Forecasting currencies with commodity prices -- Commodity prices, commodity currencies, and global economic developments / Jan J. J. Groen and Paolo A. Pesenti -- Comments: Kalok Chan, Roberto S. Mariano -- The relationship between commodity prices and currency exchange rates: evidence from the...

After decades of trial, error, and occasional regress the pieces of a successful Latin American economic model can be seen scattered among the leading economies of the region. The most traditional macroeconomic maladies of the emerging world - such as chronic fiscal imbalances and monetary...

This paper presents empirical evidence against the standard dichotomy in macroeconomics that separates growth from the volatility of economic fluctuations. In a sample of 92 countries as well as a sample of OECD countries, we find that countries with higher volatility have lower growth. The...

Spontaneous shifts in output originating within the business sector are an important factor in aggregate fluctuations. This paper develops a simple two-component decomposition of the movement of real GNP. One component is the path that GNP would have followed in order to deliver the volume of...

This paper shows that stock volatility increases during recessions and financial crises from 1834-1987. The evidence reinforces the notion that stock prices are an important business cycle indicator. Using two different statistical models for stock volatility, I show that volatility increases...

We propose a novel measure of risk perceptions: the price of volatile stocks (PVS_t), defined as the book-to-market ratio of low-volatility stocks minus the book-to-market ratio of high-volatility stocks. PVS_t is high when perceived risk directly measured from surveys and option prices is low....

We study the pricing of uncertainty shocks using a wide-ranging set of options that reveal premia for macroeconomic risks. Portfolios hedging macro uncertainty have historically earned zero or even significantly positive returns, while those exposed to the realization of large shocks have earned...

Recent critiques have demonstrated that existing attempts to account for the unemployment volatility puzzle of search models are inconsistent with the procylicality of the opportunity cost of employment, the cyclicality of wages, and the volatility of risk-free rates. We propose a model that is...

Measures of economic uncertainty are countercyclical, but economic theory does not provide definite guidance on the direction of causation between uncertainty and the business cycle. This paper proposes a new multi-country approach to the analysis of the interaction between uncertainty and...

We provide evidence on the relationship between aggregate uncertainty and the macroeconomy. Identifying uncertainty shocks using methods from the news shocks literature, the analysis finds that innovations in realized stock market volatility are robustly followed by contractions, while shocks to...