We document that trust in public institutions - and particularly trust in banks, business and government - has declined over recent years. U.S. time series evidence suggests that this partly reflects the pro-cyclical nature of trust in institutions. Cross-country comparisons reveal a clear...

Empirical questions such as whether the Phillips curve or the Okun’s law is stable can often be framed as a model comparison—e.g., comparing a vector autoregression (VAR) in which the coefficients in one equation are constant versus one that has time-varying parameters. We develop Bayesian...

We estimate a nonlinear VAR to quantify the impact of economic policy uncertainty shocks originating in the US on the Canadian unemployment rate in booms and busts. We find strong evidence in favor of asymmetric spillover effects. Unemployment in Canada is shown to react to uncertainty shocks in...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of commodity price uncertainty (CPU) shocks. Using Australia as a case study, an econometric-based CPU index is proposed to reveal that Australia has experienced an unprecedented increase in uncertainty from the commodity market recently. Evidence...

This paper analyzes the role of the United States in the global economy and examines the extent of global spillovers from changes in U.S. growth, monetary and fiscal policies, and uncertainty in its financial markets and economic policies. Developments in the U.S. economy, the world's largest,...

This paper studies the impact of commodity terms of trade (CToT) volatility on economic growth (and its sources) in a sample of 69 commodity-dependent countries, and assesses the role of Sovereign Wealth Funds (SWFs) and quality of institutions in their long-term growth performance. Using annual...

Survey data on expectations of a range of macroeconomic variables exhibit low-frequency drift. In a New Keynesian model consistent with these empirical properties, optimal policy in general delivers a positive inflation rate in the long run. Two special cases deliver classic outcomes under...

The Beveridge-Nelson (BN) trend-cycle decomposition based on autoregressive forecasting models of U.S. quarterly real GDP growth produces estimates of the output gap that are strongly at odds with widely-held beliefs about the amplitude, persistence, and even sign of transitory movements in...

It is well known that different specification choices can give starkly different output gap estimates. To account for model uncertainty, we average estimates over a wide variety of popular specifications using stochastic model specification search. In particular, we consider three types of...

Economists typically use seasonally adjusted data in which the assumption is imposed that seasonality is uncorrelated with trend and cycle. The importance of this assumption has been highlighted by the Great Recession. The paper examines an unobserved components model that permits non-zero...