Early evidence on the pandemic’s effects pointed to women’s employment falling disproportionately, leading observers to call a “she-cession.” This paper documents the extent and persistence of this phenomenon in a quarterly sample of 38 advanced and emerging market economies. We show...

Motivated by the literature on the capital asset pricing model, we decompose the uncertaintyof a typical forecaster into common and idiosyncratic uncertainty. Using individual surveydata from the Consensus Forecasts over the period of 1989-2014, we develop monthlymeasures of macroeconomic...

We build a new dataset of listed and private nonfinancial zombie firms for a large set of Advanced Economies and Emerging Markets over the last two decades. We find that the share of these unproductive and unviable firms has been rising worldwide, especially since the GFC and the Covid-19...

We revisit the conventional view that output fluctuates around a stable trend by analyzing professional long-term forecasts for 38 advanced and emerging market economies. If transitory deviations around a trend dominate output fluctuations, then forecasters should not change their long-term...

Is over-optimism about a country's future growth perspective good for an economy, or doesover-optimism also come with costs? In this paper we provide evidence that recessions, fiscalproblems, as well as Balance of Payment-difficulties are more likely to arise in countrieswhere past growth...

We analyze a range of macrofinancial indicators to extract signals about cyclical systemic risk across 107 economies over 1995-2020. We construct composite indices of underlying liquidity, solvency and mispricing risks and analyze their patterns over the financial cycle. We find that liquidity...

This paper examines the impact of financial depth on macroeconomic volatility using a dynamic panel analysis for 110 advanced and developing countries. We find that financial depth plays a significant role in dampening the volatility of output, consumption, and investment growth, but only up to...

Both global and regional economic linkages have strengthened substantially over the past quarter century. We employ a dynamic factor model to analyze the implications of these linkages for the evolution of global and regional business cycles. Our model allows us to assess the roles played by the...

All types of recessions, on average, not just those associated with financial and political crises (as in Cerra and Saxena, AER 2008), lead to permanent output losses. These findings have far-reaching conceptual and policy implications. A new paradigm of the business cycle needs to account for...