This paper presents a fear theory of the economy, based on the interplay between fear of rare disasters and the interest rate on safe assets. To do this, I study the macroeconomic consequences of government-administered interest rates in the neoclassical real business cycle model. When the...

We use a decomposition methodology to analyze the factors underlying the differentiated output losses of European countries in 2020. Our findings are fourfold: First, 2020 growth outcomes can be explained by differences in mobility, underlying growth trends, and pre-pandemic country...

This paper presents a novel framework to estimate the elasticity between nighttime lights and quarterly economic activity. The relationship is identified by accounting for varying degrees of measurement errors in nighttime light data across countries. The estimated elasticity is 1.55 for...

This paper provides new empirical evidence of the impact of an unanticipated change in public debt on real GDP. Using public debt forecast errors, we identify exogenous changes in public debt to assess the impact of a change in the debt to GDP ratio on real GDP. By analyzing data on gross public...

A Technical Assistance (TA) mission was conducted in July 2021 to review the data sources and methods used to produce revised estimates of the Kenyan National Accounts (NA) for the period 2009-2019. The mission also provided guidance on producing a revision report to be published at the time of...

Major output collapses are costly and frequent in the developing world. Using cross-country data, we classify five-year periods using a two-dimensional state space based on growth regimes and political institutions. We then model the joint evolution of output growth and political institutions as...

Die Weltkonjunktur dürfte im Prognosezeitraum moderat expandieren. Die Weltproduktion wird 2024 um 2,9 % und 2025 um 3,0 % zunehmen. Der Welthandel wird dabei etwas an Fahrt aufnehmen; im Jahresdurchschnitt 2024 um 2,1 % und im nächsten Jahr um 3,0 %. Die deutsche Konjunktur befindet sich seit...