We document a remarkable increase in economic belief polarization - disagreement - regarding the future state of the economy across Europe during the Covid-19 pandemic. We find evidence suggesting that belief polarization may have impeded the implementation of pandemic response measures such as...

I study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on business confidence in 11 Euro area countries and its consequent impact on economic activity. To obtain causal effects, I instrument business confidence with domestic household confidence as well as average household confidence in neighboring...

Do recessions harm investment in technology and thus future aggregate supply? We provide novel evidence on this question using unique, granular data on innovation investment in R&D and diffusion from a representative survey of German firms. Our data allows to identify the crisis-induced...

We find that deep contractions have highly persistent scarring effects, depressing the level of GDP at least a decade hence. Drawing on a panel of 24 advanced and emerging economies from 1970 to the present, we show that these effects are nonlinear and asymmetric: there is no such persistence...

This paper studies fiscal policy in a New Keynesian DSGE model with endogenous technology growth in which scarring can occur endogenously through hysteresis effects in TFP. Both demand- and supply-driven recessions can weaken investment in R&D and technology adoption, thus depressing the...

Barsky and Sims (2012, AER) demonstrated, via indirect inference, that confidence innovations can be viewed as noisy signals about medium-term economic growth. They highlighted that the connection between confidence and subsequent activity, such as consumption and output, is primarily driven by...

I document a statistical link between old-age dependency ratios and average markups. I propose that a mechanism whereby households develop deep habits in consumption as they age could explain this feature of the data. I show that when this mechanism is embedded in an overlapping generations New...

Wavelet analysis, although used extensively in disciplines such as signal processing, engineering, medical sciences, physics and astronomy, has not yet fully entered the economics discipline. In this discussion paper, wavelet analysis is introduced in an intuitive manner, and the existing...

This paper provides some further tests for the proposition that a larger public sector leads to smaller output volatility. Both Gali and Fatas & Mihov have provided some evidence which appears to support this proposition. Their evidence is, however, based on a relatively small sample of...

This article analyses the frequency components of European business cycles using real GDP by employing multiresolution decomposition (MRD) with the use of maximal overlap discrete wavelet transforms (MODWT).Static wavelet variance and correlation analysis is performed, and phasing is studied...