We use payroll data on over 1 million workers at 80,000 small firms to construct county-month measures of employment, hours, and wages that correct for dynamic changes in sample composition in response to business cycle fluctuations. We use this to estimate the response of small firms'...

This paper updates the Reported Social Unrest Index of Barrett et al (2020), reviewing recent developments in social unrest worldwide since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic. It shows that unrest was elevated during late 2019, coincident with widespread protests in Latin America. Unrest then...

Prior research attributes negative stock market performance following episodes of social unrest to elevated uncertainty. However, social unrest does not solely increase uncertainty, but separately acts to decrease investor sentiment. To determine which effect dominates, we study initial public...

We propose a method to identify the anticipated components of macroeconomic shocks in a structural VAR. We include empirical forecasts about each time series in the VAR. This introduces enough linear restrictions to identify each structural shock and to further decompose each one into "news" and...

This paper is the second update of the Reported Social Unrest Index (Barrett et al. 2022), outlining developments in global social unrest since March 2022. It shows that the fraction of countries experiencing major social unrest events has been stable. Reasons for social unrest can be broadly...

The consensus among central bankers is that higher inflation expectations can drive up inflation today, requiring tighter policy. We assess this by devising a novel method for identifying shocks to inflation expectations, estimating a semi-structural VAR where an expectation shock is identified...

Activity and inflation responded slowly to the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes in 2022. Was this because the transmission of monetary policy had changed? Or did other shocks offset tighter policy? We use pre-pandemic data to estimate a VAR with monetary policy shocks identified from...

Rollover risk imposes market discipline on banks’ risk-taking behavior but it can be socially costly. I present a two-sided model in which a bank simultaneously lends to a firm and borrows from the short-term funding market. When the bank is capital constrained, uncertainty in asset...

We propose a tax-adjusted q model with physical and intangible assets and estimate it with a self-collected comprehensive database of intangible assets. The presence of intangibles changes the accounting and economic measures of q. We show that when tax changes are temporary, the q model can be...

I study whether firms' reliance on intangible assets is an important determinant of financing constraints. I construct new measures of firm-level physical and intangible assets using accounting information on U.S. public firms. I find that firms with a higher share of intangible assets in total...