The extraordinary events surrounding the Great Recession have cast a considerable doubt on the traditional sources of macroeconomic instability. In their place, economists have singled out financial and uncertainty shocks as potentially important drivers of economic fluctuations. Empirically...

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...

Building on the growing evidence on the importance of large data sets for empirical macroeconomic modeling, we estimate a large-scale FAVAR model for 18 OECD member countries. We quantify the global effects of economic policy uncertainty shocks and check whether the signs, the magnitude, and the...

We investigate whether the macroeconomic effects of government spending shocks vary with the level of uncertainty. Using postwar US data and a Self-Exciting Interacted VAR (SEIVAR) model, we find that fiscal spending has positive output effects in tranquil times but is contractionary during...

Building on the growing evidence on the importance of large data sets for empirical macroe-conomic modeling, we estimate a large-scale FAVAR model for 18 OECD member countries. We quantify the global effects of economic policy uncertainty shocks and check whether the signs, the magnitude, and...