Futures markets are a potentially valuable source of information about price expectations. Exploiting this information has proved difficult in practice, because time-varying risk premia often render the futures price a poor measure of the market expectation of the price of the underlying asset....

Using a novel dataset for the US states, this paper examines whether household debt and the protracted debt deleveraging help explain the dismal performance of US consumption since 2007, in the aftermath of the housing bubble. By separating the concepts of deleveraging and debt overhang - a flow...

This paper extends the identification of unanticipated changes in average federal corporate and personal income tax rates in the United States, as proposed in Mertens and Ravn (2013), to the end of 2019, and assesses their propagation to economies with tight links to the US economy. While cuts...

Product standards are omnipresent in industrialized societies. Though standardization can be beneficial for domestic producers, divergent product standards have been categorized as a major obstacle to international trade. This paper quantifies the effect of standard harmonization on trade flows...

We propose a new no-change benchmark to evaluate forecasts of series that are temporally aggregated. The new benchmark is the last high-frequency observation and reflects the null hypothesis that the underlying series, rather than the aggregated series, is unpredictable. Under the random walk...

Shocks to the demand for housing that originate in one region may seem important only for that regional housing market. We provide evidence that such shocks can also affect housing markets in other regions. Our analysis focuses on the response of Canadian housing markets to oil price shocks. Oil...

The transmission of oil price shocks has been a question of central interest in macroeconomics since the 1970s. There has been renewed interest in this question after the large and persistent fall in the real price of oil in 2014-16. In the context of this debate, Ramey (2017) makes the striking...

It is widely understood that the real price of globally traded commodities is determined by the forces of demand and supply. One of the main determinants of the real price of commodities is shifts in the demand for commodities associated with unexpected fluctuations in global real economic...

The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland...