Emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) have experienced an extraordinary decline in inflation since the early 1970s. After peaking in 1974 at 17.3 percent, inflation in these economies declined to 3.5 percent in 2017. Despite a checkered history of managing inflation among many EMDEs,...

We build a directed technical change model of the British Industrial Revolution where one intermediate goods sector uses a fixed renewable energy (“wood”) quantity, and another uses coal at a fixed price. With a high enough elasticity of substitution between the two goods in producing final...

Theory, historiography and empirical evidence suggest that agriculture is the key to economic development. This paper examines the extent to which productivity advances in British agriculture in the period 1620-1850 were driven by technological progress. Measuring technology by patents and new...

In the context of recent developments with cryptocurrencies, as well as the potential rise of central bank digital currencies, we present a new visualisation of money. Using three novel figures, we distinguish between the relevant mechanisms, technologies, recordkeeping, and transactions of...

We analyze if the transmission of oil price shocks on the U.S. economy has changed with the shale oil boom. To do so, we put forward a framework that allows for spillovers between industries and learning by doing (LBD) over time. We identify these spillovers using a time-varying parameter...

We analyze the role of oil price volatility in reducing U.S. macroeconomic instability. Using a Markov Switching Rational Expectation New-Keynesian model we revisit the timing of the Great Moderation and the sources of changes in the volatility of macroeconomic variables. We find that smaller or...

In recognition of the severe consequences of the recent international financial crisis, the topic of macroprudential policy has elicited considerable research effort. The present study constructs, for 46 economies around the globe, an index of the capacity to deploy macroprudential policies....

In U.S. data, inflation and output are negatively related in the long run. A Bayesian VAR with stochastic trends generalized to be piecewise linear provides robust reduced-form evidence in favor of a threshold level of trend inflation of around 4%, below which potential output is independent of...

We analyze the distributional consequences of uncertainty shocks in the U.S. economy at a business cycle frequency. Our findings reveal that uncertainty shocks have heterogeneous effects across income and wealth distribution. While their impact on income inequality appears marginal when measured...

Consumers hold inventory for future uses. This study investigates how such intertemporal decisions influence the cost-of-living index (COLI). To this end, I construct a simple dynamic model, in which goods are storable and nonresalable, and prices take either high (regular price) or low values...