Background
McCALLUM, Bennett Tarlton was born in 1935 in Poteet, Texas, United States of America.
McCALLUM, Bennett Tarlton was born in 1935 in Poteet, Texas, United States of America.
Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science (Chemistry), Doctor of Philosophy Rice University, Houston, Texas, 1957, 1958, 1969. Master of Business Administration Harvard University, 1963.
He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Monetary Economics; Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking; Economics Letters; and the International Journal of Finance and Economics. He is a former co-editor of the American Economic Review and since 1995 has been co-editor of the Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy.
Initial research efforts were in the area of applied econometrics and, to a lesser extent, econometric theory. Several empirical studies involved the formulation and estimation of relationships describing dynamic adjustments of nominal wages and prices — i.e., ‘Phillips curves’. As such relationships include ubobservable expectational variables, these studies motivated consideration of hypotheses more plausible than the then-prevalent adaptive-expectations theory.
This led in turn to an interest in the hypotheses of rational expectations and to the development of techniques appropriate for estimation and testing that hypothesis. In response to the profession’s concern with the macroeconomic ‘policy effectiveness’ proposition, several papers were devoted to the discussion and refinement of that proposition and to the description of structures in which it is theoretically valid, despite the absence of perfect price flexibility. More recent work has involved a wide range of issues in macro and monetary economics.
Four of these are the multiplicity of solution paths that obtains in many macroeconomic models with rational expectations, the proper role of overlapping-generations models in monetary economics, the alleged destabilising effect of monetarist policy rules, and the implications of the Ricardian debt hypothesis for the feasibility of an unending sequence of government budget deficits financed by bond sales. Topics of ongoing interest include aggregate supply behaviour, the role of equilibrium and disequilibrium approaches to macroeconomic analysis,
and the possibility of drawing structural inferences by means of relatively modelfree statistical techniques.