For the past few decades, international macroeconomics has postulated the "trilemma": with free capital mobility, independent monetary policies are feasible if and only if exchange rates are floating. The global financial cycle transforms the trilemma into a "dilemma" or an "irreconcilable duo":...

This paper extends the procedure developed by Jurado et al. (2015) to allow the estimation of measures of uncertainty that can be attributed to specific structural shocks. This enables researchers to investigate the "origin" of a change in overall macroeconomic uncertainty. To demonstrate the...

This paper identifies two types of policy uncertainty measures-government spending and real interest rates-and their impact on macroeconomic activity in 54 advanced, emerging, and developing economies. Policy uncertainty is defined as the inability to predict policy moves, that is, the...

The paper uses a partial equilibrium model to simulate times series on inputs utilization rates--capital utilization and labor effort--for 10 OECD countries. The resulting series are filtered from standard measures of the Solow residual. The main findings are as follows: once variable inputs...

This paper revisits the relation between growth and volatility in disaggregated data. Across countries, the link is confirmed to be significantly negative, but the paper shows that across sectors, the relation becomes positive. This reversal has a natural interpretation. The macroeconomic...