We estimate the short-run effects of severe weather shocks on local economic activity and assess cross-border spillovers operating through economic linkages between U.S. states. We measure weather shocks using a detailed county-level database on emergency declarations triggered by natural...

In the analysis of public and external debt sustainability the National Bank of the Republic of Macedonia is actively using the IMF's Debt Sustainability Analysis (DSA) framework. The aim of our analysis is to improve the analytical power of the IMF's DSA framework, in the case of Macedonia....

Having efficient and accurate samplers for simulating the posterior distribution is crucial for Bayesian analysis. We develop a generic posterior simulator called the "dynamic striated Metropolis-Hastings (DSMH)" sampler. Grounded in the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, it draws its strengths from...

Building on Beaudry, Nam and Wang (2011) - hereafter BNW -, we use survey data on consumer sentiment in order to identify the causal effects of confidence shocks on real economic activity in a selection of advanced economies. Starting from a set of closed-economy VAR models, we show that these...

No, not really. Responding to lingering concerns about the reliability of SVARs, Christiano et al (NBER Macro Annual, 2006, "CEV") propose to combine OLS estimates of a VAR with a spectral estimate of long-run variance. In principle, this could help alleviate specification problems of SVARs in...

This paper puts forward a global macro model comprising 43 countries and covering the period from Q1 1995 to Q4 2011. Our regional focus is on countries in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe (CESEE) and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Applying a global VAR (GVAR) model, we...

Existing studies generally reject purchasing power parity (PPP) on datasets from countries that have been affected by large real shocks, including Norway. However, we offer strong evidence of PPP between Norway and its trading partners during the post-Bretton Woods period, in which the Norwegian...

This document summarizes the thrust of my monograph book Disasters and the Networked Economy (2003, NY: Routledge. 228 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-66629-9). It is no substitution for the book, but it attempts to make salient the main concepts, explanations and conclusions of it. It does so by first...

We investigate empirically the inflation dynamics in New Zealand, a small open economy and a pioneer in inflation targeting, under various open-economy Phillips curve specifications. Our forecasting exercise suggests that open-economy Phillips curves under standard measures of global slack do...

In this paper we develop an early warning system of currency crises based on the Markov switching methodology. Constructed data on speculative pressure from six Asian countries indicate that currency crises are mainly captured through volatility effects. Based on an extensive survey, we test...