The role of fiscal austerity has been questioned for centuries, but a rapidly increasing deficit along with the financial crisis in 2007 / 2008 influenced a renewed debate on the economics of austerity. This paper analyzes the role of austerity versus the role of economic growth. It also...

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 paper develops a small open economy model to investigate the impact of rising sovereign bond market spreads on the real economy. One key element of the model is a "sovereign risk channel" through which tensions in the sovereign bond market tend to spill over into private credit markets. The...

Numerous papers have tried to understand housing’s role in the economy and have not reached an agreement. In this paper we turn to the asymmetric relationship between housing and the overall economic activity. We find that the relation between building permits and GDP is regime-dependent....

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...

DSGE (Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium) models are the common workhorse of modern macroeconomic theory. Whereas story-telling and policy analysis were in the forefront of applications since its inception, the forecasting perspective of DSGE models is only recently topical. In this study,...

I examine the short-term labor market effects of the Great Lockdown in the United States. I analyze job losses by task content (Acemoglu & Autor 2011), and show that they follow underlying trends; jobs with a high non-routine content are especially well-protected, even if they are not...

This paper estimates the quarterly flow of migrants to the US working age population using data based on the Current Population Survey (CPS). The dynamic responses to immigration shocks are estimated in a vector autoregression. Immigration shocks, as well as technology shocks are identified...