Google Trends have become a popular data source for social science research. We show that for small countries or sub-national regions like U.S. states, underlying sampling noise in Google Trends can be substantial. The data may therefore be unreliable for time series analysis and is furthermore...

We analyze the price and liquidity effects in the U.S. corporate bond market caused by the Covid-19 crisis. We carefully consider the different impact of social distancing measures on firms. We find significant cross-sectional differences, i.e., bonds of firms that are more affected by these...

This paper identifies robust determinants of US stock price movements in the economic shadow of the COVID-19 crisis and in the presence of model uncertainty, using several influential factors highlighted in relevant research. Our investigation performs an extreme bounds analysis (EBA), a global...

This study proposes two new regime-switching volatility models to empirically analyze the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on hotel stock prices in Japan compared with the US, taking into account the role of stock markets. The first model is a direct impact model of COVID-19 on hotel stock...

This paper assesses the OECD’s projections for GDP growth and inflation during the global financial crisis and recovery, focussing on lessons that can be learned. The projections repeatedly over-estimated growth, failing to anticipate the extent of the slowdown and later the weak pace of the...

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...