We examine the dynamic effects of credit shocks using a large data set of U.S. economic and financial indicators in a structural factor model. The identified credit shocks, interpreted as unexpected deteriorations of credit market conditions, immediately increase credit spreads, decrease rates on Treasury securities, and cause large and persistent downturns in the activity of many economic sect...

This paper investigates the implications of major financial markets crises for the human capital accumulation decisions of households. We use data for Argentinean households over the period 1995-2002 to examine households’ response to negative idiosyncratic income shocks in different macroeconomic scenarios. In particular we study how teenagers’ school progress responds to household head unempl...

This paper analyses the effect of an increase in market-wide uncertainty on information flow and asset price comovements. We use the daily realised volatility of the 30-year treasury bond futures to assess macroeconomic shocks that affect market-wide uncertainty. We use the ratio of a stock’s idiosyncratic realised volatility with respect to the S&P500 futures relative to its total realised vol...

We examine international linkages between daily time series of US and Australian 3 month Treasury Bills and 10 year Government Bonds from 1987-95, paying particular attention to the effects of macroeconomic announcements in both countries. The 2 country’s interest rate data are modeled by a bivariate EGARCH formulation. The results suggest that market participants believed the Reserve Bank of A...

We use non-Gaussian features in U.S. macroeconomic data to identify aggregate supply and demand shocks while imposing minimal economic assumptions. Recessions in the 1970s and 1980s were driven primarily by supply shocks, later recessions were driven primarily by demand shocks, and the Great Recession exhibited large negative shocks to both demand and supply. We estimate “macro risk factors” th...

Article history: Received 17 September 2014 Received in revised form 23 March 2015 Accepted 24 March 2015 Available online 31 March 2015 This paper investigates the dynamic effects of common macroeconomic shocks in shaping business cycle fluctuations in a group of Euro-area countries. In particular, by using the structural (near) VAR methodology, we investigate the effect of area-wide shocks, w...

Little empirical work has quantified the transitory effects of macroeconomic shocks on farm production behavior or on interhousehold differences in response to disruptions. We develop a simple analytical model to explain how macroeconomic shocks might temporarily divert managerial attention, thereby affecting farm-level productivity, but perhaps to different degrees and for different durations ...

Using macroand micro-level data, we establish three stylized facts: (1) fluctuations in idiosyncratic uncertainty can have a large effect on aggregate investment; (2) the impact of uncertainty on investment occurs largely through changes in credit spreads; and (3) financial shocks—identified vis-à-vis orthogonal innovations to credit spreads—have a strong effect on investment, irrespective of t...