Post-covid inflation was predominantly driven by unexpectedly strong demand forces, not only in the United States, but also in the Euro Area. In comparison, the inflationary impact of adverse supply shocks was less pronounced, even though these shocks significantly constrained economic activity....

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in the moments of the yield curve (or alternatively, the term spread) as a predictor of future economic activity, defined as either recessions, or industrial production growth. In this paper, we re-examine the evidence for this predictor for the...

In a collaborative project with ten central banks, we have investigated the causes of the post-pandemic global inflation, building on our earlier work for the United States. Globally, as in the United States, pandemic-era inflation was due primarily to supply disruptions and sharp increases in...

At the onset of the COVID pandemic, the U.S. economy suddenly and swiftly lost 20 million jobs. Over the next two years, the economy has been on the recovery path. We assess the labor market two years into the COVID crisis. We show that early employment dynamics were almost entirely driven by...

To what extent is the recent spike in inflation driven by a change in its permanent component? We estimate a semi-structural model of output, inflation, and the nominal interest rate in the United States over the period 1900-2021. The model predicts that between 2019 and 2021 the permanent...

We provide theory and evidence that relative price shocks can cause aggregate inflation and act as aggregate supply shocks. Empirically, we show that exogenous positive energy price shocks have a positive impact not only on headline but also on U.S. core inflation while depressing U.S. real...

We evaluate the impact of government mandated proof of vaccination requirements for access to public venues and non-essential businesses on COVID-19 vaccine uptake. We find that the announcement of a mandate is associated with a rapid and significant surge in new vaccinations (more than 60\%...

This paper illustrates how to handle a sequence of extreme observations--such as those recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic--when estimating a Vector Autoregression, which is the most popular time-series model in macroeconomics. Our results show that the ad-hoc strategy of dropping these...

There is substantial evidence that cost-sharing in medical care constrains total health spending. However, there is relatively little (and unclear) evidence on its health effects, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. This paper re-evaluates the link between outpatient cost-sharing...

Multiple episodes in U.S. history demonstrate that birth rates fall in response to recessions. However, the 2020 COVID-19 recession differed from earlier periods in that employment and access to contraception and abortion fell, as reproductive health centers across the country temporarily closed...