We explore the long-term impact of economic booms on labor market outcomes using a novel approach based on revisions to professional forecasts over the past 30 years for 34 advanced economies. We find that when employment rises unexpectedly, forecasters typically raise their long-term forecasts...

We construct sentiment indices for 20 countries from 1980 to 2019. Relying on computational text analysis, we capture specific language like 'fear', 'risk', 'hedging', 'opinion', and, 'crisis', as well as 'positive' and 'negative' sentiments, in news articles from the Financial Times. We assess...

Macroeconomic costs of conflict are generally very large, with GDP per capita about 28 percent lower ten years after conflict onset. This is overwhelmingly driven by private consumption, which falls by 25 percent ten years after conflict onset. Conflict is also associated with dramatic declines...

Recent micro level data from East Africa is used to benchmark aggregate data and assess the role of agricultural inputs in explaining variation in crop yields on smallholding plots. Fertilizer, improved seeds, protection against erosion and pesticides improve crop yields in Rwanda and Ethiopia,...

We test whether foreign demand matters for local house prices in the US using an identification strategy based on the existence of 'home bias abroad' in international real estate markets. Following an extreme political crisis event abroad, a proxy for a strong and exogenous shift in foreign...

Uncertainty over economic policy plays a key role in economic outcomes. But evidence and quantification for emerging markets are elusive because of measurement and reverse causality issues. In this paper, we construct a news-based economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index for Turkey and assess how...

This paper identifies leading indicators of fiscal crises based on a large sample of countries at different stages of development over 1970-2015. Our results are robust to different methodologies and sample periods. Previous literature on early warning sistems (EWS) for fiscal crises is scarce...

While China's growth gathered momentum in 2017, rebalancing was uneven anddecelerated along many dimensions reflecting the temporary factors behind the growthpickup. Going forward, rebalancing is expected to proceed as these temporary factorsrecede, but elevated income inequality and leverage...

Early warning systems (EWS) are widely used for assessing countries' vulnerability to fiscal distress. Most EWS employ a specific set of only fiscal leading indicators predetermined by the researchers, which casts doubt on their robustness. We revisit this issue by using the Extreme Bound...

Existing economic indicators and indexes assess economic activity but no single indicator measures the general macro-economic performance of a nation, state, or region in a methodologically simple and intuitive way. This paper proposes a simple, yet informative metric called the Economic...