This paper combines new data and a narrative approach to identify shocks to political pressure on the Federal Reserve. From archival records, I build a data set of personal interactions between U.S. Presidents and Fed officials between 1933 and 2016. Since personal interactions do not...

We consider impulse response inference in a locally misspecified stationary vector autoregression (VAR) model. The conventional local projection (LP) confidence interval has correct coverage even when the misspecification is so large that it can be detected with probability approaching 1. This...

Most macroeconomic models view economic outcomes as being generated by a combination of endogenous and exogenous dynamic forces. In particular, the exogenous forces are generally modelled as a set of independent dynamics processes. In this paper we begin by showing that this dual dynamic...

We study the relation between inflation and real activity over the business cycle. We employ a Trend-Cycle VAR model to control for low-frequency movements in inflation, unemployment, and growth that are pervasive in the post-WWII period. We show that cyclical fluctuations of inflation are...

We conduct a simulation study of Local Projection (LP) and Vector Autoregression (VAR) estimators of structural impulse responses across thousands of data generating processes, designed to mimic the properties of the universe of U.S. macroeconomic data. Our analysis considers various...

In this paper we use the functional vector autoregression (VAR) framework of Chang, Chen, and Schorfheide (2024) to study the effects of monetary policy shocks (conventional and informational) on the cross-sectional distribution of U.S. earnings (from the Current Population Survey), consumption,...