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...

We investigate the hypothesis that macroeconomic fluctuations are primitively the results of many microeconomic shocks, and show that it has significant explanatory power for the evolution of macroeconomic volatility. We define "fundamental" volatility as the volatility that would arise from an...

Central banks' projections-i.e. forecasts conditional on a given interest rate path-are often criticized on the grounds that their underlying policy assumptions are inconsistent with the existence of a unique equilibrium in many forward-looking models. Here I describe three alternative...

This paper examines the macroeconomic dynamics of the 2007-09 recession in the United States and the subsequent slow recovery. Using a dynamic factor model with 200 variables, we reach three main conclusions. First, although many of the events of the 2007-2009 collapse were unprecedented, their...

Does news about future productivity cause business-cycle fluctuations? What other effects might it have? We explore the answer to this question using semi-structural VARs, where “news” is defined as the innovation in the expectation of TFP at a fixed horizon in the future. We find that...

We construct factors from a cross section of exchange rates and use the idiosyncratic deviations from the factors to forecast. In a stylized data generating process, we show that such forecasts can be effective even if there is essentially no serial correlation in the univariate exchange rate...

We consider the problem of short-term time series forecasting (nowcasting) when there are more possible predictors than observations. Our approach combines three Bayesian techniques: Kalman filtering, spike-and-slab regression, and model averaging. We illustrate this approach using search engine...

The conventional wisdom is (i) that fiscal austerity was the main culprit for the recessions experienced by many countries, especially in Europe, since 2010 and (ii) that this round of fiscal consolidation was much more costly than past ones. The contribution of this paper is a clarification of...

The Diebold-Mariano (DM) test was intended for comparing forecasts; it has been, and remains, useful in that regard. The DM test was not intended for comparing models. Unfortunately, however, much of the large subsequent literature uses DM-type tests for comparing models, in (pseudo-)...

This paper studies the pruned state-space system for higher-order approximations to the solutions of DSGE models. For second- and third-order approximations, we derive the statistical properties of this system and provide closed-form expressions for first and second unconditional moments and...