This paper reexamines U.S. business cycle volatility since 1867. We employ dynamic factor analysis as an alternative to reconstructed national accounts. We find a remarkable volatility increase across World War I, which is reversed after World War II. While we can generate evidence of postwar...

This text contains the autumn forecast 2014 of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, released on 29 October 2014. The first part discusses recent economic developments in Switzerland and abroad, and presents the main forecast results across the various sectors of the economy....

: This text contains the winter forecast 2014 of the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich, released on 17 December 2014. We present the recent economic developments in Switzerland and abroad, and discusses the main forecast results in the various sectors of the economy. We expect the Swiss...

Data revisions in macroeconomic time series are typically studied in isolation ignoring the joint behaviour of revisions across different series. This ignores (i) the possibility that early releases of some series may help forecast revisions in other series and (ii) the problems statitical...

In the process of economic development economies grow through various regimes, each characterized by different demographic-economic interactions. The changes in these interactions are key elements in different explanations of the escape from Malthusian stagnation. We employ time-varying vector...

We estimate demand, supply, monetary, investment and financial shocks in a VAR identified with a minimum set of sign restrictions on US data. We find that financial shocks are major drivers of fluctuations in output, stock prices and investment but have a limited effect on inflation. In a second...

This paper investigates how inflation expectations evolve. In particular, we analyze the time-varying nature of the propensity to update expectations and its potential determinants. For this purpose we set up a flexible econometric model that tracks the formation of inflation expectations of...

This text presents the economic forecast presented by the KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH Zurich on 28 March 2014. After an introduction describing the starting points and crucial assumptions underlying the forecast, we summarise the key results for Switzerland. Then we turn to the...

We estimate demand, supply, monetary, investment and financial shocks in a VAR identified with a minimum set of sign restrictions on US data. We find that financial shocks are major drivers of fluctuations in output, stock prices and investment but have a limited effect on inflation. In a second...

We estimate the low-frequency relationship between fiscal deficits and inflation and pay special attention to its potential time variation by estimating a time-varying VAR model for U.S. data from 1900 to 2011. We find the strongest relationship neither in times of crisis nor in times of high...