What are the macroeconomic consequences of changing aggregate lending standards in residential mortgage markets, as measured by loan-to-value (LTV) ratios? In a structural VAR, GDP and business investment increase following an expansionary LTV shock. Residential investment, by contrast, falls, a...

We use SVAR models for 18 economies to estimate how much fiscal policy deviated from pre-pandemic norms during the Covid-19 pandemic. For most countries, fiscal policy was more expansive than the pre-pandemic norm predicts based on the state of the economy during the pandemic. The size of the...

We find that macroeconomic uncertainty plays a significant role in U.S. monetary policy. First, we construct a measure of uncertainty as felt by policymakers at the time of making their rate-setting decisions. This measure is derived from a real-time, Bayesian estimation of a small monetary VAR...