In this paper we investigate the link between optimal level of leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. Using the model of firm’s value maximization, we show that as macroeconomic uncertainty increases, captured by an increase in the variability of industrial production or inflation, firms decrease their optimal levels of borrowing. We test this prediction on a panel of non–financial US firms dr...

Initial announcements of macroeconomic indicators are based on imprecise and incomplete information. Government statistical agencies routinely restate the initial estimates over the course of several subsequent years as more information becomes available. We find that simple accounting-based aggregates, such as earnings dispersion, can predict future restatements in macroeconomic estimates, inc...

this paper investigates the relationship between macroeconomic instability and private investment of the iranian economy. the study uses a trivariate var(2)-garch(1,1)-in-mean with diagonal bekk approach to proxied inflation and exchange rate uncertainties as the main indicators of macroeconomic instability. moreover, bounds testing approach to level relationship applied to investigate the long...

It is perhaps stating the obvious to say that an important part of the macroeconomic environment is monetary policy. The actions of central banks have material effects on financial markets and can shape macroeconomic outcomes. Indeed, over recent decades it became widely accepted that monetary policy was the primary macroeconomic stabilisation tool and that monetary policy could effectively man...

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...

This paper presents an integrated approach to wage and employment determination combining microeconomic evidence with macroeconomic theory. More specifically, we first develop an efficiency wage model with labor turnover and show that the worker’s decision problem gives rise to a quit-rate function. We then use microeconomic data to estimate this quit-rate function and to test the specification...