We study the causal effects and policy implications of global supply chain disruptions. We construct a new index of supply chain disruptions from the mandatory automatic identification system data of container ships, developing a novel spatial clustering algorithm that determines real-time...

This paper shows how changes in the volatility of the real interest rate at which small open emerging economies borrow have a quantitatively important effect on real variables like output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. To motivate our investigation, we document the strong evidence...

We review the literature on uncertainty shocks and business cycle research. First, we motivate the study of uncertainty shocks by documenting the presence of time-variation in the volatility of macroeconomic time series. Second, we enumerate the mechanisms that researchers have postulated to...

This paper investigates how, in a heterogeneous agents model with financial frictions, idiosyncratic individual shocks interact with exogenous aggregate shocks to generate time-varying levels of leverage and endogenous aggregate risk. To do so, we show how such a model can be efficiently...

A safe asset's real value is insulated from shocks, including declines in GDP from rare macroeconomic disasters. However, in a Lucas-tree world, the aggregate risk is given by the process for GDP and cannot be altered by the creation of safe assets. Therefore, in the equilibrium of a...