With the financialization of the economy, increasing reliance has been put on statistical models for derivatives pricing and for risk assessment in the day-to-day business of financial operators as well as in financial regulation. This practice had already been criticized from many quarters and...

This article explores the macroeconomic role that risk plays using the BAA-AAA spread as the measure of risk. First, it shows that meaningful upward movements in this spread are associated with recessions and their severity. Second, it includes the BAA-AAA spread in a structural...

This paper examines the data of Survey of Professional Forecasters to analyze the dynamics among forecast dispersion and uncertainty in different horizons. We attempt to decipher macroeconomic uncertainty in a 3-dimensional framework as time, degree, good and bad. We find that ex ante short term...

We propose a multicountry quantile factor augmeneted vector autoregression (QFAVAR) to model heterogeneities both across countries and across characteristics of the distributions of macroeconomic time series. The presence of quantile factors allows for summarizing these two heterogeneities in a...

This paper presents a method to capture the growth of financial fragility within a country and across countries. This is done by focusing on housing finance in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Following the theoretical framework developed by Hyman P. Minsky, the paper focuses...

We build a New Keynesian business-cycle model with rich household heterogeneity. A central feature is that matching frictions render labor-market risk countercyclical and endogenous to monetary policy. Our main result is that a majority of households prefer substantial stabilization of...

This paper presents a method to capture the growth of financial fragility within a country and across countries. This is done by focusing on housing finance in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. Following the theoretical framework developed by Hyman P. Minsky, the paper focuses...

The present paper presents a discussion of the forces at play behind the economic fluctuations in the medium run and their relation with the short-run macroeconomic equilibrium. The business cycle is the result of two separate phenomena. On the one hand there is the instability, which is caused...

This paper shows how uninsurable unemployment risk is crucial to qualitatively and quantitatively match macro responses to uncertainty shocks. Empirically, uncertainty shocks i) generate deflationary pressure; ii) have considerably negative consequences on economic activity; iii) produce a drop...

A market characterized as differentiated oligopoly has the following characteristics: firms experience information asymmetry with respect to other firms, utilize intangible investments to attract customers and obtain transient advantages against rival firms, take risks when dealing with their...