#1996-015A "Charging up a Mountain of Debt: Households and Their Credit Cards"
by Peter S. Yoo
December 1996

I use the Surveys of Consumer Finances conducted in 1983, 1989 and 1992 to separate the growth of credit card debt into two categories, changes in the number of households with credit cards and changes in households credit card debt. I can then account for the relative contributions of increases in credit card availability, number of households, and average credit card debt. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, March/April 1997, 79(2)

#1996-014A "Defining the Adjusted Monetary Base in an Era of Financial Change"
by Richard G. Anderson, and Robert H. Rasche
November 1996

This paper examines how recent changes in the U.S. financial system have affected the appropriate definition, construction and interpretation of the St. Louis adjusted monetary base and adjusted reserves. Since 1990, reductions in statutory reserve requirements have significantly reduced the importance of the requirements as a constraint on the deposit and lending behavior of banks and other depository institutions. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, November/December 1996, 78(6)

#1996-013B "Market Microstructure Effects on the Direct Measurement of the Early Exercise Premium in Exchange-Listed Options"
by Michael J. Dueker, and Thomas W. Miller, Jr.
December 1996

The Chicago Board Options Exchange concurrently listed European-style and American-style options on the Standard and Poor?s 500 Index from April 2, 1986 through June 20, 1986. We match near-the-money American option quotes with the most nearly contemporaneous, otherwise identical, European option quote. More...

#1996-012A "The Distribution of Wealth, 1983-1992: Secular Growth Cyclical Stability"
by John C. Weicher
September 1996

This article describes the changes in the concentration of wealth among U.S. households between 1983 and 1992, a period which nearly coincides with the most recent business cycle. The distribution of wealth has received popular attention recently, based on reports that it became markedly more unequal during the economic expansion of the 1980s. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, January/February 1997, 79(1)

#1996-011A "Tariff Risk and International Borrowing with Incomplete Asset Markets"
by Michael R. Pakko
September 1996

When residents of two countries have access to complete contingent claims markets, the welfare effects of changes in tariffs are opposite to those found in static trade theory. This paper demonstrates that a much simpler asset market structure can be sufficient to generate such a result. More...

#1996-010C "To Chain or Not to Chain Trade-Weighted Exchange Rate Indexes"
by Cletus C. Coughlin, Patricia S. Pollard, and Jerram C. Betts

Revised February 1997

With the advent of chain calculations for the U.S. national income and product accounts, it seems reasonable to contemplate using the chain approach for other indexes, such as trade-weighted exchange rates (TWEXs). A fundamental criticism of measuring the growth of gross domestic product by a fixed-base-year method is that the estimates are highly sensitive, especially when the economy?s structure is changing dramatically, to the arbitrary choice of the base year. More...

PUBLISHED: The International Trade Journal, Fall 1998

#1996-009A "Forecasting with an Adaptive Control Algorithm"
by Donald S. Allen, Yang-Woo Kim, and Meenakshi Pasupathy


We construct a parsimonious model of the U.S. macro economy using a state space representation and recursive estimation. At the core of the estimation procedure is a prediction/correction algorithm based on a recursive least squares estimation with exponential forgetting. More...

#1996-008B "Building New Monetary Services Indices: Concepts, Methodology and Source Data"
by Richard G. Anderson, Barry Jones, and Travis Nesmith
October 1996

This paper is second of two from the Monetary Services Indices (MSI) Project at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The first paper, Working Paper 96-007B, surveys the microeconomic theory of the aggregation of monetary assets. This paper describe a new database of monetary services indices (MSI) for the United States. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, January/February 1997, 79(1)

#1996-007B "Monetary Aggregation Theory and Statistical Index Numbers"
by Richard G. Anderson, Barry Jones, and Travis Nesmith
October 1996

This paper is the first of two from the Monetary Services Indices (MSI) Project at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The second paper, Working Paper 96-008B, summarizes the methodology, construction and data sources for the an extensive new database of monetary services indices, often referred to as Divisia monetary aggregates, for the United States. More...

PUBLISHED: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, January/February 1997, 79(1)

#1996-006C "Is Technical Analysis in the Foreign Exchange Market Profitable? A Genetic Programming Approach"
by Christopher J. Neely, Paul A. Weller, and Robert Dittmar
June 1996

Using genetic programming techniques to find technical trading rules, we find strong evidence of economically significant out-of-sample excess returns to those rules for each of six exchange rates, over the period 1981-1995. Further, when the dollar/deutschemark rules are allowed to determine trades in the other markets, there is a significant improvement in performance in all cases, except for the deutschemark/yen. More...

PUBLISHED: Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, December 1997