This quotation appears at the beginning of the Policy Recommendations section of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's recent jobs study (OECD, 1994). However, of the fifty-nine separate recommendations only three concern macroeconomic policies, and but 10 percent of the background analysis is concerned with macroeconomic issues. The three specific macroeconomic recommenda...

This paper examines the effect of macroeconomic releases on stock market volatility through a Poisson-Gaussian-GARCH process with time varying jump intensity, which is allowed to respond to such information. It is found that the day of the announcement, per se, has little impact on jump intensities. Employment releases are an exception. However, when macroeconomic surprises are considered, infl...

While macroeconomic variables have been used extensively to forecast the U.S. equity risk premium and build models to explain it, relatively little attention has been paid to the technical stock market indicators widely employed by practitioners. Our paper fills this gap by studying the forecasting ability of a variety of technical indicators in comparison to that of a number of well-known macr...

A decade ago, a national conference of macroeconomic educators called for fundamental reform in the teaching of intermediate macroeconomics, urging instructors to employ a single analytic framework rather than ‘responding to the fragmentation of macroeconomics by teaching a separate model for each school of thought’ (Erekson, Raynold and Salemi, 1996; Salemi and Siegfried, 1999). This paper des...

The state of macroeconomic modeling and the use of macroeconomic models in policy analysis has come under heavy criticism. Critics have accused macroeconomists in academia and policy institutions of relying too much on a particular class of macroeconomic models. This paper proposes a comparative approach to macroeconomic policy analysis that is open to competing modeling paradigms. It reviews r...