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 article provides a relatively nontechnical discussion of previously published research on the use of econometric models in the study of the economic effects of social security. It illustrates the role of econometric model building by focusing on three major applications: forecasting, policy simulation, and hypothesis testing. A series of three macroeconomic examples serves to emphasize tha...

The paper combines analytic and numeric tools to investigate a nonlinear optimal control problem relevant to the economics of climate change. The problem describes optimal investments into pollution mitigation and environmental adaptation at a macroeconomic level. The steady-state analysis of this problem focuses on the optimal ratio between adaptation and mitigation. In particular, we analytic...

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...

the purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of monetary, fiscal and oil revenue shocks on macroeconomic variables in the framework of rule and discretionary monetary policy. to end this, we use a new keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (dsge) model. given the dominant role of oil in the country, we consider the role of oil shock in the model through different channels. the ...

Athanasios Orphanides and John C. Williams’ excellent conference paper, “Inflation Scares and Forecast-Based Monetary Policy,” contributes importantly to the new and rapidly growing branch of the literature on bounded rationality and learning in macroeconomics. Their paper, like many others, derives interesting and useful theoretical results that show how the introduction of bounded rationality...

Expectations about the future are central for determination of current macroeconomic outcomes and the formulation of monetary policy. Recent literature has explored ways for supplementing the benchmark of rational expectations with explicit models of expectations formation that rely on econometric learning. Some apparently natural policy rules turn out to imply expectational instability of priv...

The paper weakens the orthodox argument that firm control of the money supply is sufficient to control the rate of inflation in the medium to long run. It argues that local linearisation is not the appropriate strategy for dealing with macroeconomic models: the global dynamics should be analysed, using simulation methods if necessary. The paper provides an example of how striking analytical (in...

Euler-equation methods for solving nonlinear dynamic models involve parameterizing some policy functions. We argue that in the typical macroeconomic model with valuable leisure, labor function is particularly convenient for parameterizing. This is because under the labor-function parameterization, the intratemporal first-order condition admits a closed-form solution, while under other parameter...

The paper analytically explores the optimal policy mix between mitigation and environmental adaptation against climate change at a macroeconomic level. The constructed economicenvironmental model is formulated as a social planner problem with the adaptation and abatement investments as separate decision variables. The authors prove the existence of a unique steady state and provide a comparativ...