The UK has experienced a dramatic increase in earnings and income inequality over the past four decades. We use detailed micro level information to construct historical measures of inequality from 1968 to 2008. We study whether monetary policy shocks played a significant role in explaining this...

Monetary policy moves the yield curve. How much is due to expected interest rates vs. term premia? And does it matter for macroeconomic outcomes? Using an affine term structure model, we shed new light on these questions. Estimation is subject to restrictions addressing an estimation bias in...

We report robust evidence of adverse cross-border externalities from terrorism on trade for over 160 countries from 1976 to 2014. Terrorism in one country spills over to reduce trade in neighboring nations. These externalities arise from higher trade costs due to trade delays and macroeconomic...

This paper extends the procedure developed by Jurado et al. (2015) to allow the estimation of measures of uncertainty that can be attributed to specific structural shocks. This enables researchers to investigate the "origin" of a change in overall macroeconomic uncertainty. To demonstrate the...

We use a simple New Keynesian model, with firm specific capital, non-zero steady-state inflation, long-run risks and Epstein-Zin preferences to study the volatility implications of a monetary policy shock. An unexpected increases in the policy rate by 150 basis points causes output and inflation...

We examine the interaction between foreign aid and binding borrowing constraint for a recipient country. We also analyze how these two instruments affect economic growth via non-linear relationships. First of all, we develop a two-country, two-period trade-theoretic model to develop testable...

The role of climate change on economic performance and output has been studied extensively in the empirical literature, however, its distributional effects have received little attention. This paper attempts to fill this gap by investigating whether climate shocks affect income inequality in a...

We study the impact of climate volatility on economic growth exploiting data on 133 countries between 1960 and 2005. We show that the conditional (ex ante) volatility of annual temperatures increased steadily over time, rendering climate conditions less predictable across countries, with...

In this paper we extend the Bayesian Proxy VAR to incorporate time variation in the parameters. A Gibbs sampling algorithm is provided to approximate the posterior distributions of the model's parameters. Using the proposed algorithm, we estimate the time-varying effects of taxation shocks in...

We propose an extended time-varying parameter Vector Autoregression that allows for an evolving relationship between the variances of the shocks. Using this model, we show that the relationship between the conditional variance of GDP growth and the long-term interest rate has become weaker over...