What are the drivers of business cycle fluctuations? And how many are there? By documenting strong and predictable co-movement of real variables during the business cycle in a sample of advanced economies, we argue that most business cycle fluctuations are driven by one major factor. The...

What are the drivers of business cycle fluctuations? And how many are there? By documenting strong and predictable co-movement of real variables during the business cycle in a sample of advanced economies, we argue that most business cycle fluctuations a re d riven b y o ne major factor. The...

It has been argued that existing DSGE models cannot properly account for the evolution of key macroeconomic variables during and following the recent Great Recession, and that models in which inflation depends on economic slack cannot explain the recent muted behavior of inflation, given the...

We find that, when estimated, a two sector computable dynamic stochastic general equilibrium open economy model of the U.S. that formally admits energy into the production process can generate plausible parameter values that can be applied to deal with a broad range of economic issues. As a...

It has been argued that existing DSGE models cannot properly account for the evolution of key macroeconomic variables during and following the recent Great Recession, and that models in which inflation depends on economic slack cannot explain the recent muted behavior of inflation, given the...

Standard economic intuition suggests that asset prices are more sensitive to news than other economic aggregates. This has led many researchers to conclude that asset price data would be very useful for the estimation of business cycle models containing news shocks. This paper shows how to...

This paper studies how non-rational risk shocks affect the macroeconomy. Exploiting survey data on expectations of financial executives, belief distortions on financial markets identify a non-rational risk shock. Surprises in beliefs in credit spreads measure belief distortions, and are used as...

This paper identifies a precautionary banking liquidity shock via a set of sign, zero and forecast variance restrictions imposed. The shock proxies the reluctance of the banking sector to "lend" to the real economy induced by an exogenous change in financial intermediaries' preference for "high"...