During the ongoing financial crisis the analysis of similar historical crises has gained more and more attention among economic researchers and forecasters. Existing studies, however, do not tackle the immense heterogeneity that is present in cross-country samples in a formal and consistent way....

We use survey data to study how consumers assess the macroeconomic effects of structural oil market shocks on the U.S. economy using vector autoregressive models. To structurally decompose oil price changes, we impose sign restrictions on impulse responses. We find that the survey respondents'...

This paper places the COVID-19 pandemic into perspective by comparing it to other recent disasters in terms of impacts on the macroeconomy of the U.S. We present a short summary of advances in the state-of-the-art of economic consequence analysis, as well as estimates this approach yields on...

We analyse the short-term impact of social distancing measures on the US labour market, using a panel threshold model with high frequency (weekly) data on unemployment across US states. We find that changes in the restrictiveness of mandated social distancing, as measured by the Oxford...