We develop a new monthly indicator of supply bottlenecks using newspaper articles. The supply bottlenecks index (SBI) provides a consistent narrative of supply issues related to wars, natural disasters, strikes and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Innovations in the SBI have important...

This paper investigates the relationship between the views expressed in the minutes of the meetings of the Central Bank of Brazil’s Monetary Policy Committee (COPOM) and the real economy. It applies various computational linguistic machine learning algorithms to construct measures of the...

This paper investigates the reactions of US financial markets to press news from January 2019 to 1 May 2020. To this end, we deduce the content and sentiment of the news by developing apposite indices from the headlines and snippets of The New York Times, using unsupervised machine learning...

We study and measure uncertainty in the minutes of the meetings of the board of governors of the Central Bank of Mexico and relate it to monetary policy variables. In particular, we construct two uncertainty indices for the Spanish version of the minutes using unsupervised machine learning...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the cyclical behavior of various credit impairment accounting regimes, namely IAS 39, IFRS 9 and US GAAP. We model the impact of credit impairments on the Prot and Loss (P&L) account under all three regimes. Our results suggest that although IFRS 9 is less...

This paper estimates the impact of pension-related policies on household spending. The identification strategy exploits the deviation in pensioner income and expenditure caused by the introduction of a new pension system during the 1980s and 1990s in Spain and constructs a new narrative series...

This paper estimates the aggregate effect of government income transfer shocks for a sample of EU countries. The new measure of transfer shocks builds on a dataset by public finance experts of the European System of Central Banks (ESCB). The identification strategy consists of a narrative...

This paper estimates the dynamic aggregate effect of exogenous shocks to two key components of public expenditure in the United States: government income transfers and government spending. The identification strategy positions the structural shocks to public expenditures in an SVAR framework...

Whether cross-border financial market integration has raised global insurance, is still a controversial issue in the literature. If this is so, what should we observe in the data? The insurance literature emphasizes that efficient risk-sharing requires financial markets to channel resources to...

Reversals in capital inflows can have severe economic consequences. This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to analyze the effect on interest rates, asset prices, investment, consumption, output, the exchange rate and the current account of a shift in portfolio preferences of...