central bank may be. The choice of the fiscal theory versus the conventional view has significant implications for the way central banks do business.
Discussion Paper
Is there a stable Phillips Curve after all?
The Phillips curve refers to a negative (or inverse) relationship between unemployment and inflation in an economy?when unemployment is high, inflation tends to be low, and vice versa. This inflation-unemployment link has been observed in many countries during many times, most famously by William Phillips in 1958 looking at historical data for the United Kingdom. If this relationship is stable (or ?structural?)?meaning that it holds regardless of changes in the economic environment, including policy adjustment?then policymakers might be able to trade off increases in inflation to achieve ...
Working Paper
The Band pass filter
The "ideal" band-pass filter can be used to isolate the component of a time series that lies within a particular band of frequencies, but applying this filter requires a data set of infinite length. In practice, some sort of approximation is needed. Using projections, the authors derive approximations that are optimal when the time-series representations underlying the raw data have a unit root, or are stationary about a trend.
Journal Article
Okun's law revisited: should we worry about low unemployment?
A review of the connection between labor resource utilization and the growth/unemployment correlation summarized by Okun's law, showing that the instability of that relationship, particularly over short time horizons, has important implications for monetary policy.
Journal Article
Has Middle America stagnated?
A closer look at hourly wages.
Journal Article
The Wal-Mart effect: Poison or antidote for local communities?
The debate over Wal-Mart is a heated one. How can you tell whether the world?s largest retailer is good or bad for your community?
Journal Article
A simple way to estimate current-quarter GNP
This paper describes a method developed to predict the advance (first) estimate of inflation-adjusted gross national product (real GNP) using hours-worked data. Besides generating fairly accurate forecasts of advance GNP, the method has two implications. First, the Commerce Department seems to weigh the hours-worked data most heavily in its early estimates of real GNP but less and less so in its revised estimates. Second, analysts attempting to predict current-quarter outcomes in real time need to consider the availability and reliability of data at the time the forecasts are made.
Journal Article
The business cycle: it's still a puzzle
The business cycle is characterized by contractions and expansions in economic activity that are synchronized across a broad range of sectors. The authors provide evidence to document this, and survey some of the theories that have been proposed to explain it. Although much progress has been made, research in this area is still at an early age.
Report
Banking in computable general equilibrium economies: technical appendices I and II
Following are the technical appendixes for ?Banking in Computable Equilibrium Economies? by Javier Daz-Gimnez, Edward C. Prescott, Terry Fitzgerald, and Fernando Alvarez, in Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control 16 (1992), 533?59. Technical Appendix I, by Fernando Alvarez, describes the procedures used to construct the balance sheets reported in Tables 1 and 2 in page 536 and 537 of the paper. Technical Appendix II, by Terry Fitzgerald, describes the computational procedures used in this paper.