I study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on business confidence in 11 Euro area countries and its consequent impact on economic activity. To obtain causal effects, I instrument business confidence with domestic household confidence as well as average household confidence in neighboring...

We document a remarkable increase in economic belief polarization - disagreement - regarding the future state of the economy across Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. We find evidence suggesting that belief polarization may have impeded the implementation of pandemic response measures such as...

Barsky and Sims (2012, AER) demonstrated, via indirect inference, that confidence innovations can be viewed as noisy signals about medium-term economic growth. They highlighted that the connection between confidence and subsequent activity, such as consumption and output, is primarily driven by...

This paper demonstrates how the observed correlation between probability of default and loss given default depends on the fact that defaults in which collateral provides 100% recovery are not observed. Creditors see only the defaults of mortgagors who suffer from a fall in collateral value to...

This paper presents Aino 2.0 – the dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model currently used at the Bank of Finland for forecasting and policy analysis. The paper provides a detailed theoretical description of the model, its estimation and how it can be used to interpret the evolution...

We study the ability of sectoral shocks to generate aggregate fluctuations in a multi-sector general equilibrium model featuring sectoral heterogeneity in price stickiness, sector size, and input-output linkages. We show fat-tailed distributions of sectoral size or network centrality are neither...

Prevailing explanations of the decline in real interest rates since the early 1980s are premised on the notion that real interest rates are driven by variations in desired saving and investment. But based on data stretching back to 1870 for 19 countries, our systematic analysis casts doubt on...

We study the behavior of key macroeconomic variables in the time and frequency domain. For this purpose, we decompose U.S. time series into various frequency components. This allows us to identify a set of stylized facts: GDP growth is largely a high-frequency phenomenon whereby inflation and...

Forecast errors for inflation decline monotonically with both verbal and quantitative IQ in a large and representative male population. Within individuals, inflation expectations and perceptions are autocorrelated only for men above the median by IQ (high-IQ men). High-IQ men's forecast...

We employ a parsimonious nonlinear Interacted-VAR to examine whether the real effects of uncertainty shocks are greater when the economy is at the Zero Lower Bound. We find the contractionary effects of uncertainty shocks to be statistically larger when the ZLB is binding, with differences that...