The dollar's dominance as the world's reserve currency was inaugurated at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference where the agreement was signed by the 44 wartime allies, but the dollar's hegemony was solidified in 1971 when US President Nixon cut the dollar's link to gold. True, the fixed exchange...

We introduce a new class of stochastic volatility models with autoregressive moving average (ARMA) innovations. The conditional mean process has a flexible form that can accommodate both a state space representation and a conventional dynamic regression. The ARMA component introduces serial...

We introduce a new class of stochastic volatility models with autoregressive moving average (ARMA) innovations. The conditional mean process has a flexible form that can accommodate both a state space representation and a conventional dynamic regression. The ARMA component introduces serial...

Commodity prices co-move, but the strength of this co-movement changes over time due to structural factors, like changing energy intensity in production and consumption as well as changing composition of underlying shocks. This paper explores whether econometric models that exploit this...

The substantial variation in the real price of oil since 2003 has renewed interest in the question of how to forecast monthly and quarterly oil prices. There also has been increased interest in the link between financial markets and oil markets, including the question of whether financial market...

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...

This paper shows that the explanation of the decline in the volatility of GDP growth since the mid-eighties is not the decline in the volatility of exogenous shocks but rather a change in their propagation mechanism

This paper explores the link between the leverage of the US financial sector, of households and of non-financial businesses, and real activity. We document that leverage is negatively correlated with the future growth of real activity, and positively linked to the conditional volatility of...

This paper explores the link between the leverage of the US financial sector, of households and non-financial businesses, and real activity. We document that leverage is negatively correlated with the future growth of real activity, and positively linked to the conditional volatility of future...

This paper studies the question of the economic scale of financial institutions. We show that banks actively smooth book equity by adjusting payouts to achieve a desired trajectory of book equity. The countercyclical nature of net payouts of financial institutions leads to procyclical book...