We find that deep contractions have highly persistent scarring effects, depressing the level of GDP at least a decade hence. Drawing on a panel of 24 advanced and emerging economies from 1970 to the present, we show that these effects are nonlinear and asymmetric: there is no such persistence...

We examine a propagation mechanism that arises from households' long-term borrowing and show empirically that it has sizable real effects. The mechanism recognises that when there is long-term debt, an impulse to new borrowing generates a predictable hump-shaped path of future debt service. We...

Optimal monetary policy studies typically rely on a single structural model and identification of model-specific rules that minimize the unconditional volatilities of inflation and real activity. In our proposed approach, we take a large set of structural models and look for the model-robust...

This paper studies fiscal policy in a New Keynesian DSGE model with endogenous technology growth in which scarring can occur endogenously through hysteresis effects in TFP. Both demand- and supply-driven recessions can weaken investment in R&D and technology adoption, thus depressing the...