After decades of rising global economic integration, the world economy is now fragmenting. To measure this phenomenon, we introduce an index of geopolitical fragmentation derived from various empirical indicators. This index is developed using a flexible dynamic factor model with time-varying...

We embed a news shock, a noisy indicator of the future state, in a two-state Markovswitching growth model. Our framework, combined with parameter learning, features rich history-dependent uncertainty dynamics. We show that bad news that arrives during a prolonged economic boom can trigger a...