The misery index (the unweighted sum of unemployment and inflation rates) was probably the first attempt to develop a single statistic to measure the level of a population’s economic malaise. In this letter, we develop a dynamic approach to decompose the misery index by using two basic...

The debate over legal requirements of a balanced federal budget has gained new life. A requirement would have strong implications for future fiscal policy. Done right, a requirement will allow Congress to combine a balanced budget with policy goals such as growth and full employment. Done wrong,...

We offer a structural interpretation of survey measures of consumer confidence. Our approach is based on a simple forward-looking model of consumption. The model decomposes observed consumption fluctuations in changes due to fundamentals, and changes due to temporary errors caused by noisy...

The 2007-2009 financial crisis has shown the importance of understanding economic and financial dynamics for the evaluation of systemic risks. In this article, we use classical perturbation theory of dynamical systems to measure the global stability of the financial system. We analyze the...

This paper uses a two-step approach to characterize the evolution of US macroeconomic and financial variables during episodes of very high uncertainty. First, we identify episodes of very high uncertainty using a regime-switching model. Second, we assess the behaviour of macroeconomic and...