We explore the natural rate of interest, shortly r*, in emerging economies. If economic growth originates from convergence, then growth, say, from technological progress will be lower than we find in the data and, hence, r* will be lower. Ignoring convergence upwardly biases our estimates of r*...

News - anticipated changes of an economy's fundamentals - drive the business cycle. Climate change is big news: it will impact the economy profoundly, but its full effect will take time to materialize. To better understand the transmission of news, this paper focuses on climate-change...

The European Central Bank (ECB) strives to maintain inflation at a 2% target rate, yet the Euro area's diverse economies pose challenges to achieving this goal with a single nominal interest rate. Effective monetary policy transmission hinges on synchronizing the Natural Rate of Interest (NRI)...