We find that the magnitudes of the regional effects of monetary policy were considerably dampened during the Volcker-Greenspan era. Further, regional differences in the depths of monetary-policy-induced recessions are related to the concentration of the banking sector, whereas differences in the...

We analyze the relationship between housing and the business cycle in a set of 51 U.S. cities. Most surprisingly, we find that declines in house prices are often not followed by declines in employment. We also find that national permits are a better leading indicator for a city's employment than...

This paper aims at improving the understanding of the transmission of shocks across countries and how this transmission may have changed over time. By employing a model that allows for parameter changes across regimes, we show that transmission of shocks from the US to European countries may...

Many macroeconomic series, such as U.S. real output growth, are sampled quarterly, although potentially useful predictors are often observed at a higher frequency. We look at whether a mixed data-frequency sampling (MIDAS) approach can improve forecasts of output growth. The MIDAS specification...

We find that model estimates of the term structure of ex ante or perceived macro uncertainty are more in line with realized uncertainty than survey respondents’ perceptions for both inflation and output growth. Survey estimates contain short-term vari- ation in short-horizon uncertainty which...

Real-time estimates of output gaps and inflation gaps differ from the values that are obtained using data available long after the event. Part of the problem is that the data on which the real-time estimates are based is subsequently revised. We show that vector-autoregressive models of data...