Research about narratives' role in economics is scarce, while real word experience and research in other sciences suggest they matter a lot. This article proposes a view and methodology for quantifying the epidemiology of media narratives relevant to business cycles in the US, Japan, and Europe....

This paper estimates the effects of tax changes on the U.K. economy. Identification is achieved by isolating the "exogenous" tax policy shocks in the post-war U.K. economy using a narrative strategy as in Romer and Romer (2010). The resulting tax changes are shown to be unforecastable on the...

In this paper, we analyze the International Great Depression in the US and Western Europe using the business cycle accounting method a la Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (CKM 2007). We extend the business cycle accounting model by incorporating endogenous factor utilization which turns out to be an...

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...

Overall, the 2008 entrepreneurial activity rate increased slightly over 2007. An average of 0.32 percent of the adult population (or 320 out of 100,000 adults) created a new business each month - representing approximately 530,000 new businesses per month - as compared to 0.30 percent in 2007....

The reply by Kehoe and Prescott restates their position but does not answer the criticism made in my review of their book (Temin 2008). I argued that the general equilibrium model of economic growth to study income fluctuations does not lead to a useful research program; the use of...

What is the impact of climate change on inflation and growth dynamics? This is not a simple question to answer as climate shocks tend to be ubiquitous, but with opposing effects simultaneously on demand and supply. The extent of which climate-related shocks affect inflation and economic growth...

We examine Italian inflation rates and the Phillips curve with a very long-run perspective, one that covers the entire existence of the Italian lira from political unification (1861) to the entry of Italy in the European Monetary Union (end of 1998). We first study the volatility, persistence...

The rate of entrepreneurial activity among women dropped sharply in 2007 while the activity rate among men and immigrants surged, according to a national assessment of entrepreneurial activity by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity,...