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Traditional structural models cannot distinguish whether changes in activity are a function of altered expectations today or lagged responses to past plans. Polynomial-adjustment-cost (PAC) models remove this ambiguity by explicitly separating observed dynamic behaviour into movements that have been induced by changes in expectations, and responses to expectations, that have been delayed because of adjustment costs.

The authors study the macroeconomic consequences of large military buildups using a New Neoclassical Synthesis (NNS) approach that combines nominal rigidities within imperfectly competitive goods and labour markets. They show that the predictions of the NNS framework generally are consistent with the sign, timing, and magnitude of how hours worked, after-tax real wages, and output actually respond to an upsurge in military purchases.

The author examines the role of collateral in an environment where lenders and borrowers possess identical information and similar beliefs about its future value. Using option-pricing techniques, he shows that a secured loan contract is equivalent to a regular bond and an embedded option to the borrower to default.

Debt strategy is defined as the manner in which a government finances an excess of government expenditures over revenues and any maturing debt issued in previous periods. The author gives a thorough qualitative description of the complexities of debt strategy analysis and then demonstrates that it is, in fact, a problem in stochastic optimal control.

In this report, the authors examine and compare twelve private and public sector models of the Canadian economy with respect to their paradigm, structure, and dynamic properties. These open-economy models can be grouped into two economic paradigms.

In a recent attempt to account for the equity-premium puzzle within a representative-agent model, Cecchetti, Lam, and Mark (2000) relax the assumption of rational expectations and in its place use the assumption of distorted beliefs. The author shows that the explanatory power of the distorted beliefs model is due to an inconsistency in the model and that an attempt to remove this inconsistency removes the model's explanatory power.

This study describes a simple model for predicting the real U.S. exchange rate. Starting with a large number of error-correction models, the authors choose the one giving the best out-of-sample forecasts over the period 1992Q3–2002Q1.

The author presents empirical evidence that he has obtained from an analysis of the response of different economic variables, including the real wage rate, to a technology shock.

One of the central lessons learned from the Great Depression was that adjusting government spending each year to balance the budget increases the volatility of output.

Various measures indicate that inflation expectations evolve sluggishly relative to actual inflation. In addition, they often fail conventional tests of unbiasedness.