It is common practice to forecast social, political, and economic outcomes by polling people about their intentions. This approach is direct, but it can be unreliable in settings where it is hard to identify a representative sample, or where subjects have an incentive to conceal their true...

In light of the COVID 19 crisis, the Federal Reserve has carried out stress tests to assess if major banks have sufficient capital to ensure their viability should a new and perhaps unprecedented crisis emerge. The Fed argues that the scenarios underpinning these stress tests are severe but...

Many sophisticated investors rely on scenario analysis to select a portfolio. These investors define prospective economic scenarios, assign probabilities to them, translate the scenarios into expected asset class returns, and select the portfolio with the highest expected return or expected...

The authors introduce a new methodology for determining the relative importance of fiscal and monetary policy to promote growth and stabilize inflation. They apply this methodology to a panel of data that spans 66 years and 17 countries. Their analysis shows that, on average, monetary policy is...

Average treatment effects estimands can present significant bias under the presence of outliers. Moreover, outliers can be particularly hard to detect, creating bias and inconsistency in the semi-parametric ATE estimads. In this paper, we use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that...

The authors apply a Hidden Markov Model to identify regimes of shifting inflation and then employ an attribution technique based on the Mahalanobis distance to identify the economic variables that determine the trajectory of inflation. Their analysis enables policymakers to focus on the most...