We develop a dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility, estimate it with several variables for a large number of countries and decompose the variance of each variable in terms of contributions from uncertainty common to all countries (global uncertainty),...

We build a dynamic factor model with time-varying parameters and stochastic volatility and use it to decompose the variance of a large set of financial and macroeconomic variables for 22 OECD countries spanning from 1960 onwards into contributions from country-specific uncertainty,...

This paper presents insights on U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867 de- rived from diffusion indices. We employ a Bayesian dynamic factor model to obtain aggregate and sectoral economic activity indices. We find a remarkable increase in volatility across World War I, which is reversed...

This paper proposes a new measure of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) for Korea by fine-tuning the keywords and exploiting information drawn from a wide variety of local newspapers. The uniqueness of our new EPU index lies mainly in the fact that it uses a set of keywords that correspond much...

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...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of uncertainty shocks with an emphasis on the interaction between elevated uncertainty and credit market conditions when the economy is in different regimes (recessions vs. non-recessions). We use a smooth-transition factor-augmented vector...

​I​In this paper we use a New Keynesian model to explain why volatility transfer from high frequency to low frequency cycles can and did occur during the period commonly referred to as the "great moderation". The model suggests that an increase in inflation aversion and/or a reduction to a...

This paper uses a battery of calibrated and estimated structural models to determine the causal drivers of the negative correlation between output and aggregate uncertainty. We find the transmission of uncertainty shocks to output is weak, while aggregate uncertainty endogenously responds to...

We estimate the monthly volatility of the US economy from 1959 to 2008 by extending the factor model of Stock and Watson (1991). The volatility of the factor, which we call VOLINX, has three applications.First, it measures the changes in uncertainty in the economy. VOLINX captures the decrease...

Macroeconomic uncertainty—the conditional volatility of the unforecastable component of a future value of a time series—shows considerable variation in the data. A typical assumption in business cycle models is that production is Cobb-Douglas. Under that assumption, this paper shows there is...