We estimate a nonlinear VAR to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty shocks originating in the US on the Canadian unemployment rate in booms and busts. We find strong evidence in favor of asymmetric spillover effects. Unemployment in Canada is shown to react to uncertainty shocks in...

We estimate a DSGE model where rare large shocks can occur, but replace the commonly used Gaussian assumption with a Student's t-distribution. Results from the Smets and Wouters (2007) model estimated on the usual set of macroeconomic time series over the 1964-2011 period indicate that 1) the...

We construct a multi-agent system (MAS) model of cyclical growth in which aggregate fluctuations result from variations in activity at firm level. The latter, in turn, result from changes in the state of long run expectations (SOLE) or “animal spirits” and their effect on firms' investment...

The Great Recession endured by the main industrialized countries during the period 2008-2009, in the wake of the financial and banking crisis, has pointed out the major role of the financial sector on macroeconomic fluctuations. In this respect, many researchers have started to reconsider the...

Stock market volatility was extremely high during the Great Depression relative to any other period in American history. At the same time, large negative and positive discontinuous jumps in stock returns can be detected using the Barndorff-Nielsen and Shephard (2004) test for jumps in financial...

Many have argued that the Great Recession of 2008 marked the end of the Great Moderation of the eighties and nineties. Through painstaking empirical analysis of the data, this paper shows this is not the case. Output volatility remains subdued despite the turmoil created by the Great Recession....

This paper shows that the parsimoniously time-varying methodology of Callot and Kristensen (2015) can be applied to factor models. We apply this method to study macroeconomic instability in the US from 1959:1 to 2006:4 with a particular focus on the Great Moderation. Models with parsimoniously...

Using a novel set of instrumental variables in a structural VAR framework, we investigate the economic impact of uncertainty shocks stemming from geopolitical swings in South Korea. We construct robust instrumental variables for examining the variations in uncertainty due to geopolitical swings...

Typical systemic risk measurement barely captures the dynamic risk characteristics of the entire banking system. Experience from past financial crises shows, major indicators in financial markets have clustered volatility during periods of economic downturns. This study focuses on the overall...

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,...