This paper introduces macroeconomic forecasters as political agents and suggests that they use their forecasts to influence voting outcomes. We develop a probabilistic voting model in which voters do not have complete information about the future states of the economy and have to rely on...

This paper aims to evaluate if frictions in credit markets are important for business cycles in the U.S. and the Euro area. For this purpose, I modify the DSGE financial accelerator model developed by Bernanke, Gertler and Gilchrist (1999) by adding frictions such as price indexation to past...

Using a small empirical model of inflation, output, and money estimated on U.S. data, we compare the relative performance of monetary targeting and inflation targeting. The results show that monetary targeting would be quite inefficient, with both higher inflation and output variability. This is...

This paper addresses two important questions that have, so far, been studied separately in the literature. First, the paper aims at explaining the high volatility of long-term interest rates observed in the data, which is hard to replicate using standard macro models. Building a small-scale...

The substantial fluctuations in house prices recently experienced by many industrialized economies have stimulated a vivid debate on the possible implications for monetary policy. In this paper, we ask whether the U.S. Fed, the Bank of Japan and the Bank of England have reacted to house prices....

While knowing there is a financial distress "when you see it" might be true, it is not particularly helpful. Indeed, central banks have an interest in understanding more systematically how their communication affects the markets, not least in order to avoid unnecessary volatility; the markets...

We develop a novel high-dimensional non-Gaussian modeling framework to infer measures of conditional and joint default risk for many financial sector firms. The model is based on a dynamic Generalized Hyperbolic Skewed-t block-equicorrelation copula with time-varying volatility and dependence...

We propose an empirical framework to assess the likelihood of joint and conditional sovereign default from observed CDS prices. Our model is based on a dynamic skewed-t distribution that captures all salient features of the data, including skewed and heavytailed changes in the price of CDS...

The Eurozone fiscal crisis has created pressure for institutional harmonization, but skeptics argue that cultural predispositions can prevent convergence in behavior. Our paper derives a robust cultural classification of European countries and utilizes unique data on natives and immigrants to...

To what extent has input reallocation contributed to aggregate productivity growth in the banking sectors of Europe and the United States? Interestingly, under-performing banks capture market share, while more productive banks lose market share, in particular in the US. The pattern of...