The authors provide empirical evidence on the dynamic effects of tax liability changes in the United States. We distinguish between surprise and anticipated tax changes using a timing convention. We document that pre-announced but not yet implemented tax cuts give rise to contractions in output,...

We extend the popular bias-based test of Stock and Yogo (2005) for instrument strength in linear instrumental variables regressions with multiple endogenous regressors to be robust to heteroskedasticity and autocorrelation. Equivalently, we extend the robust test of Montiel Olea and Pflueger...

This paper presents a flexible-price small open economy model with a peso problem in productivity states. Agents rationally adjust their beliefs about future productivity growth after the arrival of news. A downward revision of expectations triggers a Sudden Stop, together with large declines in...

Can long-run identified structural vector autoregressions (SVARs) discriminate between competing models in practice? Several authors have suggested SVARs fail partly because they are finite-order approximations to infinite-order processes. We estimate vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA)...

We use daily survey data from Gallup to assess whether households' beliefs about economic conditions are influenced by surprises in monetary policy announcements. We first provide more general evidence that public confidence in the state of the economy reacts to certain types of macroeconomic...

This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI is a weekly composite index of real economic activity, with eight of ten series available...

This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI, with its ten component series, tracks the overall economy. Comparing the contributions of...

The financial crisis led to severe crises in much of Southern Europe that generated deep economic problems that still have not been resolved. Many of these economies (Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal) witnessed not only large drops in aggregate activity but also rising levels of debt and...

This paper studies how the HP-Filter should be adjusted, when changing the frequency of observations. It complements the results of Baxter and King (1999) with an analytical analysis, demonstrating that the filter parameter should be adjusted by multiplying it with the fourth power of the...

Consumer credit spreads significantly impact consumption and asset dynamics, affecting indebted households' spending behavior and the income sensitivity of consumption. Analyzing Danish data, we find that elevated credit spreads reduce consumption of indebted households. Our results suggest that...