What is the impact of time-varying business uncertainty on economic activity? Using partly confidential business survey data from the U.S. and Germany in structural VARs, we find that positive innovations to business uncertainty lead to prolonged declines in economic activity. In contrast, their...

Previous work by Dumas and Solnik (1993) has shown that a CAPM which incorporates foreign-exchange risk premia (a so-called 'international CAPM') is better capable empirically of explaining the structure of worldwide rates of return than does the classic CAPM. In the specification of that test,...

This paper investigates the economic and social consequences of sovereign default on external debt. We focus on the crises' impact on real per capita GDP, infant mortality, life expectancy, poverty headcounts, and calorie supply per capita. After methodological exclusions, the sample covers 221...

Data on global trade as well as capital and labor flows indicate a slowdown, but not reversal, of globalization post the 2008-09 financial crisis. Yet profound changes in the policy environment and public sentiment in the largest economies over the past five years suggest the beginning of a new...

Two centuries ago, in most countries around the world, women were unable to vote, had no say over their own children or property, and could not obtain a divorce. Women have gradually gained rights in many areas of life, and this legal expansion has been closely intertwined with economic...

For many years a system of leading, coincident, and lagging economic indicators, first developed in the 1930s by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), has been widely used in the United States to appraise the state of the business cycle. Since 1961 the current monthly figures for...

This article examines the performance of various financial variables as predictors of subsequent U.S. recessions. Series such as interest rates and spreads, stock prices, currencies, and monetary aggregates are evaluated singly and in comparison with other financial and non-financial indicators....

This paper examines the forecasting performance of various leading economic indicators and composite indexes since 1988. in particular during the onset of the 1990 recession. The primary focus is on an experimental recession index (tile "XRI"). a composite index which provides probabilistic...

This paper proposes a new way of displaying and analyzing macroeconomic time series to form recession forecasts. The proposed data displays contain the last three years of each expansion. These allow observers to see for themselves what is different about the last year before recession. Based on...