We study the dynamic impact of Covid-19, economic mobility, and containment policy shocks. We use Bayesian panel structural vector autoregressions with daily data for 44 countries, identified through sign and zero restrictions. Incidence and mobility shocks raise cases and deaths significantly...

This paper provides new evidence on the effects of government spending shocks and the fiscal transmission mechanism in the euro area for the period 1980-2008. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we investigate changes in the macroeconomic impact of government spending shocks using time-varying...

We develop a new targeted maximum likelihood estimation method that provides improved forecasting for misspecified linear autoregressive models. The method weighs data points in the observed sample and is useful in the presence of data generating processes featuring structural breaks, complex...

This paper develops a discrete-time epidemiological model for the spread of crises across sectors in the United States for the period 1952-2015. It is the first to use an epidemiological approach with macroeconomic (Flow of Funds) data. An extension of the usual one-period Markov model to a...

A linear structure is a family of matrices that satisfy a given set of linear restrictions, such as symmetry or diagonality. We add to the literature on linear structures by studying the family of matrices where all diagonal elements are zero, and discuss two econometric examples where these...

Macroeconomic disasters (wars, pandemics, depressions) are characterized by drastic shifts and increased volatility of the aggregate consumption to income ratio. By standard intertemporal budget constraint logic, this ratio is linked to expectations of future income and consumption growth rates....

Recessions and expansions are often caused or reinforced by developments in private consumption - the largest component of aggregate demand - which, as a result, varies over the business cycle. As such, an accurate measurement of the cyclical component of consumption and an understanding of its...

This paper shows that the parsimoniously time-varying methodology of Callot and Kristensen (2015) can be applied to factor models. We apply this method to study macroeconomic instability in the US from 1959:1 to 2006:4 with a particular focus on the Great Moderation. Models with parsimoniously...

In this paper we investigate whether the dynamic properties of the U.S. business cycle have changed in the last fifty years. For this purpose we develop a flexible business cycle indicator that is constructed from a moderate set of macroeconomic time series. The coincident economic indicator is...