Elevated government debt levels in advanced economies have risen rapidly as sovereigns absorbed private sector losses and cyclical deficits blew up in the Global Financial Crisis and subsequent slump. A rush to fiscal austerity followed but its justifications and impacts have been heavily...

We develop flexible semiparametric time series methods that are then used to assess the causal effect of monetary policy interventions on macroeconomic aggregates. Our estimator captures the average causal response to discrete policy interventions in a macro-dynamic setting, without the need for...

This paper provides a historical overview on financial crises and their origins. The objective is to discuss a few of the modern statistical methods that can be used to evaluate predictors of these rare events. The problem involves prediction of binary events and therefore fits modern...

In January, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics significantly reduced its projections for medium-term labor force participation. The revision implies that recent participation declines have largely been due to long-term trends rather than business-cycle effects. However, as the economy recovers,...

The Federal Reserve was created 100 years ago in response to the harsh recession associated with the Panic of 1907. Comparing that recession with the Great Recession of 2007–09 suggests the Fed can mitigate downturns to some extent. A statistical analysis suggests that if a central bank had...

Credit is a perennial understudy in models of the economy. But it became the protagonist in the Great Recession, reviving a role it had not played since the Great Depression. In fact, the central part played by credit in the downturn and weak recovery of recent years is not unusual. A study of...

The traditional view of the monetary transmission mechanism rests on the premise that the Federal Reserve (Fed) controls the level of the federal funds rate via open market operations and the liquidity effect. By contrast, this paper argues that the Fed also manipulates the federal funds rate...

This paper unveils a new resource for macroeconomic research: a long-run dataset covering disaggregated bank credit for 17 advanced economies since 1870. The new data show that the share of mortgages on banks’ balance sheets doubled in the course of the 20th century, driven by a sharp rise of...

After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

Two separate narratives have emerged in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. One speaks of private financial excess and the key role of the banking system in leveraging and deleveraging the economy. The other emphasizes the public sector balance sheet over the private and worries about the...