In the context of a quantitative real business cycle (RBC) model, we document that shocks to the higher-order moments, especially the skewness, of productivity can have large first-order effects on economic growth. We augment a standard small-open- economy RBC model with a new feature: a...

This paper develops an empirical macroeconomic framework to analyze the relationship between major political disruptions and business cycles of a country. We combine a new dataset of political revolutions (mass domestic political campaigns to remove dictators and juntas) across the world since...

The assumption of rational expectations is potentially a serious source of misspecification in DSGE models. Many recent theories of expectations formation have relaxed rational expectations and improved the predictive properties of benchmark macroeconomic models. Problematically, the space of...

This paper estimates the contributions of trade and financial linkages to the directed graph that describes the international propagation of macroeconomic shocks at the business cycle frequency. Among the findings: import and export intensity are asymmetrically associated with shock...