Using a narrative identification of tax changes in the United States over the post-WWII period, we document that a temporary cut in corporate income tax rates leads to a long-lasting increase in innovation and productivity, whereas changes in personal income tax rates only have short-term...

This paper estimates the impact on the US economy of four types of uncertainty about (i) government spending, (ii) tax changes, (iii) public debt sustainability and (iv) monetary policy. Following a one standard deviation shock, uncertainty about debt sustainability has the largest and most...

Using a narrative identification of US tax changes over the post-WWII period, we show that corporate income tax cuts foster R&D spending and innovation, leading to a persistent increase in aggregate productivity and output. In contrast, changes in the average personal income tax rate have mostly...

This paper investigates the empirical relevance of a new framework for monetary policyanalysis in which decision makers are allowed to weight differently positive and negative deviations of inflation and output from the target values. The specification of the central bank objective is general...

This paper extends the procedure developed by Jurado et al. (2015) to allow the estimation of measures of uncertainty that can be attributed to specific structural shocks. This enables researchers to investigate the "origin" of a change in overall macroeconomic uncertainty. To demonstrate the...

This paper introduces a VAR with stochastic volatility in mean where the residuals of the volatility equations and the observation equations are allowed to be correlated. This implies that exogeneity of shocks to volatility is not assumed apriori and structural shocks can be identified ex-post...

We use variation in the effect of US-wide or global uncertainty on state-level uncertainty to identify the impact of this shock on real activity. We ?nd that increases in uncertainty do have an adverse impact on real income, employment and unemployment. Thus, uncertainty shocks can be a source...

In this note we present an updated algorithm to estimate the VAR with stochastic volatility proposed in Mumtaz (2018). The model is re-written so that some of the Metropolis Hastings steps are avoided.

The design of monetary policy depends upon the targeting strategy adopted by the central bank. This strategy describes a set of policy preferences, which are actually the structural parameters to analyse monetary policy making. Accordingly, we develop a novel calibration method to identify...

Economic activities are highly clustered. Why is geographic concentration becoming a predominant feature of modern economies? On the basis of the empirical models developed by the 'new' theories of international trade, our answer is that increasing returns are the driving force of economic...