We develop a tractable framework to study the optimal design of stress scenarios. A principal wants to manage the unknown risk exposures of a set of agents. She asks the agents to report their losses under hypothetical scenarios before mandating actions to mitigate the exposures. We show how to...

Misinformation pervades political competition. We introduce opportunities for political candidates and their media supporters to spread fake news about the policy environment and perhaps about parties' positions into a familiar model of electoral competition. In the baseline model with full...

The U.S. economy currently faces a truly extraordinary degree of uncertainty as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. In these circumstances, the Federal Reserve could begin highlighting alternative scenarios to illustrate key risks to the economic outlook, and such scenarios could inform the...

We provide a first evaluation of the quality of banking stress tests in the European Union. We use stress tests scenarios and banks' estimated losses to recover bank level exposures to macroeconomic factors. Once macro outcomes are realized, we predict banks' losses and compare them to actual...

Shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs) are perhaps the most influential economic policy analyses today. My paper evaluates their development, natural associations, logical consequences, and economic identification. All five SSP baseline scenarios are predicting scenarios that historical...

We analyze how output and wages behave under different scenarios for technological progress that may culminate in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined as the ability of AI systems to perform all tasks that humans can perform. We assume that human work can be decomposed into atomistic...

The substantial fluctuations in oil prices in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have highlighted the importance of tail events in the global market for crude oil which call for careful risk assessment. In this paper we focus on forecasting tail risks in the...

Nitrogen (N) fertilizer use in agricultural production is a significant determinant of surface water quality. As climate changes, agricultural producers are likely to adapt at extensive and intensive margins in terms of land and per acre input use, including fertilizers. These changes can affect...

"This paper studies the cycles of nationalization and privatization in resource-rich economies. We discuss available evidence on the drivers and consequences of privatization and nationalization, review the existing literature, and present illustrative case studies. Our main contribution is then...

"While substantial research finds that financial development boosts overall economic growth, we study whether financial development disproportionately raises the incomes of the poor and alleviates poverty. Using a broad cross-country sample, we distinguish among competing theoretical predictions...