Purpose - We search for determinants of the change in homicides over time by analyzing the interconnection between a high incidence of murders and the socioeconomic environment, using Puerto Rico as the case study. This case presents intriguing facts that challenge some of the conventional crime...

This paper develops a 9-dimensional SVAR to investigate the sources of the U.S. business cycle. We extend the standard set of identified shocks to include unexpected changes in commodity prices. Our main result is that commodity price shocks are a very important driving force of macroeconomic...

This contribution investigates the business cycles of Switzerland compared to its five neighboring countries Germany, Austria, Italy, France and Liechtenstein. In contrast to the widespread notion of small countries "importing" the business cycle from bigger neighbors, it is shown that the real...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MSVAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...

This paper analyzes the performance of the monthly economic policy uncertainty (EPU) index in predicting recessionary regimes of the (quarterly) U.S. GDP. In this regard, the authors apply a mixed-frequency Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MF-MS-VAR) model, and compare its in-sample and...

We investigate how oil supply shocks are transmitted to U.S. economic activity, consumer prices, and interest rates. Using a structural VAR approach with a combination of sign and zero restrictions, we distinguish between supply and demand channels in the transmission of exogenous changes in...

Using 136 United States macroeconomic indicators from 1973 to 2017, and a factor augmented vector autoregression (FAVAR) framework with sign restrictions, we investigate the effects of three structural macroeconomic shocks - monetary, demand, and supply - on the labour market outcomes of black...

We analyze the transmission of producer price in inflation shocks across the U.S. manufacturing industries from 1947 to 2018 using the Diebold-Yilmaz Connectedness Index framework, which fully utilizes the information in generalized variance decompositions from vector autoregressions. The...

Using a novel quarterly dataset on debt financing of non-financial corporations, this paper provides the first empirical evaluation of the relative importance of loan and market-based finance (MBF) supply shocks on business cycles in the euro area as a whole and in its five largest countries. In...

What are the economic implications of financial and uncertainty shocks? We show that financial shocks cause a decline in output and goods prices, while uncertainty shocks cause a decline in output and an increase in goods prices. In response to uncertainty shocks, firms increase their markups,...