This paper shows how changes in the volatility of the real interest rate at which small open emerging economies borrow have a quantitatively important effect on real variables like output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. To motivate our investigation, we document the strong evidence...

What are the shocks that drive economic fluctuations? I examine technology and money shocks in some detail, and briefly review the evidence on oil price and credit shocks. I conclude that none of these popular candidates accounts for the bulk of economic fluctuations. I then examine whether...

Traditional approaches to structural vector autoregressions can be viewed as special cases of Bayesian inference arising from very strong prior beliefs. These methods can be generalized with a less restrictive formulation that incorporates uncertainty about the identifying assumptions...

Identifying assumptions need to be imposed on dynamic models before they can be used to analyze the dynamic effects of economically interesting shocks. Often, the assumptions are only rich enough to identify a set of solutions. This paper considers two types of restrictions on the structural...

We explore empirically models of aggregate fluctuations with two basic ingredients: agents form anticipations about the future based on noisy sources of information; these anticipations affect spending and output in the short run. Our objective is to separate fluctuations due to actual changes...

More than fifty years ago, Friedman and Schwartz examined historical data for the United States and found evidence of pro-cyclical movements in the money stock, which led corresponding movements in output. We find similar correlations in more recent data; these appear most clearly when Divisia...

There seems to be a widespread belief among economists, policy-makers, and members of the media that the "confidence'" of households and businesses is a critical component in the transmission of fiscal policy shocks into economic activity. We take this proposition to the data using standard...

Using a sample of 20 emerging countries from 1880 to 1913, we study the determinants and output effects of sudden stops in capital inflows during an era of intensified globalization. We find that higher levels of original sin (hard currency debt to total debt) and large current account deficits...

This paper considers VAR models incorporating many time series that interact through a few dynamic factors. Several econometric issues are addressed including estimation of the number of dynamic factors and tests for the factor restrictions imposed on the VAR. Structural VAR identification based...