In the aftermath of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), scholars and policymakers turned their attention to the role of uncertainty in amplifying the effects of economic or financial shocks on economic activity. A growing literature has focused on addressing this question. Most works find...

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...

We propose a conditional model of asset returns in the presence of common factors and downside risk. Specifically, we generalize existing latent factor models in three ways: we show how to estimate the threshold which identifies the 'disappointment' event triggering the bad state of the world; we...

We implement a long-horizon static and dynamic portfolio allocation involving a risk-free and a risky asset. This model is calibrated at a quarterly frequency for ten European countries. We also use maximum-likelihood estimates and Bayesian estimates to account for parameter uncertainty. We find...

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...

We estimate a production‐based general equilibrium model featuring demand‐ and supply‐side uncertainty and an endogenous term premium. Using term structure and macroeconomic data, we find sizable effects of uncertainty on risk premia and business cycle fluctuations. Both demand‐ and...

Persistent variations in the log price-to-dividend ratio (PtDR) have triggered a lively discussion in the literature. This paper proposes a present value model incorporating this persistence through a time-varying steady state of the PtDR. Log-likelihood statistics confirm that the time-varying...

Recessions and expansions are often caused or reinforced by developments in private consumption - the largest component of aggregate demand - which, as a result, varies over the business cycle. As such, an accurate measurement of the cyclical component of consumption and an understanding of its...