We revisit recent evidence on how monetary policy affects output and prices in the U.S. and in the euro area. The response patterns to a shift in monetary policy are similar in most respects, but differ noticeably as to the composition of output changes. In the euro area investment is the...

The Survey of Professional Forecasters is the oldest quarterly survey of macroeconomic forecasts in the United States. The survey began in 1968 and was conducted by the American Statistical Association and the National Bureau of Economic Research. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia took...

We estimate the macroeconomic effects of import tariffs and trade policy uncertainty in the United States, combining theory-consistent and narrative sign restrictions on Bayesian SVARs. We find mostly adverse consequences of protectionism. Tariff shocks are more important than trade policy...

Average hourly real wage series from the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program and the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program have evolved very differently over the past decades. While the LPC wage has grown consistently over time and become markedly more volatile since the mid-1980s,...

According to data from the Labor Productivity and Costs (LPC) program, average hourly real compensation in the United States has grown consistently over time and become markedly more volatile since the mid-1980s. By contrast, data from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) imply that average...

Much of macroeconomics is concerned with the allocation of physical capital, human capital, and labor over time and across people. The decisions on savings, education, and labor supply that generate these variables are made within families. Yet the family (and decision-making in families) is...

We adopt an unobserved components time series model to extract financial cycles for the United States and the five largest euro area countries over the period 1970 to 2014. We find that credit, the credit-to-GDP ratio and house prices have medium-term cycles which share a few common statistical...

We study the severity of liquidity constraints in the U.S. housing market using a life-cycle model with uninsurable idiosyncratic risks in which houses are illiquid, but agents have the option to extract home equity by refinancing their long-term mortgages. The model implies that three quarters...

What are the macroeconomic consequences of changing aggregate lending standards in residential mortgage markets, as measured by loan-to-value (LTV) ratios? In a structural VAR, GDP and business investment increase following an expansionary LTV shock. Residential investment, by contrast, falls, a...

This paper investigates how the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) - a survey measure of U.S. households' expectations about current and future economic conditions - responds to structural oil supply and demand shocks. We find that the response to an observed increase in...