Research about narratives’ role in economics is scarce, while real word experience and research in other sciences suggest they matter a lot. This article proposes a view and methodology for quantifying the epidemiology of media narratives relevant to business cycles in the US, Japan, and...

We estimate Okun's law, the negative relationship between output and the unemployment rate, at the sector level for the US, the UK, Japan, and Switzerland to test several hypotheses that may explain why the aggregate Okun's coeffcients are different across countries. Specifically, we show that...

We investigate the sources of the great changes in GDP volatility observed from 1966 to 2000. We develop a general equilibrium model and calibrate it to US data in order to characterize the contribution of micro level productivity shocks, inter-sectoral linkages and households' behavior to...

We add to the literature on the influence of the global financial cycle (GFC) and gyrations in capital flows. First, we build a new measure of the GFC based on a structural factor approach, which incorporates theoretical priors in its definition. This measure can also be decomposed in a...

For emerging economies, borrowing abroad is a double-edged sword: it can buffer against adverse economic shocks and smooth their domestic consumption; however, it can also amplify volatility in consumption, depending on the currency in which the debt is denominated and cyclicality in the...

We analyze how investor expectations about economic growth and stock returns changed during the February-March 2020 stock market crash induced by the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as during the subsequent partial stock market recovery. We surveyed retail investors who are clients of Vanguard at...