This monograph challenges the myth that the recent banking crisis was caused by insufficient statutory regulation of financial markets. Though it finds that statutory regulation failed, and that market participants took more risks than they should have done, it appears that statutory regulation...

We extract aggregate demand and supply shocks for the US economy from real-time survey data on inflation and real GDP growth using a novel identification scheme. Our approach exploits non-Gaussian features of macroeconomic forecast revisions and imposes minimal theoretical assumptions. After...

We propose a theory of indebted demand, capturing the idea that large debt burdens by households and governments lower aggregate demand, and thus natural interest rates. At the core of the theory is the simple yet under-appreciated observation that borrowers and savers differ in their marginal...

Previous studies have shown that linear models are incapable of capturing business cycle dynamics with accuracy. This has brought interest in non-linear models such as the Markov switching (MS) regime technique, which can distinguish business cycle recession and expansion phases, and is...

This paper finds that the yield spread of investment-grade bonds relative to Treasuries, a proxy of default risk, predicts marginal changes in industrial production in the United States up to 12 months in the future, even upon controlling for a commonly used predictor such as the commercial...

Economic theory suggests that financial health of the corporate sector can trigger or worsen an economy-wide recession. This paper proposes a measure of corporate vulnerability, the Corporate Vulnerability Index (CVI), and analyzes whether it can explain the probability and severity of...

Monetary policy shocks affect interest rates at long horizons (10 years or more). Furthermore, the private sector's real GDP forecasts are revised upward in response to a monetary tightening. These facts challenge the prevailing theories in academic and policy circles. In this paper, I propose a...

How does uncertainty affect the costs of raising finance in the bond market and via bank loans? Empirically, this paper finds that heightened uncertainty is accompanied by an increase in corporate bond yields and a decrease in bank lending rates. This finding can be explained with a model that...

The estimation of dynamic term structure models (DTSMs) turns out to be challenging in the presence of a small sample. It is exacerbated if the sample is characterized by a prolonged period of low interest rates near a time-varying effective lower bound. These challenges all weigh heavily when...

We use non-Gaussian features in U.S. macroeconomic data to identify aggregate supply and demand shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. Macro risks represent the variables that govern the time-varying variance, skewness and higher-order moments of these two shocks, with "good"...