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 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...

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...

Public investment in advanced economies is at historical lows, and shows a declining trend since at least the 1980s. Two main hypotheses have been posed to rationalize this fact. On the one hand, the “social dominance hypothesis” claims that this is related to structural factors, given the...

In this paper we aim at empirically testing cross-country impacts of commodity price shocks to aggregate TFP growth for a sample of emerging economies. Under a growth accounting framework, we estimate country-specific TFP growth (1992-2014) and select the attendant robust determinants by means...

We have examined the fiscal consolidation episodes in a group of OECD countries from 2009 to 2014. The range of the estimated short-term fiscal multiplier runs from 1.2% to 2% of GDP, larger than those obtained in more “normal times”, implying that the contractionary effect has been greater...

Their strong macroeconomic position when the financial crisis erupted allowed Latin American economies to mitigate its impact through fiscal expansions, reversing the characteristic procyclical behaviour of fiscal policy. At the same time, in the last two decades fiscal rules have been...

Sovereign spreads within the European Monetary Union (EMU) arise because markets price-in heterogeneous country fundamentals, but also re-denomination risks, given the incomplete nature of EMU. This creates a permanent risk of financial fragmentation within the area. In this paper we claim that...

The use of central bank liquidity lines has gained momentum since the global financial crisis in order to provide liquidity in foreign exchange markets, while at the same time preventing threats to financial stability and negative spillbacks. US dollar swap lines are well studied, but much less...