We examine the causal dynamic relationship between economic policy uncertainty and economic activities, using a Local Projection model with external instruments. Based on the psychological theory of conviction narratives, we construct a Relative Sentiment Shift (RSS) index and use it as an...

Recent evidence suggests that agents' expectations may have played a role in several cyclical episodes such as the U.S. "new economy" boom in the late 1990s and the real estate boom in Japan in the 1980s. These business cycles feature long and gradual boom and sharp bust phases. Existing...

We make four contributions in this paper. First, we provide a core of macroeconomic time series usable for systematic research on China. Second, we document, through various empirical methods, the robust findings about striking patterns of trend and cycle. Third, we build a theoretical model...

Using text from 200 million pages of 13,000 US local newspapers and machine learning methods, we construct a 170-year-long measure of economic sentiment at the country and state levels, that expands existing measures in both the time series (by more than a century) and the cross-section. Our...

This chapter develops a toolkit of neoclassical macroeconomic models, and applies these models to the US economy from 1929 to 2014. We first filter macroeconomic time series into business cycle and long-run components, and show that the long-run component is typically much larger than the...

This work explores some distributional properties of aggregate output growth-rate time series. We show that, in the majority of OECD countries, output growth-rate distributions are well-approximated by symmetric exponential-power densities with tails much fatter than those of a Gaussian. Fat...

We consider a prototypical representative-agent forward-looking model, and study the low frequency variability of the data when the agent's beliefs about the model are updated through linear learning algorithms. We find that learning in this context can generate strong persistence. The degree of...

Recent empirical findings suggest that macroeconomic variables are seldom normally dis- tributed. For example, the distributions of aggregate output growth-rate time series of many OECD countries are well approximated by symmetric exponential-power (EP) den- sities, with Laplace fat tails. In...

We study the impact of alternative detrending techniques on the distributional properties of U.S. output time series. We detrend GDP and industrial production time series employing first-differencing, Hodrick-Prescott and bandpass filters. We show that the resulting distributions can be...

For over five decades, diffusion indexes have been widely used by statistical and economic agencies as an instrument to summarize the dynamics of a group of disaggregated time-series economic data. In this note we revise the methods for constructing diffusion indexes, propose a novel generalized...