Katarina Juselius’s research while affiliated with IT University of Copenhagen and other places

The high inflation occurring in the aftermath of the Corona pandemic rekindled an interest in the previous high inflation period of the 70s. Many feared that inflation was finally back again and hoped that central banks would be able to bring inflation down to previously low levels. To address this issue, the paper uses theoretical results on inflation control in Johansen, S. and K. Juselius (2024) to examine the conditions under which a monetary control rule would bring inflation down. Based on two different monetary policy regimes in the USA, one covering the Burns/Miller chairmanship in 1970–1979 and the other the Greenspan chairmanship in 1987-2006, the paper examines inflation control in the two periods. The empirical results provide little support for the widely held belief that the Federal Reserve Bank would have been able to control inflation by raising the federal funds rate. A discussion of why this was the case concludes the paper.

A theory-consistent CVAR scenario describes a set of testable regularities capturing basic assumptions of the theoretical model. Using this concept, the paper considers a standard model for exchange rate determination with forward-looking expectations and shows that all assumptions about the model’s shock structure and steady-state behavior can be formulated as testable hypotheses on common stochastic trends and cointegration. The basic stationarity assumptions of the monetary model failed to obtain empirical support. They were too restrictive to explain the observed long persistent swings in the real exchange rate, the real interest rates, and the inflation and interest rate differentials.

Inspired by the paper by Guzman and Stiglitz (2020, ‘Towards a dynamic disequilibrium theory with randomness,’ NBER Working Paper 27453), this article shows that cointegrated VAR (CVAR) analyses have for many years provided empirical underpinnings for most of the topics discussed in that paper. The CVAR takes the nonstationarity of economic data seriously; it allows explicitly for complex adjustment dynamics in the short run and the long run; it is able to describe self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms leading to multiple equilibria; it is able to handle extraordinary shocks to the system whether they are exogenously or endogenously induced; and it is able to accommodate sizeable crisis periods such as the Great Recession. The article discusses these issues and many more from a methodological, econometric, and empirical point of view and illustrates the ideas with an application to the Phillips curve with a Phelpsian natural rate based on US data.

This survey paper discusses the Cointegrated Vector AutoRegressive (CVAR) methodology and how it has evolved over the past 30 years. It describes major steps in the econometric development, discusses problems to be solved when confronting theory with the data, and, as a solution, proposes a so-called theory-consistent CVAR scenario. A number of early CVAR applications are motivated by the urge to find out why the empirical results did not support Milton Friedman’s concept of monetary inflation. The paper also proposes a method for combining partial CVAR analyses into a large-scale macroeconomic model. It argues that an empirically-based approach to macroeconomics preferably should be based on Keynesian disequilibrium economics, where imperfect knowledge expectations replace so called rational expectations and where the financial sector plays a key role for understanding the long persistent movements in the data. Finally, the paper argues that the CVAR is potentially a candidate for Haavelmo’s “design of experiment for passive observations” and provides several illustrations.

While there seems to be a well-established consensus about the underlying causes to the Greek crisis, less is known about internal and external transmission mechanisms that ultimately caused unemployment to increase rapidly over this period. Motivated by the structural slumps theory in Phelps (Structural slumps, 1994), the paper attempts, therefore, to uncover the dynamic mechanisms behind prices, interest rates, and external imbalances that contributed to the severity and the length of the crisis. The authors find that the strongly increasing real bond rate and unemployment rate together with an persistently appreciating real exchange rate and a deterioration of competitiveness in the eurozone have contributed to persistently growing structural imbalances in the Greek economy. As the lack of confidence in the Greek economy grew steadily, the scene was set for a monumental structural slump. Over the crisis period, all variables exhibited self-reinforcing feedback adjustment somewhere in the system except for inflation rate. Unemployment took the burden of adjustment when the bond rate sky rocketed, competitiveness deteriorated, and confidence fell.

This survey paper discusses the Cointegrated VAR methodology and how it has evolved over the last 30 years. The first section is a description of major steps in the econometric development of the CVAR model that facilitated serious real world applications. The next three sections are primarily methodological and discuss (i) difficulties and puzzles when confronting theory with the data, (ii) the formulation of a viable link between theory and the data, a so called theory-consistent CVAR scenario, and (iii) how all this was inspired by Trygve Haavelmo and his Nobel prize winning monograph "The Probability Approach to Economics". The next two sections discuss early applications of the Cointegrated VAR model to monetary transmission mechanisms, international transmission mechanisms and wage, price and unemployment dynamics. They report puzzling evidence, discuss the need for new theory, and propose a method for combining partial CVAR analyses into a larger macroeconomic model. The following sections propose a new, empirically-based, approach to macroeconomics in which imperfect knowledge based expectations replace so called rational expectations and in which the financial sector plays a key role for understanding the long persistent movements in the data. The last section argues that the CVAR can act as a "design of experiment for passive observations" and illustrates with several applications including unemployment dynamics under crises periods and aid effectiveness in South Saharan African countries.

This paper uses consensus forecasts to address empirical puzzles in international macro using the Cointegrated VAR model. The data, consisting of three-month Libor rates, their three-month ahead forecasts, prices and exchange rates for the US and UK, were all found to be near I(2) consistent with imperfect knowledge expectations. The I(2) analysis showed that over the medium run the nominal exchange rate has moved away from equilibrium values with interest rates following suit, whereas over the long run the nominal exchange rate was adjusting while the interest rate forecasts pushed the system away from steady state. Evidence of self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in the system signals the importance of speculative bubbles for the determination of the exchange rate and the interest rates.