We document that most democratic transitions are preceded by lengthy episodes of mass political unrest. These episodes are associated with an increased probability of political disruption and significant macroeconomic losses, especially in non-democracies and even in the absence of violence....

In the context of a quantitative real business cycle (RBC) model, we document that shocks to the higher-order moments, especially the skewness, of productivity can have large first-order effects on business cycles. We augment a standard small open economy RBC model with a new feature: a discrete...

This paper uses uses a novel type of panel vector autoregression to establish that the well-known association between linkages and business cycle comovement has both intratemporal and intertemporal dimensions. When two countries are more closely linked (i.e., they trade more or hold more...

The assumption of rational expectations is potentially a serious source of misspecification in DSGE models. Many recent theories of expectations formation have relaxed rational expectations and improved the predictive properties of benchmark macroeconomic models. Problematically, the space of...

Standard international macroeconomic models overpredict capital flows into countries with relatively lower capital stocks and faster-growing TFP. Asymmetric invest- ment risk has been shown in similar models to be a significant driver of capital flows between otherwise symmetric countries. But...