Search Results
Journal Article
The economics of smoking bans: peering through the haze
Although such prohibitions are becoming more common, generalizations can't be made about their impact because they still are too new and too few. Scrutiny of the ban in Maryville, Mo., shows that the issues remain hazy.
Journal Article
Monetary policy in jobless recoveries
Journal Article
Monetary policy and financial market expectations: what did they know and when did they know it?
Interest rates sometimes seem to respond to Federal Reserve policy actions in unexpected ways--for example, falling when the Fed " tightens" monetary policy or rising when the Fed "eases" policy. In this article, Michael R. Pakko and David C. Wheelock attempt to demystify such responses. They show how trading in the federal funds futures market reveals public expectations of Federal Reserve actions, and how our knowledge of these expectations can help us interpret the behavior of interest rates.
Journal Article
Comparing apples and oranges
Tracking prices over time is easy when the object in question doesn't change much-say, an orange. But the process is difficult when there are frequent changes in the quality of the item-say, an Apple computer. Hedonics provides the solution.
Journal Article
District fares better than nation as housing market crumbles
Journal Article
Uneven employment growth reflects differing mixes of jobs
Journal Article
Shoe-leather costs of inflation and policy credibility
Inflation can cause costly misallocations of resources as consumers seek to protect the purchasing power of their nominal assets. In this article, Michael R. Pakko discusses the nature of these distortions - known as "shoe-leather" costs - in a model where the demand for money is motivated by a "shopping-time" constraint. While the estimates of the shoe-leather costs of long-run inflation (implied by this model) are generally consistent with previous studies, the article goes on to show that the transition between inflation rates can involve dynamics that alter the nature of these ...
Working Paper
Trade, investment, and international borrowing in two-country business cycle models
Two country applications of equilibrium business cycle methodology have succeeded in matching some key features of international fluctuations. However, discrepancies between theory and data remain. This paper identifies a new anomaly related to a basic property of typical models: the prediction of countercyclical net exports is fundamentally related to (counterfactual) implication for negative cross-country investment correlations. Although the introduction of investment adjustment costs can reverse this anomaly, it has the side-effect of inducing the wrong cyclical behavior for net exports. ...