The financial crisis 2008-2009 and the European sovereign debt crisis have shown that stress on financial markets is important for analyzing and forecasting economic activity. Since financial stress is not directly observable but is presumably reflected in many financial market variables, it is...

This paper shows that illiquidity in short-term credit markets during the financial crisis may have sharply curtailed the supply of non-bank consumer credit. Using a new data set linking every car sold in the United States to the credit supplier involved in each transaction, we show that the...

The UK has experienced a dramatic increase in earnings and income inequality over the past four decades. We use detailed micro level information to construct quarterly historical measures of inequality from 1969 to 2012. We investigate whether monetary policy shocks played a role in explaining...

This paper shows that macroeconomic uncertainty affects the housing market in two significant ways. First, uncertainty shocks adversely a¤ect housing prices but not the quantities that are traded. Controlling for a broad set of variables in fixed-effects regressions, we find that uncertainty...

We combine a structural model with cross-sectional micro data to identify the causes andconsequences of rising concentration in the US economy. Using asset prices and industrydata, we estimate realized and anticipated shocks that drive entry and concentration. Wevalidate our approach by showing...

We investigate the heterogeneity in the effects of monetary policy shocks on the distribution of wages and hours worked, using unique contract-level data from the Czech labor market and identifying monetary policy shocks using a narrative approach based on market suprises in interest rate...

This paper studies the consumption response to an increase in the domestic value of foreign currency household debt during a large depreciation. We use detailed consumption survey data that follows households for four years around Hungary’s 2008 currency crisis. We find that, relative to...

This chapter reviews and synthesizes our current understanding of the shocks that drive economic fluctuations. The chapter begins with an illustration of the problem of identifying macroeconomic shocks, followed by an overview of the many recent innovations for identifying shocks. It then...

Many countries consider the lifting of restrictions of social contacts (RSC). We quantify the effects of RSC for Germany. We initially employ a purely statistical approach to predicting prevalence of COVID19 if RSC were upheld after April 20. We employ these findings and feed them into our...