The authors study the effects of changes in uncertainty about future fiscal policy on aggregate economic activity. Fiscal deficits and public debt have risen sharply in the wake of the financial crisis. While these developments make fiscal consolidation inevitable, there is considerable...

We study the effects of changes in uncertainty about future fiscal policy on aggregate economic activity. Fiscal deficits and public debt have risen sharply in the wake of the financial crisis. While these developments make fisscal consolidation inevitable, there is considerable uncertainty...

volatility in the real interest rates faced by a sample of four emerging small open economies: Argentina, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Brazil. We postulate a stochastic volatility process for real interest rates using T-bill rates and country spreads and estimate it with the help of the Particle...

policy rules during Volckers tenure as Chairman of the Fed. At the same time, we document how good volatility shocks played an important role in the great performance of the economy during the 1990s.

The dynamics of a linear (or linearized) dynamic stochastic economic model can be expressed in terms of matrices (A,B,C,D) that define a state space system. An associated state space system (A,K,C,Sigma) determines a vector autoregression for observables available to an econometrician. We review...

Methods for Applied Macroeconomics Research by Fabio Canova, and Structural Macroeconometrics by David N. DeJong and Chetan Dave are two outstanding new books that provide an excellent introduction to what is sometimes called the New Macroeconometrics. This area of empirical macroeconomics is...

This paper compares different solution methods for computing the equilibrium of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models with recursive preferences such as those in Epstein and Zin (1989 and 1991) and stochastic volatility. Models with these two features have recently become popular,...

We show how changes in the volatility of the real interest rate at which small open emerging economies borrow have an important effect on variables like output, consumption, investment, and hours. We start by documenting the strong evidence of time-varying volatility in the real interest rates...

This paper shows how changes in the volatility of the real interest rate at which small open emerging economies borrow have a quantitatively important effect on real variables like output, consumption, investment, and hours worked. To motivate our investigation, we document the strong evidence...