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...

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...

Access to external finance, such as bank loans or trade credit, is a key determinant of a firm’s ability to develop, operate, and expand. Economic researchers have studied how various macroeconomic and microeconomic factors influence such access; for example, it has been shown to depend on the macroeconomic environment, since economic downturns tend to limit firms’ ability to borrow and banks’ ...

This paper presents evidence that stringent balanced budget requirements enforced in some U.S. states have exacerbated business cycles in those states. The effect is not apparent directly. However, among states for which fiscal policy may have more macroeconomic consequences (large states), the difference in volatility between states with lenient and strict balanced budget rules is larger (more...

We analyse the impact of interactions between monetary and fiscal policy on macroeconomic stability. We find that in the presence of sovereign default beliefs a monetary policy, which aims to stabilize inflation through an active interest rate policy, will destabilize the economy if the feedback from debt surprises back to the primary surplus is too weak. This result, which relies on endogenous...

 Libya experienced a substantial increase in oil revenue as a result of increased oil prices during the period of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and again after 2000. Recent increases in oil production and the price of oil, and their positive and negative macroeconomic impacts upon key macroeconomic variables, are of considerable contemporary importance to an oil dependent economy such as that...