This paper investigates how the University of Michigan's Index of Consumer Sentiment (ICS) - a survey measure of U.S. households' expectations about current and future economic conditions - responds to structural oil supply and demand shocks. We find that the response to an observed increase in...

We investigate how oil supply shocks are transmitted to U.S. economic activity, consumer prices, and interest rates. Using a structural VAR approach with a combination of sign and zero restrictions, we distinguish between supply and demand channels in the transmission of exogenous changes in...

In this work, we investigate the interrelations among technology, output and employment in the different states of the U.S. economy (recessions vs. expansions). More precisely, we estimate different threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) models with TFP, hours, and GDP, employing the latter as...

We take the neoclassical perspective and apply the business cycle accounting method as proposed by Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2007, Econometrica) for the Great Recession and the associated stimulus program in Germany 2008-2009. We include wedges to the variables government consumption,...

We study the time-varying impact of Economic Policy Uncertainty (EPU) on the US Economy by using a VAR with time-varying coefficients. The coefficients are allowed to evolve gradually over time which allows us to discover structural changes without imposing them a priori. We find three different...

An n-variable structural vector auto-regression (SVAR) can be identified (up to shock order) from the evolution of the residual covariance across time if the structural shocks exhibit heteroskedasticity (Rigobon (2003), Sentana and Fiorentini (2001)). However, the path of residual covariances is...

This paper investigates private net saving in the US economy - divided into its principal components, households and (nonfinancial) corporate financial balances - and its impact on the GDP cycle from the 1980s to the present. Furthermore, we investigate whether the financial markets (stock...

We take the neoclassical perspective and apply the business cycle accounting method as proposed by Chari, Kehoe, and McGrattan (2007, Econometrica) for the Great Recession and the associated stimulus program in Germany 2008-2009. We include wedges to the variables government consumption,...

This paper seeks to identify the largest two shocks that can explain the movement in Canadian GDP for the period 1981Q1 to 2011Q4. I employ a very flexible identification method proposed by Uhlig (2003) that allows us to identify the key shocks from the time series data without imposing any...

We propose a new non-recursive identification scheme for uncertainty shocks, which exploits breaks in the unconditional volatility of macroeconomic variables. Such identification approach allows us to simultaneously address two major questions in the empirical literature on uncertainty: (i) Does...