Search Results
Journal Article
Why policymakers might care about stock market bubbles
This Commentary makes a case for Fed action in the event of a stock market bubble. Because stock market prices serve as a signal to business managers to invest, bubbles can mislead managers into investing when it is not profitable. The overinvestment, which becomes apparent after the bubble bursts, can lead to a period of low investment, which can cause a recession. Policymakers may wish to step in to end a bubble before stock prices get too far out of line relative to their fundamentals.
Journal Article
Per capita income growth and disparity in the United States, 1929–2003
Economic theory says the average income of different regions should grow closer over time. Within the United States and across some of the richer countries, evidence suggests this is true.
Working Paper
The return to capital and the business cycle
Real business cycle models have difficulty replicating the volatility of S&P 500 returns. This fact should not be surprising since real business cycle theory suggests that the return to capital should be measured by the return to aggregate market capital, not stock market returns. We construct a quarterly time series of the after-tax return to business capital. Its volatility is considerably smaller than that of S&P 500 returns. Our benchmark model captures almost 40 percent of the volatility in the return to capital (relative to the volatility of output). We consider several departures from ...
Journal Article
What labor market theory tells us about the \"New Economy\"
An investigation of whether economic theory supports the claim that a technology shock can change the "natural rate of unemployment."
Working Paper
Evolutionary programming as a solution technique for the Bellman equation
Evolutionary programming is a stochastic optimization procedure that has proved useful in optimizing difficult functions. This paper shows that evolutionary programming can be used to solve the Bellman equation problem with a high degree of accuracy and substantially less CPU time than Bellman equation iteration. Future applications will focus on sometimes binding constraints, a class of problem for which standard solutions techniques are not applicable.
Journal Article
On the cost of inflation
The FOMC has two objectives: maximizing sustainable economic growth and maintaining price stability. At times-like the past year-these goals appear to be in conflict. This Commentary outlines some economic theory that suggests that in the long run, the FOMC can achieve its two objectives by focusing primarily on its price stability target.
Working Paper
Home production meets time-to-build
An innovation in this paper is to introduce a time-to-build technology for the production of market capital into a model with home production. The paper?s main finding is that the two anomalies that have plagued all household production models?the positive correlation between business and household investment, and household investment leading business investment over the business cycle?are resolved when time-to-build is added.
Journal Article
Iowa electronic markets
In 1998, University of Iowa faculty members created their own futures markets. These experimental markets, designed to provide insights into the behavior of traders and naturally occurring markets, are still going strong. Their clever design gives them another practical use: They can be used to predict future events such as election outcomes and Federal Open Market Committee voting.
Journal Article
Canada's money targeting experiment
An inquiry into why the Bank of Canada was unable to bridle the inflation of the 1970s by controlling money growth.
Journal Article
Accounting for the jobless recoveries
Much has been made of the so-called jobless recovery of the past two business cycles?that is, their atypically weak employment growth early in the expansion phase. This Commentary examines the factors that account for this behavior, focusing on two key measures: the probabilities of job finding and job separation.