We propose a new instrument for estimating the price elasticity of gasoline demand that exploits systematic differences across U.S. states in the pass-through of oil price shocks to retail gasoline prices. We show that these differences are primarily driven by the cost of producing and...

We develop a method that identifies the effects of nationwide policy, i.e., policy implemented across all regions at the same time. The core idea is to track outcome paths in terms of stages rather than time, where a stage of a regional outcome at time t is its location on the support of a...

In 2001, the Fed has lowered interest rates in a series of cuts, starting from 6.5 per cent at the end of 2000 to 2.0 per cent by early November. This paper asks, whether the Federal Reserve Bank has been surprising the markets, taking as given the conventional view about the effect of monetary...

This paper presents a canonical, econometric model of contagion and investigates the conditions under which contagion can be distinguished from inter-dependence. In a two-country (market) setup it is shown that for a range of fundamentals the solution is not unique, and for sufficiently large...

The 2007-2008 global financial crisis and the subsequent anemic recovery have rekindled academic interest in quantifying the impact of uncertainty on macroeconomic dynamics based on the premise that uncertainty causes economic activity to slow down and contract. In this paper, we study the...