The demographic transition --the move from a high fertility/high mortality regime into a low fertility/low mortality regime-- is one of the most fundamental transformations that countries undertake. To study demographic transitions across time and space, we compile a data set of birth and death...

We use data on deaths in New York City, Madrid, Stockholm, and other world cities as well as in various U.S. states and various countries and regions to estimate a standard epidemiological model of COVID-19. We allow for a time-varying contact rate in order to capture behavioral and...

We examine the rise of dark shipping - oil tankers disabling AIS transceivers to evade detection - amid Western sanctions on Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, and Russia. Using a machine learning-based ship clustering model, we track dark-shipped crude oil trade flows worldwide and detect...

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...

The authors study the impact that the liquidity crunch in 2008-2009 had on the U.S. economy's growth trend. To this end, the authors propose a model featuring endogenous productivity a la Romer and a liquidity friction a la Kiyotaki-Moore. A key finding in the authors' study is that liquidity...

We study the impact that the liquidity crunch in 2008-2009 had on the U.S. economy's growth trend. To this end, we propose a model featuring endogenous growth á la Romer and a liquidity friction á la Kiyotaki-Moore. A key finding in our study is that liquidity declined around the demise of...

In this paper, we first introduce investment-specific technology (IST) shocks into an otherwise standard international real business cycle model and show that a thoughtful calibration of them along the lines of Raffo (2009) successfully addresses several of the existing puzzles in the...

We identify structural vector autoregressions using narrative sign restrictions. Narrative sign restrictions constrain the structural shocks and/or the historical decomposition around key historical events, ensuring that they agree with the established narrative account of these episodes. Using...

In this paper, we first introduce investment-specific technology (IST) shocks to an otherwise standard international real business cycle model and show that a thoughtful calibration of them along the lines of Raffo (2009) successfully addresses the "quantity," "international comovement,"...