The misery index (the unweighted sum of unemployment and inflation rates) was probably the first attempt to develop a single statistic to measure the level of a population's economic malaise. In this letter, we develop a dynamic approach to decompose the misery index using two basic relations of...

The US economy grew reasonably fast during the last quarter of 2010, and the general expectation is that satisfactory growth will continue in 2011-12. The expansion may, indeed, continue into 2013. But with large deficits in both the government and foreign sectors, satisfactory growth in the...

We seek to determine whether a United States President's job approval rating is influenced by the Misery Index. This hypothesis is examined in two ways. First, we employ a nonlinear model that includes several macroeconomic variables: the current account deficit, exchange rate, unemployment,...

Fluctuations in upside risks to unemployment over the medium term are examined using quantile regressions. U.S. experience reveals an elevated risk of large increases in unemployment when inflation or credit growth is high and when the unemployment rate is low. Inflation was a significant...

This study adopts a dynamic approach to compute the level of economic distress in Nigeria. Quarterly series from 2002Q1 to 2016Q4 were utilized in computing the index. Leveraging on the expectations-augmented Phillips curve and Okun’s law, the results obtained indicate a minimum and maximum...

We quantify and study state-level economic policy uncertainty. Tapping digital archives for nearly 3,500 local newspapers, we construct three monthly indexes for each state: one that captures state and local sources of policy uncertainty (ΕPU-S), one that captures national and international...

This paper develops a forward-looking indicator for macroeconomic uncertainty that employers are confronted with when they take decisions about the size of their workforce. The model that provides the basis for this uncertainty indicator interprets hires and lay-off s of workers as an investment...

This paper studies long economic series to assess the long-lasting effects of pandemics. We analyze if periods that cover pandemics have a change in trend and persistence in growth, and in level and persistence in unemployment. We find that there is an upward trend in the persistence level of...

Although the unemployment rate is traditionally used to diagnose the current state of the labor market, this indicator does not reflect the existence of asymmetries, mobility costs, and rigidities which impede labor to freely flow over the business cycle. Thus, to get a better portrait of the...

This paper proposes a model of the US unemployment rate which accounts for both its asymmetry and its long memory. Our approach, based on the tests of Robinson (1994), introduces fractional integration and nonlinearities simultaneously into the same framework (unlike earlier studies employing a...