Malthus and the Industrial Revolution: Evidence from a Time-Varying VAR

Changes in the Transmission of Monetary Policy: Evidence from a Time-Varying Factor-Augmented VAR

This paper re-examines the evolution in the US monetary transmission mechanism using an empirical framework that incorporates substantially more information than the standard trivariate VAR model used in most previous studies. In particular, we employ an extended version of the factor-augmented VAR proposed by Bernanke et al. (2005). Our extensions include allowing for time variation in the coe...

Malthus and Pre-Industrial Stagnation

The past two hundred years have seen a remarkable transformation in the standard of living of a substantial fraction of the world’s population. Since about 1800, real wages of ordinary workers in Western Europe and North America have risen steadily by roughly one to two percent per year. This has lead to a cumulative increase in real wages of a staggering 1500%. In sharp contrast, real wages of...

Credit Rationing and Crowding out during the Industrial Revolution: Evidence

Why was growth so slow during the British Industrial Revolution? More than a decade ago, Jeff Williamson proposed "crowding-out" as a result of Britain's numerous wars as a key mechanism, but little empirical evidence existed to support it. We argue that examinations of interest rates are fundamentally misguided. The eighteenthand early nineteenth-century private loan market balanced through qu...

On the predictability of time-varying VAR and DSGE models

Over the last few years, there has been a growing interest in DSGE modelling for predicting macroeconomic ‡uctuations and conducting quantitative policy analysis. Hybrid DSGE models have become popular for dealing with some of the DSGE misspeci…cations as they are able to solve the tradeo¤ between theoretical coherence and empirical …t. However, these models are still linear and they do not con...

The New Industrial Revolution