New Econometric Techniques for Marcoeconomic Policy Evaluation

Abstract

This paper is an expository review of recently developed techniques that are designed to evaluate macroeconomic policy using econometric models ; The exposition focuses on dynamic stochastic models with rational expectations and with discrete time. The method of undetermined coefficients is used to calculate the effects of anticipated, unanticipated, permanent, and temporary policy shocks; the same method is also used to calculate the effect of alternative policy rules on the stochastic equilibrium. This method provides a convenient unifying framework for comparing alternative solution methods for models with rational expectations. Estimation, testing and identification techniques are reviewed as well as recent methods for solving large nonlinear models.