A recent study of 36 sub-Saharan African countries found a positive impact of aid in the absolute majority of these countries. However, for Tanzania and Ghana, two major aid recipients, aid did not seem to have been equally beneficial. This paper singles out these two countries for a more...

This paper investigates how the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) - a survey measure of U.S. households' expectations about current and future economic conditions - responds to structural oil supply and demand shocks. We find that the response to an observed increase in...

We investigate how oil supply shocks are transmitted to U.S. economic activity, consumer prices, and interest rates. Using a structural VAR approach with a combination of sign and zero restrictions, we distinguish between supply and demand channels in the transmission of exogenous changes in...

This paper investigates private net saving in the US economy - divided into its principal components, households and (nonfinancial) corporate financial balances - and its impact on the GDP cycle from the 1980s to the present. Furthermore, we investigate whether the financial markets (stock...

This paper investigates private net saving in the US economy - divided into its principal components, households and (nonfinancial) corporate financial balances - and its impact on the GDP cycle from the 1980s to the present. Furthermore, we investigate whether the financial markets (stock...

We study the time-varying impact of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) on the US Economy by using a VAR with time-varying coefficients. The coefficients are allowed to evolve gradually over time which allows us to discover structural changes without imposing them a priori. We find three different...

This paper examines the transmission channels through which property markets propagate shocks to the real economy. Using a four-equation model which portrays the theoretical inter-linkages between real estate value and other components of the economy, our findings suggest that in the short run,...

This paper uses the dynamic Laurent demand system to jointly estimate the service flows from durable and nondurable goods. The parameter estimates are used to obtain the Morishima elasticity of substitution between goods for the United States from 1960:1 to 1991:4. One of the significant results...

We estimate the dynamic effects of aggregate US housing market shocks on state-level retail sales and home prices from 1976 to 2008. We use a common factor VAR model to account for the dynamics of the state-level variables, and identify housing demand and supply shocks using a signs-restriction...