Are structural models getting closer to being able to forecast exchange rates at short horizons? Here we argue that misinterpretation of some new out-of-sample tests for nested models, over-reliance on asymptotic test statistics, and failure to sufficiently check robustness to alternative time...

Central banks' projections-i.e. forecasts conditional on a given interest rate path-are often criticized on the grounds that their underlying policy assumptions are inconsistent with the existence of a unique equilibrium in many forward-looking models. Here I describe three alternative...

Research finds strong links between credit booms and macroeconomic outcomes like financial crises and output growth. Are impacts also seen in financial asset prices? We document this robust and significant connection for the first time using a large sample of historical data for many countries....

What is the impact of time-varying business uncertainty on economic activity? Using partly confidential business survey data from the U.S. and Germany in structural VARs, we find that positive innovations to business uncertainty lead to prolonged declines in economic activity. In contrast, their...

Aging populations in advanced economies are placing ever-increasing demands on government spending in the form of old-age benefits. Economies that have promised substantially more benefits than they have made provision to finance are heading into a prolonged era of fiscal stress. Unresolved...

Monetary policy decisions tend to be based on systematic analysis of alternative policy choices and their associated macroeconomic impacts: this is science. Fiscal policy choices, in contrast, spring from unsystematic speculation, grounded more in politics than economics: this is alchemy. In...

We use a rational expectations framework to assess the implications of rising debt in an environment with a "fiscal limit." The fiscal limit is defined as the point where the government no longer has the ability to finance higher debt levels by increasing taxes, so either an adjustment to fiscal...

The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Credit Crisis of the 2000s had similar causes but elicited strikingly different policy responses. It may still be too early to assess the effectiveness of current policy responses, but it is possible to analyze monetary and fiscal policies in the...

Over the last two decades, communication has become an increasingly important aspect of monetary policy. These real-world developments have spawned a huge new scholarly literature on central bank communication -- mostly empirical, and almost all of it written in this decade. We survey this...

This paper assesses the effects of central bank governor appointments on financial market expectations of monetary policy. To measure these effects, we assemble a new dataset of appointment announcements from 15 countries, and conduct an event study analysis on exchange rates, bond yields, and...