We estimate nonlinear VARs to assess to what extent fiscal spending multipliers are countercyclical in the United States. We deal with the issue of nonfundamentalness due to fiscal foresight by appealing to sums of revisions of expectations of fiscal expenditures. This measure of anticipated...

We investigate the effects of uncertainty shocks on unemployment dynamics in the post-WWII U.S. recessions via non-linear (Smooth-Transition) VARs. The relevance of uncertainty shocks is found to be much larger than that predicted by standard linear VARs in terms of i) magnitude of the reaction...

The role of trend inflation shocks for the U.S. macroeconomic dynamics is investigated by estimating two DSGE models of the business cycle. Policymakers are assumed to be concerned with a time-varying inflation target, which is modeled as a persistent and stochastic process. The identification...

This paper estimates a new-Keynesian DSGE model of the U.S. business cycle by employing a variety of business cycle proxies, either one-by-one or, following a recent proposal by Canova and Ferroni (2009), in a joint fashion. Objects such as posterior densities, impulse-response functions, and...

We employ a nonlinear VAR to document the asymmetric reaction of real economic activity to uncertainty shocks. An uncertainty shock occurring in recessions triggers an abrupt and deep drop followed by a quick rebound and a temporary overshoot. The same shock hitting in expansions induces a...

What does a monetary policy shock do? We answer this question by estimating a new-Keynesian monetary policy DSGE model for a number of economies with a variety of empirical proxies of the business cycle. The effects of two different policy shocks, an unexpected interest rate hike conditional on...

In this paper we assess the stability of open economy backward looking Phillips curves estimated across two different exchange rate regimes. The time series we deal with come from the simulation of a New-Keynesian hybrid model suited for performing monetary policy analysis. The statistical...

We assess the stability of open economy backward-looking Phillips curves estimated over two different exchange rate regimes. We calibrate a new-Keynesian monetary policy model and employ it for producing artificial data. A monetary policy break replicating the move from a Target-Zone regime to a...

This paper estimates Taylor rules featuring instabilities in policy parameters, switches in policy shocks' volatility, and time-varying trend inflation using post-WWII U.S. data. The model embedding the stochastic target performs better in terms of data-fit and identification of the changes in...

This paper investigates the interactions between stock market fluctuations and monetary policy within a DSGE model for the U.S. economy. First, we design a framework in which fluctuations in households financial wealth are allowed - but not necessarily required - to exert an impact on current...