While conditional forecasting has become prevalent both in the academic literature and in practice (e.g., bank stress testing, scenario forecasting), its applications typically focus on continuous variables. In this paper, we merge elements from the literature on the construction and...

We find that deep contractions have highly persistent scarring effects, depressing the level of GDP at least a decade hence. Drawing on a panel of 24 advanced and emerging economies from 1970 to the present, we show that these effects are nonlinear and asymmetric: there is no such persistence...

We compare business cycle fluctuations in Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries vis-a-vis the rest of the world. Our main results are as follows: (i) African economies stand out by their macroeconomic volatility, which is is reflected in the volatility of output and other macro variables; (ii)...