Financial frictions are known to raise the volatility of economies to shocks (e.g. Bernanke and Gertler 1989). We follow this line of research to the labor literature concerned by the volatility of labor market outcomes to productivity shocks initiated by Shimer (2005): in an economy with search...

We adopt a statistical approach to identify the shocks that explain most of the fluctuations of the slope of the term structure of interest rates. We find that one single shock can explain the majority of all unpredictable movements in the slope over a 10-year forecast horizon. Impulse response...

Beaudry and Portier (American Economoc Review, 2006) propose an identification scheme to study the effects of news shocks about future productivity in Vector Error Correction Models (VECM). This comment shows that their methodology does not have a unique solution, when applied to their VECMs...

This paper documents large revisions in a widely-used series of utilization-adjusted total factor productivity (TFP) by Fernald (2014) and shows that these revisions can materially affect empirical conclusions about the macroeconomic effects of news shocks. We propose an alternative...