This paper incorporates a small and time-varying “disaster risk” à la Gourio (2012) in a New Keynesian model. A change in the probability of disaster may affect macroeconomic quantities and asset prices. In particular, a higher risk is sufficient to generate a recession without effective...

International comparisons of living standards are still primarily made using GDP per capita, in spite of recurrent criticism that this is a partial and ill-founded measure of social welfare (Sen). Alternative measures abound, such as the Index of Human Development computed by the United Nations...