The global financial crisis (2008-09) led to a sharp contraction in both Euro Area (EA) and US real activity, and was followed by a long-lasting slump. However, the post-crisis adjustment in the EA and the US shows striking differences - in particular, the EA slump has been markedly more...

This paper investigates the relationship between firms' inflation expectations and their holdings of liquid assets. We implement a new quantitative survey of firms' expectations about inflation in New Zealand. We find that firms that hold more shares of liquid assets systematically report lower...

In this paper we present an evaluation of forecasts of a vector of variables of the German economy made by different institutions. Our method permits one to evaluate the forecasts for each year and then if one is interested to combine the years. We use our method to determine an overall winner...

A large literature suggests that the expected equity risk premium is countercyclical. Using a variety of different measures for this risk premium, we document that it also exhibits growth asymmetry, i.e. the risk premium rises sharply in recessions and declines much more gradually during the...

Regulatory policy can create economic and social benefits, but poorly designed or excessive regulation may generate substantial adverse effects on the economy. In this paper, we present measures of sentiment and uncertainty about regulation in the U.S. over time and examine their relationships...

In 2019, President Trump called on the U.S. Federal Reserve to cut interest rates to depreciate the U.S. dollar, which, according to the IMF, is overvalued by between 6 and 12 percent. This paper uses an intertemporal general equilibrium model to explore what would likely happen if the...

Productivity growth has flat-lined in most economies despite rapid advances in technology. Economists suggest competing explanations for this paradox. Some argue the current stagnation will persist given deep structural challenges, arguing that recent technological advances are no match for...

This paper arms central bank policy makers with ways to think about interactions between financial stability and monetary policy. We frame the issue of whether to integrate financial stability into monetary policy operating rules by appealing to the observation that in actual economies financial...

The COVID-19-triggered collapse in oil prices in March and April 2020 was the seventh, and by far the most severe, in a series of such collapses since 1970. This paper, first, compares this most recent collapse and its drivers with previous ones in an event study. It finds that it was associated...

We study the effects of financial uncertainty on investment dynamics in the U.S. using a vector autoregression with drifting parameters and stochastic volatilities. We find time-varying negative effects of financial uncertainty shocks on investment. These effects have declined in the post-WWII...