#2006-062B "Is There Too Little Immigration? An Analysis of Temporary Skilled Migration"
by Subhayu Bandyopadhyay, and Howard J. Wall
December 2006
Revised August 2007

This paper presents a model of legal migration of temporary skilled workers from one source country to two host countries, both of which can control their levels of such immigration. More...

PUBLISHED: Journal of International Trade and Economic Development, June 2008, 17(2), pp. 197-211

#2006-061B "The Expectation Hypothesis of the Term Structure of Very Short-Term Rates: Statistical Tests and Economic Value"
by Pasquale Della Corte, Lucio Sarno, and Daniel L. Thornton
November 2006
Revised July 2007

This paper re-examines the validity of the Expectation Hypothesis (EH) of the term structure of US repo rates ranging in maturity from overnight to three months. More...

FORTHCOMING: Journal of Financial Economics

#2006-060B "A Note on Oil Dependence and Economic Instability"
by Luís Aguiar-Conraria, and Yi Wen
November 2006
Revised September 2007

We show that dependence on foreign energy can increase economic instability by raising the likelihood of equilibrium indeterminacy, hence making fluctuations driven by self- fulfilling expectations easier to occur. More...

FORTHCOMING: Macroeconomic Dynamics

#2006-059B "The Economic and Statistical Value of Forecast Combinations under Regime Switching: An Application to Predictable US Returns"
by Massimo Guidolin, and Carrie Fangzhou Na
October 2006
Revised April 2007

We address one interesting case — the predictability of excess US asset returns from macroeconomic factors within a flexible regime switching VAR framework — in which the presence of regimes may lead to superior forecasting performance from forecast combinations. More...

FORTHCOMING: Forecasting in the Presence of Structural Breaks and Model Uncertainty, M. Wohar and D. Rapach, eds.

#2006-058C "Strategic Online-Banking Adoption"
by Roberto Fuentes, Rubén Hernández-Murillo, and Gerard Llobet
October 2006
Revised January 2008

In this paper we study the determinants of banks’ decision to adopt a transactional website for their customers. More...

#2006-057A "Controlling for Geographic Dispersion When Estimating the Japanese Phillips Curve"
by Hiroshi Fujiki, and Howard J. Wall
October 2006

This paper argues that estimation of the Phillips curve for Japan should take account of the geographic dispersion of labor-market conditions. More...

#2006-056C "The Economic Performance of Cities: A Markov-Switching Approach"
by Michael T. Owyang, Jeremy M. Piger, Howard J. Wall, and Christopher H. Wheeler
October 2006
Revised January 2007

This paper examines the determinants of employment growth in metro areas. More...

FORTHCOMING: Journal of Urban Economics

#2006-055A "Trends in the Distributions of Income and Human Capital within Metropolitan Areas: 1980-2000"
by Christopher H. Wheeler, and Elizabeth A. La Jeunesse
October 2006

Human capital tends to have significant external effects within local markets, increasing the average income of individuals within the same metropolitan area. More...

#2006-054B "Forecasting Inflation and Output: Comparing Data-Rich Models with Simple Rules"
by William T. Gavin, and Kevin L. Kliesen
September 2006
Revised May 2008

Decision makers, both public and private, use forecasts of economic growth and inflation to make plans and implement policies. In many situations, reasonably good forecasts can be made with simple rules of thumb that are extrapolations of a single data series. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, May/June 2008, 90(3, Part 1), pp. 175-92

#2006-053A "Regional Business Cycle Phases in Japan"
by Howard J. Wall
September 2006

This paper uses a Markov-switching model with structural breaks to characterize and compare regional business cycles in Japan for 1976-2005. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, January/February 2007, 89(1), pp. 61-76