After the Global Financial Crisis a controversial rush to fiscal austerity followed in many countries. Yet research on the effects of austerity on macroeconomic aggregates was and still is unsettled, mired by the difficulty of identifying multipliers from observational data. This paper...

In broad perspective, there have been essentially two competing views of the global financial crisis, albeit there are some complementarities among them. One view looks across the border: it mainly blames external imbalances, the large-scale mix of unprecedented pattern current account deficits...

Business cycles are costlier and stabilization policies could be more beneficial than widely thought. This paper introduces a new test to show that all business cycles are asymmetric and resemble “mini-disasters.” By this we mean that growth is pervasively fat-tailed and non-Gaussian. Using...

Population aging has been linked to global declines in real interest rates. A similar trend is seen for equity risk premia, which are on the rise. An existing literature can explain part of the declining trend in safe rates using demographics, but has no mechanism to speak to trends in relative...

The fiscal “multiplier” seeks to measure how many additional dollars of output are gained or lost for each dollar of fiscal expansion or contraction. In practice, the multiplier at any point in time depends on the monetary policy response and existing conditions in the economy. Using the IMF...

Identifying exogenous variation in monetary policy is crucial for investigating central bank policy transmission. Using newly-collected archival real-time data utilized by the Central Bank Council of the German Bundesbank, we identify unexpected changes in German monetary policy from 580 policy...

We propose that analysis of purchasing power parity (PPP) and the law of one price (LOOP) should explicitly take into account the possibility of commodity points' thresholds delineating a region of no central tendency among relative prices, possibly due to lack of perfect arbitrage in the...

What determines sovereign risk? We study the London bondmarket from the 1870s to the 1930s. Our findings support conventional wisdom concerning the low credibility of the interwar gold standard. Before 1914 gold standard adherence effectively signalled credibility and shaved 40 to 60 basis...

The economic history of Argentina presents one of the most dramatic examples of divergence in the modern era. What happened and why? This paper reviews the wide range of competing explanations in the literature and argues that, setting aside deeper social and political determinants, the various...

What are the macroeconomic consequences of business credit booms? Are they as dangerous as household credit booms? If not, why not? We answer these questions by collecting data on nonfinancial business liabilities (primarily bank loans and corporate bonds) for 17 advanced economies over the past...