This chapter reviews and synthesizes our current understanding of the shocks that drive
economic fluctuations. The chapter begins with an illustration of the problem of identifying …

The paper provides a review of the estimation of structural vector autoregressions with sign
restrictions. It is shown how sign restrictions solve the parametric identification problem …

We prove that local projections (LPs) and Vector Autoregressions (VARs) estimate the same
impulse responses. This nonparametric result only requires unrestricted lag structures. We …

Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and
the central bank's assessment of the economic outlook. This paper disentangles these two …

We present a news-based measure of adverse geopolitical events and associated risks. The
geopolitical risk (GPR) index spikes around the two world wars, at the beginning of the …

The term “austerity” indicates a policy of sizeable reduction of govern-ment deficits and
stabilization of government debt achieved by means of spending cuts or tax increases, or …

The extent to which either supply or demand factors drive inflation has important implications
for economic policy. I propose a framework to decompose inflation into supply‐and demand …

This is the first paper in a series of two that synthesizes, compares, and extends methods for
causal inference with longitudinal panel data in a structural equation modeling (SEM) …

We construct a new measure of uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy actions and their
consequences, a monetary policy uncertainty (MPU) index. We evaluate the information …

Commonly used instruments for the identification of monetary policy disturbances are likely
to combine the true policy shock with information about the state of the economy due to the …