This paper analyzes the channels through which financial crises exert long-term negative effects on output. Recent models suggest that a shortfall in productivity-enhancing investments temporarily slows technological progress, creating a gap between pre-crisis trend and actual GDP. This...

We analyze the implications of financial openness to macroeconomic volatility in a small open economy. Major macroeconomic aggregates show non-monotonic volatility patterns with respect to the degree of financial openness in the model without domestic financial frictions. The introduction of...

The recent financial crisis and the associated decline in economic activity have raised some important questions about economic activity and its links to the financial sector. This paper introduces an index of financial stress -- an index that was used in real time by the staff of the Federal...

We use a text-based measure of popular sentiment toward finance to study how finance sentiment responds to rare historical disasters and to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Finance sentiment declines after epidemics and earthquakes, but rises following severe droughts, floods, and landslides....

This paper presents a statistical analysis of revisions in quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) of the Group of Twenty countries (G-20) since 2000. The main objective is to assess whether the reliability of early estimates of quarterly GDP has been weakened from the turmoil of the 2008...

This paper constructs internationally consistent measures of macroeconomic uncertainty. Our econometric framework extracts uncertainty from revisions in data obtained from standardized national accounts. Applying our model to quarterly post-WWII real-time data, we estimate macroeconomic...

The article proposes a new set of composite indicators-predictors in business tendency surveys, which allow identifying early information signals of a cyclical nature in the economic behavior of business agents. The main criterion for the efficiency of such indicators is their sensitivity to a...

We analyze the international transmission of financial stress and its effects on economic activity. We construct country specific monthly financial stress indexes (FSI) using dynamic factor models from 1970 until 2012 for 20 countries. We show that there is a strong co-movement of the FSI during...

There exists a persistent disagreement in the literature over the effect of business cycles on economic growth. This paper offers a solution to this disagreement, suggesting that volatility carries a positive direct effect, but also a negative indirect effect, operating through the insurance...