A common practice in empirical macroeconomics is to examine alternative recursive orderings of the variables in structural vector autogressive (VAR) models. When the implied impulse responses look similar, the estimates are considered trustworthy. When they do not, the estimates are used to...

A common practice in empirical macroeconomics is to examine alternative recursive orderings of the variables in structural vector autogressive (VAR) models. When the implied impulse responses look similar, the estimates are considered trustworthy. When they do not, the estimates are used to...

We propose a decomposition to distinguish between Knightian uncertainty (ambiguity) and risk, where the first measures the uncertainty about the probability distribution generating the data, while the second measures uncertainty about the odds of the outcomes when the probability distribution is...

We use a factor model with stochastic volatility to decompose the time-varying variance of Macro economic and Financial variables into contributions from country-specific uncertainty and uncertainty common to all countries. We find that the common component plays an important role in driving the...

We jointly explain the variations of the equity and value premium in a model with both short-run (SRR) and long-run (LRR) consumption risk. In our preliminary empirical analysis, we find that SRR varies with the business cycle and it has a substantial predictive power for market excess returns...

We extract a global factor from cross-country output growth since 1960. We find that the fluctuations of the global factor are typically small, with the annualized unconditional volatility estimated at 0.06%, but highly persistent, with estimated persistence at 0.98. Evidence of time variation...

Structural vector autoregressive analysis aims to trace the contemporaneous linkages among (macroeconomic) variables back to underlying orthogonal structural shocks. In homoskedastic Gaussian models the identification of these linkages deserves external and typically notdata-based information....

We show that a business-cycle component of consumption growth (dubbed business-cycle consumption) with cycles between 2 and 4 years is effective in explaining the differences in risk premia across alternative test assets, including recently-proposed anomaly portfolios. We formalize the mapping...

This paper uses a nonlinear vector autoregression and a non-recursive identification strategy to show that an equal-sized uncertainty shock generates a larger contraction in real activity when growth is low (as in recessions) than when growth is high (as in expansions). An estimated New...

We investigate the link between macroeconomic uncertainty and business cycle asymmetry of the U.S. economy. To this end, we propose an unobserved component model in which the shocks are asymmetrically distributed, and the degree of asymmetry varies with macroeconomic uncertainty. An efficient...