The unprecedented 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States caused massive casualties and damage, and ushered in an era of greater uncertainty. While a prompt and vigorous policy response helped limit the immediate economic impact of the aggression, the heightened terrorist threat...

The relationship between oil price shocks and U.S. macroeconomic fluctuations advocated by Hamilton (1983) broke down in the 1980s amidst a new regime of highly volatile oil price movements. Several authors have argued that asymmetric and nonlinear transformations of oil prices restore that...

We argue that political distribution risk is an important driver of aggregate fluctuations. To that end, we document significant changes in the capital share after large political events, such as political realignments, modifications in collective bargaining rules, or the end of dictatorships,...

We argue that political distribution risk is an important driver of aggregate fluctuations. To that end, we document significant changes in the capital share after large political events, such as political realignments, modifications in collective bargaining rules, or the end of...

Recent international experience with the effective lower bound on nominal interest rates has rekindled interest in the benefits of inflation targets above 2 per cent. We evaluate whether an increase in the inflation target to 3 or 4 per cent could improve macroeconomic stability in the Canadian...

With fiscal adjustment proceeding quickly in Bulgaria and given the weak economic growth environment, there is keen interest in making the budget composition more growth friendly. This paper quantifies the short-term impact of fiscal policy on economic activity in Bulgaria using econometric and...

This paper explores if economic uncertainty alters the macroeconomic influence of monetary policy. We consider several measures of U.S. economic uncertainty, and estimate their interaction effects with monetary policy shocks as identified through structural vector autoregressions. We find that...

This paper constructs a DSGE model for an economy with commodity exports. We estimate the model on Russian data, making a special focus on quantitative effects of commodity price dynamics. There is a widespread belief that economic activity in Russia crucially depends on oil prices, but...

This paper develops a macroeconomic model of real-financial market interactions in which the credit and the business cycles reinforce each other according to a bidirectional causal relationship. We do so in the context of a computational agent-based framework, where the channelling of funds from...

The world economy is currently going through a serious financial upheaval that sparked off in the United States and has spread to Europe and the rest of the world, including Egypt. The severity of the crisis and ongoing uncertainties demonstrate the need for urgent action to restore worldwide...