Macroeconomics tries to describe and explain the economywide movement of prices, output, and unemployment. The field has been sharply divided among various schools, including Keynesian, monetarist, new classical, and others. It has also been split between theorists and empiricists. Ray Fair is a resolute empiricist, developing and refining methods for testing theories and models. The field cannot advance without the discipline of testing how well the models approximate the data. Using a multicountry econometric model, he examines several important questions, including what causes inflation, how monetary authorities behave and what are their stabilization limits, how large is the wealth effect on aggregate consumption, whether European monetary policy has been too restrictive, and how large are the stabilization costs to Europe of adopting the euro. He finds, among other things, little evidence for the rational expectations hypothesis and for the so-called non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) hypothesis. He also shows that the U.S. economy in the last half of the 1990s was not a "new age" economy.

This book gives a practical, applications-oriented account of the latest techniques for estimating and analyzing large, nonlinear macroeconomic models. Ray Fair demonstrates the application of these techniques in a detailed presentation of several actual models, including his United States model, his multicountry model, Sargent's classical macroeconomic model, autoregressive and vector autoregressive models, and a small (twelve equation) linear structural model. He devotes a good deal of attention to the difficult and often neglected problem of moving from theoretical to econometric models. In addition, he provides an extensive discussion of optimal control techniques and methods for estimating and analyzing rational expectations models.

A computer program that handles all the techniques in the book is available from the author, making it possible to use the techniques with little additional programming. The book presents the logic of this program. A smaller program for personal microcomputers for analysis of Fair's United States model is available from Urban Systems Research & Engineering, Inc. Anyone wanting to learn how to use large macroeconomic models, including researchers, graduate students, economic forecasters, and people in business and government both in the United States and abroad, will find this an essential guidebook.

In this book Ray Fair expounds powerful techniques for estimating and analyzing macroeconometric models. He takes advantage of the remarkable decrease in computational costs that has occurred since the early 1980s by implementing such sophisticated techniques as stochastic simulation. Testing Macroeconometric Models also incorporates the assumption of rational expectations in the estimation, solution, and testing of the models. And it presents the latest versions of Fair's models of the economies of the United States and other countries.

After estimating and testing the U.S. model, Fair analyzes its properties, including those relevant to economic policymakers: the optimal monetary policy instrument, the effect of a government spending reduction on the government deficit, whether monetary policy is becoming less effective over time, and the sensitivity of policy effects to the assumption of rational expectations.

Ray Fair has conducted research on structural macroeconometric models for more than twenty years. With interest increasing in the area, this book will be an essential reference for macroeconomists.